Telstra’s home internet is ‘more reliable than family’ in new spot via The Monkeys
Telstra has launched another new TV campaign, this time touting why its fast home internet speeds are even more reliable than “your family”.
The new campaign, titled ‘Telstra Home Internet. More reliable than family.’ comes a month after the ‘Secured by Telstra’ spot, the brand’s first major campaign since Brent Smart’s arrival as chief marketing officer.
It focuses on a boy’s family forgetting to pick him up from sports training on a school night, forcing him to walk home in the rain, while the rest of the family are all pre-occupied with streaming and internet content on their own devices.
Smart spoke to Mumbrella this week about continuing to invest in brand in challenging economic times, displayed by Tesltra’s marketing output so far in 2023.
“What the great brands are able to do is they’re able to maintain a premium position in the marketplace, even though we’re at a time when customers are incredibly value-conscious,” he said.
“So I think what the great marketers do is they think about ‘how can I position my brand in a way that I can continue to be priced in a premium way, even though we’re in a highly competitive market?’ That’s the challenge that I think is really interesting and certainly one that we need to be thinking about at Telstra because we are the premium brand in the marketplace.”
Smart said investing in brand has been proven “time-and-time again” in recessionary or economically challenging times when often the knee-jerk reaction is to cut budgets or short-term and tactical with spend.
“But again, it’s been proven that the brands that continue to invest in their brand are the ones that not only hold their position well, when times are tough, but when growth comes back, they grow much faster than the competitors who do cut their budget and don’t invest in brand.”
“So I think now is the time to keep investing in brand and really think about if we build a brand the right way, can we continue to have a bit of premium built-in as opposed to just, let’s cut prices and let’s have a race to the bottom with everyone else, which I think is tempting, but I don’t think is the right strategic move right now.”
“It’s a nice way of talking about reliability and something that most Australians would be familiar with,” CEO of The Monkeys, Mark Green, added. “We’re not all perfect. We have moments where you might forget the time that you’ve got to pick your son up at football training, fighting traffic and everything else is in your way to try and get somewhere on time.”
Green said the work since Smart’s arrival has been “really fun” so far, with the security piece, alongside some work in conjunction with Kayo, each of which stands out and “hopefully do the job of driving the right results for the Telstra brand”.
The campaign launched on Sunday evening.
Catch Smart and Green on this afternoon’s Mumbrellacast.
Credits
Client: Telstra
Creative agency: The Monkeys
Media agency: OMD
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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“So I think what the great marketers do is they think about ‘how can I position my brand in a way that I can continue to be priced in a premium way, even though we’re in a highly competitive market?’
How about just having a great product people rave about, you know, great internet speed, never down time, stuff like that. stuff people care about not just management fluff.
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This ad is so confusing. The two brothers look the same age. Everybody in the house looks miserable. Why is the dad watching a kokada trail documentary one time and an exercise video the next? The family is so disconnected from each other by the one thing you’re selling? You could also add any product at the end as it’s not intrinsically obvious it’s an ad for a tele communication company.
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On the surface it makes for a good, entertaining story but for a telecommunications provider, it doesn’t say much about their phone services. Wouldn’t the kid call to see where the lift was, or the collector call to see where the kid ended up? It would be a gap in the story for any product using this story but more so for a company who is primarily a phone company.
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Not a fan! Usually great ads but latest anything but family friendly… no one speaking, parents forgetting kids and having to walk home after dark!
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The irony. Not the greatest message conveyed here – the kid gets home and what does he find? Was there an emergency? Nope. Had the car broken down? Nup. Every member of his family was using Telstra as part of a cultish, singular addiction to the online world. Yeah baby – family is nothing compared to internet providers…
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Agree with the other comments. Also a strange choice to have audible worded commentary from the purported (code nonspecific) footy game when the commentary doesn’t link to the message of the ad at all. And to this ear the commentary sounds completely unrealistic and irritating when heard in high rotation on Foxtel ad breaks: in my life I have never heard anyone say *brave* camel’s back when using the phrase “straw that broke the camel’s back”. At least they don’t end “internet that works like Australia” or similar.
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Not specific to this campaign, but the problem with so many ads in Australia these days is that concepts don’t seem to be thoroughly reality checked. Someone comes up with a story, but does anyone have the guts to say “that just wouldn’t happen, let’s think of something else?”. Of course they’d call the parents (unless the coverage is bad). Seinfeld in the 1990s was full of people “just missing” each other, but would make no sense today.
Maybe that’s why you see ads with older people driving the cars that the creatives’ parents or grandparents used to drive in the 1980s or 1990s, rather than the BMW or X-Trail a lot of retired people drive today.
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