A big, bold campaign in every sense of the expression, Virgin Media's Big Kahuna was bold, impactful and different.
With more than 13m UK households now paying subscriptions to access a greater choice of TV and online content, the competition between suppliers has never been fiercer. Virgin Media developed an innovative and unique proposition for 2014; a package of TV, broadband, landline and mobile services, with the flexibility for each household to dial up or down individual elements according to their own needs. This new "Big Kahuna" bundle of communications services could deliver premium digital content and connectivity, great value for money, or something in between.
We needed to create fame and intrigue around Big Kahuna. Our strategy was to behave like a brand campaign rather than a bundling promotion, achieving real category disruption in the process. We would use wide reaching and impactful communications to first establish awareness of the Big Kahuna brand amongst UK households and then demonstrate the relevance of its key benefits - connectivity, flexibility and value - to different segments of the market in a highly personal and relevant way.
The first task was to create a big, bold branding campaign which created UK-wide awareness and fame for "Big Kahuna". 48 sheet and 96 sheet billboards were planned nationwide, support by premium sites and iconic digital screens to give extra force to our campaign where our audience was most likely to live and work. For added disruption and to convey a sense of novelty, we behaved as disruptively in OOH as Big Kahuna is to the pay-TV market. Non-traditional OOH formats such as building wraps helped us to cut-through and unequivocally announce the arrival of something new.
The impact of the advertising was consistently stronger among audiences exposed to our comms in more than one channel. Recall of the advertising and awareness of bundled service from Virgin Media peaked when there was exposure to Out-of-Home and TV. It was also higher in locations where banners had been used to drive bolder messaging.
OOH was the lead channel to establish awareness and intrigue about the Big Kahuna launch, but the other channels were vital to making the campaign a success.