Advertising Case Study

O2
Company Background
O2 is an international telecommunications company with approximately 21 million customers in the UK. It provides mobile and fixed telephone services, as well as mobile broadband and related services.

Facebook Executive Summary

Client:

Objective
O2 has sought to position itself as a social leader and proponent of various causes. One of its main initiatives, Think Big, is founded on the belief that young people are full of ideas and enthusiasm and that they just need the right support to turn their ideas into reality. Think Big found 900 young people with great ideas and provided them with the training and funding they needed to bring them to life. One of those 900 ideas was the Why Do campaign, which aims to bridge the generation gap by challenging adults stereotypes of young people in a way that would change those views. O2 turned to Facebook to help Why Do reach a larger audience as well as increasing awareness of O2 and driving connections to the O2 Facebook Page. O2s Facebook campaign sought to both encourage people to participate in the Why Do initiative and promote Think Big and O2 as supporting young people. Bill Eyres, Head of Sustainability at O2, explains that rather than a commercial campaign, it was about interacting with people and stirring up a debate.

Objective: To increase awareness of O2s work to support young people, help the Why Do initiative change adults perceptions of young people and increase connections to the O2 Facebook Page. Solution: Employ a reach block to gain a wide audience and video polls and video engagement ads to foster participation. Key Lessons: Facebook Ads can be an effective tool to publicise and generate interest in a social cause By injecting fresh creative during the campaign, performance can be maintained at a high level throughout the campaign period

When, as a company, you want to make a difference by tackling a social cause, Facebook is ideal. The best way to make a campaign come alive is by interacting with the Facebook community and getting them to support the cause and engage with it.
Bill Eyres, Head of Sustainability, O2

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Approach
O2 used Facebook Ads to stimulate engagement with the Why Do campaign. The ads presented a quiz called Street Age, which asked users questions about youth culture. At the end of the quiz, participants were told what their street ages were, as opposed to their biological ages. After taking the quiz, users were directed to the Why Do website. The ads also brought people to the O2 Facebook Page to deeper engage with the campaign. The campaign ran from October 7-November 14, 2010. It combined a reach block with sustained media, incorporating video engagement and video poll ads to catch users attention and encourage participation. The reach block targeted all users in the UK in order to obtain a wide audience for Why Do and specifically targeted the sustained media towards 25-64 year olds.

Results
Over the course of the six-week campaign, 40,000 new users clicked to like the O2 Facebook Page More than 84,143 Facebook users responded to the three poll ads The ads were viewed over 208.6 million times 75 percent of people who participated in the Why Do initiative said it was positive to support young people and 50 percent said it changed their view of young people A Nielsen Brand Effect study conducted after the campaign indicated exceptional results overall, and revealed a big boost to O2s brand affinity. Those who saw the Facebook campaign were more than twice as likely to recommend the brand and were more likely overall to agree that O2 has changed for the better in the last 12 months.

But ultimately, Bill says, what was important for us was how successfully we changed adults views about young people.

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The Future
Facebook has helped change the way O2 promotes its brand and engages with people. Indeed, O2 recently formed a social media team dedicated to creating social media campaigns. As one of the companys goals is to be involved with people and the environment, there will be many future Facebook campaigns to come.