The Big Switch Part 2

A little bit of history

In February 2009 Bord Gais Energy started to talk directly with a few Irish bloggers. On the eve of their Big Switch launch they were interested in seeing how well that would play as part of their marketing push for the promotion. It wasn't anything too intense: an informal approach (via Damien Mulley) to tell the assembled (and mostly bemused) bloggers what they were planning. Just another promotional activity from a big Irish company is the gist of it. And pushing 160,000 conversions, the vast majority of them via the web, tells you fairly emphatically that it's been hugely successful.

A small part of that success has been the online engagement. They ran a nice chatty Twitter campaign to back up the activity of the promo, but with the amount of PR and ATL activity through solid work from DDFH&B, plus a no-brainer offer of a guaranteed minimum 10% saving over ESB prices, it was never going to fail. The question was, how well would it succeed?

That laptop theft

We know now, of course. But what wasn't foreseen was the bit of a PR disaster with customers and the online community that resulted from the theft of sensitive consumer data. With customers because it was their data, and with the online community because BGE's engagement, hitherto chummy, suddenly turned to static. The tweeting stopped and no real explanations were forthcoming for an extended period. When it came, it was through the usual channels, and not the direct, speedy interface of online engagement.
Companies have fires like this to contend with all the time, and BGE rode it out fairly well, all things considered. The arguably less important of the two issues, their nascent relationship with the online community (a complete misnomer of itself btw, but that's another day's discussion), was a little bruised, but in many respects that community is a self-regarding and quite small entity in marketing terms within Ireland. Each year it becomes more relevant and professional, but these are early days. Plenty of companies of BGE's stature and even more smaller ones wouldn't even deign to engage with bloggers, Tweeters and online types. But that's where BGE showed some foresight, I'd have to say. Knowing that this is part of the marketing mix, and at least attempting to converse, makes them the trendsetters and made everyone else with a promo since then ask their digital connections to 'do a Bord Gais for us'. Thus far, despite quite a few people doing different things to engage customers online, nobody's engaged at the level of BGE. So how have they followed it up?

The Big Switch Part 2



Lucy is back on TV, in another campaign from DDFH&B, this time mopping up what was missed last time out. There's been a display campaign, Google Adwords and all the rest. They've also stuck by the online community and gone a step further than last year's launch by creating an entire online campaign that doesn't feature Lucy at all, but is a much more format-friendly guerrilla style.



The Last Family, featuring the last man to want to switch to Bord Gais Energy, Sean Last, is a series of 'amateur' productions by the fictional family itself designed to highlight some of the issues that non-switchers might have, and the resolutions to them.

Bord Gais Energy launched this exclusively online campaign to selected bloggers on the last day of March this year. Most of the bloggers were following up on the teaser video by Young Kubrick (as the junior member of the Last family was called in a Twitter campaign). It involved the acting out of a live ad on a set in front of the assembled bloggers, who were encouraged to tweet about it as it happened.

It generated quite a bit of local interest online, as you can see if you follow the #livead hashtag on Twitter. As is the way of online, the comments include less than glowing ones. Some more fleshed-out coverage can be seen here at Mediacontact and at Channelship.

But does it all work?

The Big Question. For any company, but especially a larger one, social engagement must be a pain in the arse. It can consume horrible amounts of time to talk directly to consumers, and very often for what seems like little in return. Or maybe even less than that. There's a ton of slowly-being-written rules that you have to observe, and woe betide you if you piss off the wrong online influencers. And aside from time invested, engagement doesn't come for free. It's still cheaper than TV or press or a detailed mail drop, but it ain't cheap.

So why do it? Do you really have to? I mean, it hasn't done any favours for Nestlé, has it? And the point that Fianna Fail pretty much shoulder-jabbed into an ambushed and highly irate group of soc media and political bloggers in Feb of last year still holds. A front page in a national daily will reach tens of thousands more than most blogs would hope to attract.

Ultimately I don't believe big companies have a choice. And I'm being disingenuous with the two references in the previous paragraph. In fairness both of them handled their business at best opaquely, and at worst ineptly. The truth will set you free, and the truth is spelled out with statistics. The Big Switch didn't happen mostly on the phone or by post. It was an online initiative that recruited the vast majority of switchers via the website. What we hear about declining TV viewership and folding local newspaper titles is true, and while maybe not as dramatic as it's made out, it's still a slide that won't be reversed. The flipside is that more and more time is spent online, whether at home, at work or on mobiles. The realisation is slowly dawning: a company NOT interacting with its customers is girding itself today for hari kiri tomorrow. Even the exception that proves the rule is getting (oh so terribly slightly) involved with social media.

SWOT analysis time.

The pursuit of online marketing means a realignment of practices, and it represents a threat to any traditional advertising agency, particularly if they're wedded to their traditions. It also represents an opportunity, and one that's as available to yesterday's ad agencies as to any new ones. Look at the Big Switch promotion as an example of evolving thinking. They deal with a spectrum of agencies, each bringing different skills to the task of promoting The Big Switch. There are more than the ones I've outlined here, but I'm too lazy to check.

DDFH&B for TV, radio and press advertising
Web Factory for site design
Pembroke Communications for PR/event management
Mulley Communications for online PR/marketing
Eighty:Twenty and Radical for interactive advertising

I was even involved myself, in a small way, as one of the writers for the online videos and also for some of the site and display ad content.

I say this as a way of demonstrating a point. Where once there was one single agency, or possibly two, which looked after every cradle-to-grave aspect of a client's needs, the model is now redefined. Partly because of the number of disciplines now involved. Nobody can keep that much expertise inhouse. It's in every agency's best interests to be fully up to speed at all times with what's going on around them in terms of digital comms expertise. There's a lot of it out there, from apps development to site functionality to online video production etc etc. That's even before you think in terms of creativity. That will, in the long haul, be the constant. The agency that remains creatively excellent down any channel will still be the one that makes the biggest impact, in my humble.

Wanna be an extra?

Just mind the edge of the pool...

Despite O2 now having trademarked little yellow duckies forever, Bord Gáis Energy have taken like webbed Anatidaens to water with the whole customer reachout thing, even to using meejums like this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and... oh you get the picture.

They're now working with their online people at Target Digital to follow up their Big Switch advertising and want a whole geansaí load of real people to feature.

Are you a real people, slightly unemployed perhaps, and available to spend a day or a half day as an extra? If so, go along to the Casting Couch at 3 Fitzwilliam Square on Thursday next, May 7th for 11am.

BUT NOT BEFORE YOU REGISTER WITH THEM HERE!

And if you're just a blogger nosing about, link to this page or write the info up yourself. There's a few quid in it for the lucky auditionees, and who would say no, what with the current climate given the state of the times that are economics a challenge with in a fiscally forward uncharted waters and what have ye.

Full disclosure. In return for writing this blog post, Bord Gais Energy gave me a three bedroom apartment with sea views in Seapoint for 12 months, plus use of a vintage S Type Jag and an unlimited expense account (for online purchases only however) with Curious Wines. But I do have to walk two Dobermanns on the beach every day. And do this flipping blog post.

Bord Gais steps onto a two way street

A very interesting event on Tuesday evening. Before launching into the electricity provider fray, Bord Gais decided to talk to bloggers. Before even talking to the press, I'll have you know. They took a group of interested soc media types through the complete above-the-line campaign, created by DDFH&B and craftily titled The Big Switch.

It's a big step for the company. Their hands are tied by the Regulator in the gas market (no pun there) as to what they can charge, but in the electricity market, see, they're free to drop prices lower than the ESB. A guaranteed 10% lower, no matter how low ESB drops over the coming year.

Hence the Big Switch campaign with the lovely Lucy Kennedy. Radio, press, DM, 48s, TV... the whole nine yards of atl. It's obviously a very big deal. They're building a power plant in Cork, so they want to be firing on all cylinders (again, no pun etc). It's a radical departure and one they desperately want to get right.




Yeah, so what. Companies have big launches all the time. High profile mergers, buyouts, tryouts, new products blah blah. It seems like a good offer, they seem like good people and I don't wish failure on them, but I'm not here to shill for them either. I have gas enough as it is.

From my perspective the important so what is the bit about the bloggers. This is a company with the word Bord in the early part of its title. Suggestive of caution, perhaps, or a soupçon of 'Get away from that newfangled DVD player or you'll burst it' technophobia. Except, my pretties, except...

Except it's not. The BG Staying Alive strategy ( I meant that one) has firmly embraced the blogging community and even has the audacity to hope (and that one) that a Twitter presence will help them in the quest for positive dialogue with socially interactive young Ireland. And guess what: so far it's working. The website is somewhat refreshing too, featuring as it does the lovely Lucy (Is she gone... bigger, or is it just me?) Kennedy.

The marketing dept of Bord Gais, very probably against the advice of many internal voices, invited bloggers into a room and showed us theirs. They asked us not to tell anyone they'd showed us theirs until they also showed the people from the papers the following day, but is this not a small measure of increasing respect from a very big Irish player? I contend, my lords and ladies, that it is. A measure of respect that I predict will reap dividends, as bloggers react kindly to being included, not patronised.

Chief BG on the night, Marketing Manager 'Barry' Nicky Doran said that as a company they did not expect to get the social media side of things right straight away. Fair fucks to him. He expected mistakes. He wasn't entirely comfortable in the space. He was being led, to a degree, by the more tech-aware members of his department, but he was willing to follow that lead. He had his full trad media package in place, he was chuffed with that, and he was ready to depart from the trad use of PR by not having any! Oh my. Instead, the dialogue with the Twits and the Bloggers would be the brave new interaction that would help to launch the Gas Board's entry proper to the all-round energy market.

Even if they make a complete fuck-up of it later on, they have certainly started in the best possible way. Pay close attention to how they manage this one, advertisers, and be anticipating questions from your own clients on the back of this move.

The ripple effect:
You can read more about it here from the man who helped get them into the idea, Damien Mulley.
Another socmedia writer, Peter Donegan, gives his consumer/blogger take on it here.

Over at Fitzy's Cloud Richard has some pre- and post teaser pics and notes that The Big Switch are running Google Adwords too.

Will Knott wrote about it here and posts some pics from the evening itself here.

More bloggers will be writing about it in the coming days, and I hope to have a breakdown of the campaign in the weeks to come.

Update: A more consumerist take on it here from Maman Poulet.

And Brand Ireland blogs on it here.