Colenso BBDO

Client: Skinny
Product: telecommunications
Title: Phone It In
Media: .
Country: New Zealand
Date Of Campaign: 3/10/22

Background: Skinny is a New Zealand mobile company with a track record of saving customers money through smart and thrifty advertising hacks. We understand that when Skinny spends big money on advertising, it’s their customers that ultimately pay the price.The brief was to create a low-cost, interactive campaign that furthered Skinny’s mission to keep prices low while making the product (mobiles) integral to the idea.

Idea: Celebrities charge millions of dollars to be in ads. Skinny doesn’t have millions of dollars. So, to bypass expensive voice talent and pricey recording studios, Skinny launched ‘Phone it In’, a low-cost campaign that open-sourced radio scripts via out-of-home placements so Kiwis could record them on their mobile phones, for free.

Results: What we ended up with was a nation-wide out-of-home campaign that doubled as a radio campaign that became Skinny’s most effective recruitment campaign ever.2,560 radio ads were recorded by ordinary New Zealanders, equating to 22 hours of content that didn’t cost us a cent to record.Skinny acquisitions went up 34% year-on-year, while in the same period, churn went down 26%.65% of calls came from Skinny’s competitors’ customers. Over three years of consistent brand building activity, we’d shifted Consideration from 35% in 2018 to 41% in 2021. Just 6% in four years. Phone It In shifted it another 6% shift… in just two months.