10 seconds to Switch & Save with Carphone Warehouse

The Big Idea

Blue 449 and Carphone Warehouse came to us with a challenging brief at the beginning of 2017. Each year people waste millions of pounds on paying more for mobile phone contracts than they should, but despite this only 12% of pay monthly customers switch to a new contract.
With no creative platform agreed, Carphone Warehouse needed an imaginative execution to put them front of mind with young people when considering a new phone contract.

Being the world’s youngest public service broadcaster and using our unique insight about our young Channel 4 audience, we created a short, disruptive contextual campaign that delivered increased sales and landed the key message that switching your phone contract with Carphone Warehouse can save you on average £152.

With a budget of less than £1m and a goal of driving high sales, we knew that our idea needed to have maximum impact for minimum costs.

To deliver the switch and save message we needed our audience to understand what £152 could mean to them. As it’s not a life changing sum, it could be easy to ignore, so illustrating the real life benefits of the saving in a fun and engaging way was our ultimate goal.

With our high reach of young audiences across our sales portfolio, not only were we ideally placed to reach Carphone Warehouse’s target audience, we also knew a lot about them thanks to our insight and data science team. Over 40% of 16-34 year olds are more positive to 10” ads than longer time lengths (source: AdReaction) so we knew that for Carphone Warehouse to engage this audience and to get the most bang for their buck, we needed a killer creative idea that worked in 10” or less.

We identified key, scalable programmes for young audiences over the campaign period and created a series of contextual 10” adverts that reflected the content that showed our audience different ways they might spend their £152 saving.

Making it Happen

Working with Sassy Films and our creative approach PL4Y, we created 5 different commercials: In First Dates we saw a couple enjoying a romantic dinner, in Made in Chelsea an It girl is seen pampering her poodle, copy in our food programming showed an aspiring young chef ruining his new chef whites and a young woman kicking her old television set and replacing it with a flashy new one to sit down to watch Gogglebox!

Tonally, the order of the day was a comedic tongue-in-cheek style to ensure standout in the ad break. Using one of C4’s most famous voices, Matt Berry (Toast of London, IT Crowd) to narrate the copies meant we could pull on C4’s heritage in quirky comedy to make the 10” copy disruptive and impactful.
Blue 449 bought a bespoke media schedule across C4, E4 and our digital platform All 4 which ensured a regular presence in all relevant shows and successfully placed Carphone Warehouse top of mind.

The Results

The campaign was a huge success for Carphone Warehouse with significant shifts in awareness and sales metrics. As the TV campaign only appeared on C4 Sales channels, we were able to clearly identify the impact the activity had.

• Grew Carphone Warehouse’s positive return on investment by 22%

• Spontaneous brand awareness was twice the average expected for this campaign

• We also saw that the high frequency, short time length factor drove TV ad awareness as it reached 65% for this specific campaign (a 14% increase on previous campaigns at similar budget levels)

Most importantly, the client was very happy with the activity and even extended it by three months!