When it comes to the latest out of home work from Telstra you’ve likely seen everywhere, CMO Brent Smart tells Mediaweek: “We don’t need to convince consumers we have the best mobile network, just remind them.”
“Without sounding all brand nerdy, we ultimately want to build memory structures that link our brand to our superior network strength.”
The hyper-minimalist campaign reengineers the equity of the signal strength bars symbol into a “distinctive brand asset” as Smart describes. The ads repetitively associate the Telstra brand with key mobile functionalities, including apps like ‘Gram’, messaging (‘Chit/Chat’ and ‘Send’), ‘Maps’, and ‘Game’.
The campaign has over ten executions in total – some designed to work alone, others meant to play off each other or as a series of consecutive placements.
“In out-of-home, simplicity is key,” Smart explains, pointing to the simplified brand colour palette of the campaign, and the consistent, bold use of Telstra’s core colours to make its presence pop.
“We have the best mobile network, it is a key differentiator and we wanted to communicate that in a way that is also differentiating.
“Rather than adding more information, we challenge ourselves to reduce and strip it back. It leads to work that is visually striking and confident, like this.”
The work is ultimately guided by Telstra’s North Star, as Brent attests, to create distinctive work that looks like no other big brand in this country.
Four Bars is the second out-of-home work for the brand’s agency village +61, which brings together independent creative studio Bear Meets Eagle On Fire (BMEOF), with the integrated capabilities of TBWA and Telstra’s existing media agency, TBWA’s Omnicom stablemate, OMD.
The first out-of-home, +61’s debut, From Space to Your Place, launched in April for Telstra’s satellite home internet, with a focus on the remote and regional areas that will benefit most from the connectivity solution.
The launch introduced the unconventional brand creative consumers can hereafter expect from Telstra, guided by the vision of its agency ecosystem, particularly with BMEOF founder Micah Walker at the helm.
“We also believe we can differentiate with better craft, and our agency partners, Bear Meets Eagle On Fire and +61, bring that to every job,” says Smart.
Indeed, while we can predict the work to be unique, it’s proven far from predictable.
From Space featured surreal, uniquely local yet paradoxically otherworldly creatures created by renowned Australian prosthetic specialists at Odd Studio (Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Thor: Love and Thunder). The next major work was a fourth-wall-breaking Pointless TVC, followed by the Better on a Better Network series of 26 stop-motion films, which vignetted the Aussie landscape with its endearingly offbeat characters, from blokey wattle flowers, Tasmanian devils, and teenage goth cockatoos.
Now, this latest campaign has dialled it back to pure text, and sparingly at that.
“Combining the things you do with your phone with the four coverage bars is such a concise idea,” Walker, BMEOF CCO, told Mediaweek. “We love how economic, confident and undeniably Telstra they are.”
According to Smart, the greatest success of the work so far is the number of people it has engaged.
“So many people have told me that they didn’t fully understand this work until they’d seen it multiple times, and that’s powerful,” he says.
“It respects the audience’s intelligence and leaves room for them to participate. And because of that, it stays with people and is more memorable than your average out-of-home campaign.”
Brent Smart