Optus modelled rebrand on David Bowie claim strategists
Musician David Bowie was the inspiration for the recent overhaul of Optus’ brand position, according to the strategists behind it.
Speaking at the Mumbrella Entertainment Marketing Summit, associate director of brand strategy at Optus Jane Saleh and RE’s head of strategy Benjamin Harrison outlined the company’s efforts to become an entertainment company that “moves at the speed of culture, and to create culture”.
Harrison and Saleh spoke about Optus’ transition to an entertainment company
“The inspiration for the brand actually came from the late, great David Bowie,” Harrison said.
“We wanted to build a brand that was like David Bowie, in that David Bowie is always himself, unmistakably himself, but he moves and evolves and changes and adapts with culture. ”
Fundamental to this new brand ethos was the redefinition of Optus’ relationship with their content partners, beginning with Netflix in early 2015.
The venture’s first creative depicted Optus in the centre of a pipe network distributing a plethora of Netflix content.
“It worked really well, it sold a lot, but strategically it was absolutely and fundamentally flawed,” Harrison stated. “It literally positioned Optus as a pipe, as a network, as just a utility… that powered the content but was really just sitting behind it. It was literally saying ‘Hi, we’re a commodity, please undervalue us.'”
Optus’ determination to integrate content into their brand image resulted in not only content partnerships, but entertainment-centric advertisements, beginning with the series of socially-driven ads featuring Ricky Gervais.
According to Saleh these served to distance Optus from its associations as a purely telecommunications company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waymSm5lP-k
“We needed to bring out the big guns in order to really shift this perception,” Saleh said.
“What that has given us internally, with our stakeholders, with our partners, is the credibility and trust that we actually understand the difference between a push-out of offers and content.”
Optus has since featured a string of well-known athletes and celebrities in its promotions.
“This has opened up the door for us to have the trust of partners such as Idris Elba, Vinnie Jones, Usain Bolt…they have a desire to work with us.” Saleh claimed.
“Idris Elba, Vinnie Jones, Usain Bolt…they have a desire to work with us.”
I’m sure that’s what enters people’s minds when they enter a brothel too… definitely doesn’t have anything to do with your money.
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Everything wrong with advertising right here in one article.
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Ricky’s partnership with and allegiance to Netflix was clearly the only reason he gave the telco a second look. But, the original Ricky work and reinvigoration of the Yes positioning before that, showed real promise.
Since then Optus has limited itself to tactical rent-a-celeb product campaigns, wrapped in nice typography. With Optus numbers seemingly not hitting the mark and budget blown, it will be interesting to see if consumers really buy them as an entertainment brand. Or if it still just comes down to free/cheap data and a decent network in the end.
Bowie? No words.
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Why connect as a brand with people when the brand is not a peoples brand? Optus is not content, the Premiership failure confirms that. Josh, Usain and other personalities confirm they are not sporting or entertainment. Singtel needs to revert back to their roots, be price/ product and position these accordingly.
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I’m with Ewok, this is truly embarrassing.
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What a load of absolute waffle.
As someone very close to the brand in another life, I can weigh in that the ‘pipes’ incarnation was simply a campaign execution and the previous master brand worked extremely well due to high recall, playfulness and cut-through.
This latest incarnation is confused and bland. Guilty of trying to look more sophisticated but coming off looking like every other tech brand. The only personality is in the use of ‘yes’ and the comms are all over the place.
Finally – Gervais, Vinnie Jones, Usain Bolt are not ‘partners’. They are paid a lot of money to spruik a brand they have absolutely no interest in apart from financial gain.
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RE partner with M&C on the strategic development of campaigns for Optus. Quite brave to call out that creative strategies they jointly develop for their clients are ‘fundamentally flawed’. Should be a lively conversation back at Macquarie Street after this…
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such an epic load of bollocks.
This is what happens when marketers and agencies disappear into 3 day workshops and forget that nobody wants to have a relationship with their brand
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Modern take on “A fool and their money are soon parted”.
If you are fool enough to think celebrities are partners, then you are soon parted from lots of your money.
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Oh good, ‘Chalk and Cheese’ was getting soooo over used.
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