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As the iconic underdog battler brand on the Australian mobile scene, Virgin Mobile had all the right in the world to leap into social marketing boots and all. Our team at Publicis Digital in Auckland – Andre, me, Jeremy and Rochelle – conceptualised and designed an approach designed to break through the corporate culture and treat Virgin Mobile “members” like, well, rock stars.

Based in a slick, ultra-fluid site built by our team in Australia, and driven via a Twitter feed packed with surprise gigs, topups, freebies, shoutouts and more, the Members’ Lounge leverages Virgin’s unique personality and familiar rock star personality to create what was at the time a completely new style of customer retention community, pushing highly customised content and offers to Virgin Mobile customers – or should we say, members. One of those wonderful projects when strategy, ideation, design, development, the web tools to make it happen and a fully engaged client results in something really cool. Me likey.

Our man will sort out your shambles of a mate...

Everyone has a mate who is a bit of a shambles in the morning.

We helped give them a bit of a wake up call – in the form of a personalised video from a no-nonsense character, who knows their name, mocks their morning mocha, and gives them a simple solution: wake up and drink Tararua Real Iced Coffee.

Every video was unique – triggered by an email, and seamlessly stitched together on the fly from more than 115 individual clips. During the 33,000 minutes of brand engagement we generated, over 50% of videos previewed were sent to a friend – and nine out of ten of those friends clicked through to be given a wake-up call they won’t forget.

A further innovation came as we looked to convert interest to trial. We made sure each shambles of a mate could book a perfectly timed, pre-personalised wake-up call to their mobile in the morning – complete with a txt coupon for the all new no-nonsense Tararua Real Iced Coffee at the nearest gas station.

The campaign not only gave thousands of kiwi blokes a bit of a wake up call; we proved that people engage with FMCG brands in the digital space – and we helped the product sell well over target: in the first eight weeks it sold twice what the benchmark product sells… in an entire year. And that’s a bit of a wake up call for the entire category.

Face to face with the Australian Cricket Team

We adapted the ground-breaking 2007 Weet-Bix All Blacks Face2Face campaign to create a site that let Australians face up to their cricket heroes via the web or mobile, to see which one they most resemble.

Highlights:
• Learning the background and hearing from the team about how exciting it was developing the All Blacks version of this with the irrepressible Daniel Lee reminded me of the reasons I chose to join Ogilvy in the first place.
• However. A relaxed bout of to-ing and fro-ing in the selling-in stages left us with the most insanely compressed timeline I have ever, ever seen (and I’ve seen a few)…
• …made worse by the Christmas break — and a freelancer who did “nothing” over a ten-day period. And by “nothing”, I mean “not a thing”.
• Without the incredible willpower, outright skill and incomprehensibly good humour of the lead team (Super Rupert, Farah the Invincible and freelance developer Oscar the Invisible), there is no way the agency would have survived this process.
• And many, many thanks to the rest of the team who kept their own balls in the air, while this project – supporting one of Australasia’s greatest brands and one of Australia’s greatest sports teams – was successfully managed to completion. You know who you are.