T-Mobile - The word on the street

Music is a primary platform for sponsorship, because it has the clear potential to reach specific markets, so identifying music was not the hard part.

The difficulty was about creating genuine affinity with a very savvy 18-22 year old market. So many sponsorships fail to create any level of genuine resonance with target audiences – and with this particular audience, the challenge is even greater. And, as with football, many brands feel that the act of sponsorship is enough.

Fortunately, T-Mobile is a confident brand, and this enabled us to propose a confident route: property creation. Instead of concert or festival sponsorship, where both the hard work and the obvious risk are in the past, we recommended T-Mobile create their own property.

The advantage is obvious: complete control. The challenge likewise : complete responsibility. Brand confidence is doubly necessary : firstly, to accept the logistical and organisational implications, because property creation is … hard work; secondly, in applying the brand’s values to an entirely new area. How does T-Mobile ‘do’ music? It’s the Carlsberg ad for real.

In this instance, our long-standing relationship with T-Mobile meant they weren’t surprised to receive a creative proposal from a business that is pre-eminent in strategy. Our Street Gigs proposal offered T-Mobile users - exclusively - a series of intimate sets with the UK’s best contemporary bands, bands like The Arctic Monkeys, The Magic Numbers, Editors and Hard-Fi.

The experience, from start to finish, is managed by T-Mobile : invitations, talent selection, venues, publicity, hospitality, guest-list, promotions, everything. And if that doesn’t sound exciting, let’s flesh that out : 500 T-Mobile customers queue at Millennium Pier in early June 2006, to take a cruise up-river to an unknown venue. Top DJs begin the party as soon as the guests started to embark. Drinks are served as the ship pulls away to a strictly controlled over-18 audience. One hour later, everyone disembarks at Trinity Buoy Wharf, following a magenta carpet into a magenta bathed lighthouse. And within minutes, The Streets began to play.

And whilst the lucky few to be invited were - relatively - few, T-Mobile intuitively ‘got’ that intensity of message is often better than ‘reach’ alone. The results showed immediate impact : 79% attendees thought the overall event better than expected, the perception shift towards Fun moved from 10% to 79%; almost two-thirds of attendees report feeling ‘a lot more positive’ about T-Mobile after attending a Street Gig. The Streets activity had a clear positive impact on all T-Mobile brand values when compared to the perceptions of 18-22 yr olds not exposed to the Streets activity. And over 97% of guests tell their friends about the events. So, as the Streets moves around the UK, T-Mobile benefits from enthusiastic word of mouth endorsement from its key target audience.

Because of the sensitivity of the target audience, we created an evaluation framework – including focus groups, brand tracking, face-to-face interviews and computer aided telephone interviews - to monitor satisfaction, providing unequivocal feedback, and guidance on how to make sure things only get better.

Our role in the Street Gigs, after concept creation and development, has been executive management of all agencies involved in what is now an extensive programme : talent management, event management, PR, branding, web, interactive and design and more. We propose the programme, we locate the venues, we manage the budget – and at times, we answer the phones.

Now in their second year, the Street Gigs are now the subject of an ad-funded programme on C4, taking a very unambiguous T-Mobile message out to a national audience of ‘attitudinal’ 18-22 year olds.

This is the 1st sponsorship activity that T-Mobile has wholly owned. Sponsor property creation is not for every brand : T-Mobile showed they had the brand confidence and intuitive marketing skills to really, genuinely dialogue with a key audience, as well as the judgement to invest wisely in evaluation. Confidence inspires.