A straw poll on the streets of Sydney or Perth would turn up a high recognition factor for Fin, the iiNet guy.
A straw poll on the streets of Sydney or Perth would turn up a high recognition factor for Fin, the iiNet guy.
The face of the Perth-based internet service provider’s first mass media advertising campaign certainly has had an impact.
There has been a massive blitz of TV commercials, cinema commercials, bus adverts and billboards since the $5 million campaign was launched about two months ago.
iiNet even managed to secure every available billboard space at Sydney’s Town Hall railway station, so that thousands of CBD commuters were forced to get familiar with its fast broadband brand.
iiNet’s campaign, developed by Perth agency Meerkats, has helped it earn the title of Western Australia’s most improved brand following WA Business News’ annual survey of the state’s advertising and marketing industries.
“The recent relaunch has provided significant credibility and perception of a fair player in a highly competitive market,” The Brand Agency group account director Morgen Lewis said.
“There is a nice personality associated with this brand as well as excellent use of media strategy to engage customers out-of-home.”
iiNet’s presence in the marketplace is set to intensify in the coming years as the ISP lifts its advertising budget.
The current campaign spend could jump as much as 80 per cent as the group ploughs between $7 million and $9 million into advertising this financial year.
iiNet managing director Michael Malone says the campaign had been extremely successful, achieving its goal of increasing brand recognition in the market, particularly in Sydney where it is keen to expand.
“Before the campaign, our prompted awareness in Sydney was 12 per cent and now it is around 60 per cent,” Mr Malone said. “Hits to the website went up 10-fold in the one week.”
It’s the type of campaign that has created its own PR – The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story last month on the man who plays Fin in the commercials, David Smyth.
“This was about getting that cut through,” Mr Malone said. “It is a really crowded sector and a lot of what is out there is all about the price; we didn’t want to be another company with another $29.95 a month deal. We wanted to build the brand.”
Mr Malone said iiNet wanted to be seen in the market as a credible alternative to Telstra or Optus and didn’t want to get confused as just “a reseller of Telstra and Optus products”.
“That’s why we focused on our network, the network that we spent a lot of money to build,” he said.
iiNet chief operating officer Mark White said the ISP’s customers, and potential customers, watched less TV than the average Australian but went to the movies more often.
“We decided that if they were not a home watching TV or at the cinema than they were out and about and on their way to work or somewhere else, so that is why we brought outdoor into it,” Mr White said.
“Because they don’t watch a lot of television we did not go station specific, we went TV show specific so we advertised during the football, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost and House.”
He said the next phase of the campaign would be focused on increasing customer numbers by marketing to more specific audiences.
For example, iiNet will begin to target users of Macintosh computers in a campaign that will promote specific products and benefits to them.
iiNet was also rated highly as a best employer brand and rated as one of the better emerging brands.
iiNet was excluded from the emerging brand category because it is a brand that has existed for more than five years.
