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EE Reveals Its Climactic Big Play in the Battle for Share of Life

18/10/2023
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After two years growing EE as its flagship consumer brand, Pete Jeavons and the teams at Saatchi & Saatchi and Digitas speak to 天美棋牌鈥檚 Laura Swinton about the ambitious new platform that aims to put EE at the heart of all Britons鈥 digital lives

Forget share of market, EE is aiming to grow its share of your life. The UK telecomms giant has just launched a new proposition that builds on its success in the mobile and broadband space and, the team hopes, turns it into a one-stop platform for your connected life.

The new business vision puts EE at the heart of our digital lives, whether we鈥檙e chilling in front of the TV, working from home, gaming or studying. It sees EE launch a completely new creative platform as well as a host of new products and tools. There鈥檚 the EE TV set top box, for example, and an expanded gaming store that will allow gamers to purchase not just consoles but in-game currencies. Tying it all together is the EE ID, a verified digital ID that will allow people to manage all of their devices, connections and subscriptions in one place. EE鈥檚 also opening up its products to those who don鈥檛 have a mobile contract with them.

It is, reflects Pete Jeavons, 12 years almost to the day that the EE brand launched as the newest player in the UK鈥檚 booming mobile telecomms space, a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and France's Orange. Since then, Pete and EE have been on an incredible journey together. In 2015 it was acquired by UK establishment mainstay British Telecomms (BT) and in 2022, he and the team announced that they鈥檇 flip the whole business on its head by replacing BT with EE as the flagship consumer brand. Now, after a journey that has seen the team pull apart all of its brand platform as well as its systems, tech stack and processes, EE is ready to lay out the full scope of its ambitions.


The scale of the challenge, says Pete, was no joke. 鈥淭he complexity of that challenge meant that things took probably a little bit longer than we were expecting them to take. And so from our perspective, there were a lot of stop-starts and some gos and no-gos. And so it was really, really hard. It was hard to motivate yourself, hard to motivate the team, especially hard to motivate agencies that you're working in partnership with. I think it's actually brought everyone incredibly close together,鈥 says Pete, reflecting that that closeness is why there are so many people from EE鈥檚 partner agencies at the launch.

It鈥檚 been a major undertaking for all of EE鈥檚 partners, especially the cross-agency team from Publicis Groupe that has dug deep to demonstrate what its 鈥榩ower of one鈥 slogan is all about. Talent from Saatchi & Saatchi, Digitas, Boomerang, Publicis鈥oke, Zag and Prodigious have worked together to create not just the multichannel comms campaign, but to create everything from innovative digital tools to brand identity, social, retail stores, product and services positioning, and production into this campaign. The addressable-first media, audience planning and buying was led by longstanding media partner EssenceMediacom X, sponsorship and activation by Havas Play and PR by M&C Saatchi Talk and The Academy.

Indeed, what makes this project particularly exciting from a creative point of view is, says Saatchi & Saatchi chief strategy officer Richard Huntington, is that it鈥檚 been a business transformation driven by brand. Building off a vision devised by CEO Marc Allera, it鈥檚 taken the collective imagination of the Groupe to really figure out what role EE could play in our lives over the next decade. That, in turn, has informed everything from tech priorities, UX design to content strategies and everything in between.

鈥淔undamentally, I think we see this as a brand-led business transformation. We've had an era of digital business transformation. Now, UX is at parity across every provider, so the place to find growth is to make it brand-led. In a lot of ways, it was setting out a vision for our brand and then being patient because the business has got to build the infrastructure behind that,鈥 says Richard.

鈥淚t's exciting for the creative industries because we've stopped dressing up the things that clients and businesses give us and started building the vision for that business today,鈥 he says. 鈥淎nd I fundamentally believe only people from our sector have the imagination, to kind of go, 鈥榯his is what your business could be鈥.鈥


Part of that vision was to figure out how EE could transcend the category of mobile telecomms to become something that could grow into new areas. Matt Holt is CSO at Digitas UK, which has been instrumental in creating the digital tools for this new EE, and he says the tech sector has been a massive inspiration.

鈥淚 think we've always had in our minds how we reframe a telco to a tech co - that's certainly been one of the things that we've been grasping with,鈥 he says. 鈥淏ut the things that tech companies do really well is they put the customer at the heart. And we've used so many out-of-category examples of others basically creating platform businesses, essentially building around the customer.鈥

In order to put the customer truly at the centre of the business - and to futureproof the platform - the team has focused on verticals it鈥檚 calling 鈥榥eeds鈥. The first three 鈥榥eeds鈥 to launch are Home, Game, and Learn. Early next year, we鈥檒l see the fourth need - Work - which will focus on the connection-heavy requirements for the Work From Home (WFH) mob. But, explains Pete, the new brand platform has flexibility built in. Just as WFH is a need that only really emerged during covid-19 lockdowns, the team foresees that new needs will likely crop up over time.

鈥淲hat's driven all the work is the needs that we've identified,鈥 says Pete. 鈥淚n truth, we spent ages looking at those. What are the most important things in people's lives that we can focus on? We picked those four, but there could have been 10, 15, 20鈥︹ He continues, 鈥淭he four are absolutely 100% right for now. Will they be the same in two years time? No, they won't. But by focusing and doubling down on those needs, and showing how our products and services can address them, does that have longevity and consistency? Absolutely. 100%. Although it might not be those four needs [in the future], the approach will still be exactly the same.鈥

Creative has been a huge part of communicating to people across Britain that EE understands these needs. That means a new creative campaign that鈥檚 a departure from the highly successful Kevin Bacon-fronted ads. While Kevin was full of Hollywood swagger and charisma, the new approach is all about creating snapshots of real life. The campaigns, directed by Love Song's Daniel Wolfe and Elliot Power, are streetcast and shot all around the UK, in London, Glasgow, Belfast and Newcastle.



Pete says that moving on from their highly recognisable spokesperson was a huge conversation - but that the new approach uses recognition in a different way. In terms of the hero films, each zeroes in on a recognisable moment of life, whether it鈥檚 a rainy Sunday afternoon or a hectic bedtime routine for a busy family. That recognition is underlined with a recognisable track, like Faithless banger 鈥業nsomnia鈥 (for bedtime, of course), 鈥業t鈥檚 Not Over Yet鈥 by The Klaxons and 鈥楽o We Are Here鈥 by Bloc Party.



But this new marketing strategy isn鈥檛 just about the top-level mass marketing. The team is now leaning into addressable in a big way. There鈥檚 so much on offer from the new EE that targeting each audience and sub-group with the relevant information was crucial.

鈥淚f you change your approach, which we have absolutely done, and go to relevance and addressability, then actually, you're sort of talking to different people about different things in slightly different ways, which allows you to get all of that across,鈥 says Pete. 鈥淭here are some things that you want everyone to overhear, like 鈥楨E's different, it's doing different things鈥. But then when you get into the specifics and the details of it, a gaming audience is very different to parents, who are very different to people who work from home, and vice versa. So if you come at it from an addressability relevance perspective, it can all live together. But we have to figure all that out because our approach prior to this was a single, binary message that we popped out to the world through very, very traditional channels.鈥



All of this means there鈥檚 also a far bigger demand on production. Saatchi & Saatchi鈥檚 chief production officer, Jess Ringshall, says that this meant a more strategic and integrated approach to production and content. From her perspective, it鈥檚 not just about creating 鈥榤ore stuff鈥, but creating more thoughtfully and really working closely with the media agency to test and analyse the content that鈥檚 working - meaning more effectiveness. 鈥淭he really exciting thing for me is that suddenly, when brands talk about 鈥榳e need to make more content but with the same budget鈥, we're able to work really forensically with them against that, constantly testing, learning what works and doesn鈥檛 work in the different channels,鈥 she says. Given the integrated nature of the brief and the long time frame of the brand and business transformation, production has been able to work in a proactive and informed manner.

Now, as the new offering launches, the brand is entering into new spaces and the team behind it will have much to learn from its new competition. Not only is it up against the mobile and broadband businesses like Three or Virgin or Sky, it鈥檚 up against games retailers like Game or Argos or lifestyle brands like John Lewis. Pete says that it鈥檚 a real learning curve, particularly when it comes to how search or PPC works in those other categories. However, he鈥檚 full of excitement for this next phase of his journey with EE.

And for Richard Huntington, this kind of category-transcendence is a crucial part of the race for the future. 

鈥淭here's a phrase, which is: 鈥榤oving from share of market to share of life鈥,鈥 he says. 鈥淓E's asking to serve a bigger share of your life than it has done before because it's not fighting for market share in broadband or mobile. One of the challenging things is, as more businesses realise that this is the only way to get real growth, everybody's going to want to have share of home security, share of insurance. Who's going to own charging your EV? Is it going to be your insurance company? Your car company? Your utility company? And that's what I mean by saying it has to be brand-led.鈥

鈥淚t's going to be the brand that's most credible doing it that will win.鈥


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