Data in Dollars
XFINITY
Issue 48 | September 2018
Agency
Goodby Silverstein & Partners
Creative Team
Partners Jeff Goodby, Rich Silverstein Chief Creative Officer Margaret Johnson Creative Directors Jens Waernes, Jon Wolanske Associate Creative Directors Felipe Lima, Tristan Graham Art Director Ricardo Matos Copywriter Otto Pajunk
Production Team
Goodby Silverstein & Partners Executive Broadcast Producer James Horner Producer Kateri McLucas Motion Graphics Creative Director Mike Landry Executive Post Producer John Dutton Post Producer Jack Whalen Technical Director Nathan Shipley Production Company THINKING MACHINE Director Docter Twins Music Christian Moder Sound Design and Mix, Animated
Date
March 2018
Background
In the US, phone data was expensive but with XFINITY Mobile, it wasn’t. In fact, XFINITY Mobile was a new carrier that had been designed to help phone users save a lot of money on data by connecting to any one of its 18 million WiFi hotspots.
The problem was letting their competitors’ customers know just how much money they could save.
Competitors’ customers didn’t really care enough to switch - until they were showed how much they were spending on data just to watch a YouTube video.
Idea
The idea was to show phone users exactly how much money they were spending on data whenever they watched a YouTube video. They knew that everything they streamed, downloaded or uploaded through their phones used up their data plans but what they didn’t realise is quite how much a single YouTube video could burn. Or how much in real dollars and cents those megabytes cost them.
Pre-roll ads before popular videos were turned into price tags. YouTube provided the file sizes for some of its most popular videos and the default resolution for videos on its mobile app. With that data in hand, the price of each video could be calculated on the basis of the cost per gigabyte of each of XFINITY’s competitors.
Results
By the time this entry was submitted, YouTube’s most popular videos had made XFINITY Mobile popular too. More than 2,000 YouTube videos got price tags. With this highly targeted campaign, 4.5 million customers of competitor carriers were reached. Online searches for XFINITY Mobile more than tripled (a 221 percent lift).
Brand interest increased by 113 percent.
Our Thoughts
Most people will say how much they hate advertising. They don’t. They hate bad advertising, which isn’t the same thing at all. When they see an ad that is useful and helpful, it’s not that they like it but it ceases being advertising and becomes interesting.
This campaign is acutely interesting because it describes in precise detail a problem most people are only dimly aware of, the real cost of data. And it offered a solution, a new, cheaper carrier.
Isn’t it great when challenger brands do actually challenge like this?