How does avoidable advertising work?
No one likes intrusive video adverts. But, without them, how would you get your message out? Surely your customers aren’t going to choose to watch your advertising. Are they? Mobile telephone network giffgaff decided to test this theory out with their ‘Big Swim’ campaign.
Strategy: giffgaff is a huge challenger network in the UK, with a loyal following built from seven years of respectful relationship building with their members and young adults.
giffgaff decided to mirror this respectful approach in their outreach to new audiences by creating an ‘avoidable’ advertising campaign.
Research showed that positive sentiment is a primary driver in building brand preference, trust and ultimately consideration. The ‘avoidable’ campaign would achieve this by thoughtfully constructing a campaign with the audience in mind, through the deployment of paid media.
Creativity: giffgaff’s targeted their ‘VIP’ customers first as they knew that their core members were fans of the brand. They hoped that giving these ‘VIPs’ exclusive first access would encourage them to view and share it.
The campaign also avoided getting repetitive. TV was planned to ensure that there were no stations with too many spots per day and that any peak or hero spots did not have more than one spot within them.
The content was always skippable, with all media easily avoided if the audience wanted to. Measured sentiment in real-time through Brand Index and Facebook helped giffgaff see when their audience was getting bored, and react by introducing new iterations of the creative. This meant that they could continue to achieve the reach levels required to drive the consideration, and purchase intent metrics, whilst sticking to the overarching comms goal.
Results: The campaign achieved giffgaff’s highest ever consideration, up 59%. 6.1%, pre-campaign to 9.7% campaign high.
It also generated giffgaff’s highest ever purchase intent, with an increase of those ‘in-market’ from a pre-campaign low of 2.3% to campaign high of 3.7%.
Join the Discussion
Would you be more inclined to give a new brand a chance if they weren’t pushing their content on you?
Introduction to Marketing: Understanding your Customers
Introduction to Marketing: Understanding your Customers
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