The T-Mobile Parking Ticket

Background

For a long time, customers choosing a mobile phone deal had to choose either the control of spend that pay-as-you-go offers, or run the risk of running up huge bills in order to get a free phone and minutes and text bundles on pay monthly.

T-Mobile had developed a new product, YouFix, which gave customers both the control of pay-as-you-go and the benefits of pay monthly. Customers on YouFix could fix their monthly bill at a specific amount, and then top up like pay-as-you-go if they needed to.

Idea

The brief to the Agency was to launch this revolutionary new product, driving immediate sales in the crucial period running up to Christmas.

The challenge was going to be explaining the relatively complex YouFix offer in a way that fitted in with T-Mobile’s ‘Life’s for sharing’ campaign.

The solution focused on the core product benefit – an end to the nasty surprise of receiving a huge bill.

The creative idea was to recreate the nasty surprise of a huge bill and show T-Mobile as the solution. Given T-Mobile’s legacy of using real people in their advertising, the idea concentrated on the moment when people discover they’ve been given a parking ticket. But unlike normal parking tickets, these contained money.

T-Mobile traffic wardens (actors and comedians) targeted streets in five major cities across Britain on one day, handing out the special parking tickets. Hidden cameras captured people’s reactions as they went from anger at being ticketed to elation when they found money inside.

A two-minute TV commercial was edited together but as well as in TV, the diea was also extended across press and outdoor as well as digital display and social media.

Results

Sales targets were exceeded by 9%.

Our Thoughts

This was one of those ideas that people couldn’t stop talking about. An art director at SFW got ticketed and came into the agency bubbling about it. Her creative director showed it at an industry event a few days later, providing his audience of young people a very neat summary of the YouFix story, which they would be interested in. And that’s the genius of this idea, a complicated selling message is being delivered in blogs, emails and in conversations by word of mouth.

Using real people in all their recent campaigns has given T-Mobile great warmth and made it seem far friendlier than any of its competitors in the UK. And friendliness, as the social media experts tells us, is good for business.