By DITA DE BONI
Sheesh, those advertising agencies with multimillion-dollar telco accounts sure are sensitive.
This week we asked Vodafone's agency Lowe Lintas to share the secrets of what makes a successful telco texting campaign.
Lowe wasn't having a bar of it, refusing to give out any details "that might tell
the opposition how to do it better". The opposition is Telecom, serviced in advertising by Saatchi & Saatchi, which was also reluctant to be drawn on the subject.
More than one million text messages are sent each day in New Zealand alone, most of those on the Vodafone network but increasingly also on Telecom mobiles. Around two years ago, New Zealand was about 23rd out of 24 Vodafone countries for frequency of texting. We are now top of the list.
Of course, Lowe chief executive Stephen Pearson has no shortage of things to say about how its sassy campaign for Vodafone - its biggest client - had contributed to the huge texting phenomenon.
The original brief, given around 18 months ago, was to make texting come alive on television, he says. The agency decided music was vital to the ads, and sought a soundtrack representing the nature of exchanges over phones (while teenage girls are dead-keen users of the medium, texting also seems to befit the private nature of a love affair, one wag has noted).
So Meatloaf's Took the words right out of my mouth was used over an encounter between a charismatic cartoon wolf and a demure librarian; followed by an execution featuring a man with an afro and a woman with a big booty to the sound of Marvin Gaye's Sexual Healing and then a host of characters backed by Blur's sexually ambiguous Girls and Boys.
Now the campaign enters its second phase, where all the cartoon characters promise one lucky texter a "supa yot holiday for U & 5 frenz" set to a racy new version of Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday.
