Vodafone Pitch

In 2009, after a highly contested pitch Vodafone Germany left their agency of record to move all the advertising work to Scholz & Friends. I was on the core pitch team leading the digital work, together with Nico Lumma, that worked on winning the pitch. A selection of my thinking that went into the work follows below.

Vodafone didn’t have the iPhone in 2009. The next best thing from a Vodafone perspective was the Blackberry Storm. But my thinking was less about the technology and more about the social and behavioral practices of the existing Vodafone users. It was with this in mind that I approached the task at hand; creating convincing work that would win the pitch.

I created the diagram above to illustrate the relevancy of messaging from a user’s perspective. From there, it flows outward with the campaign website being the furthest from the core. This informed our thinking as well as emphasized the importance of building communication for existing customers first as retaining customers is always the number one priority for a entity of Vodafone’s scale.

The one thing we all carry with us, besides our wallet and keys, nearly all the time is our mobile phone. Therefore, it made sense to have the mobile phone be the starting point of our creative work. With this in mind, we created value for existing Vodafone user’s by simplifying their lives in creating one point of access to their social graph. In other words, an application that aggregated a user’s multi-platformed social stream as well as making it possible to broadcast to those same streams. We designed and built a working prototype on the Blackberry Storm that was so convincing when presented that Vodafone asked if we already built the application.

Next up was creating more value for Vodafone customers by offering them the opportunity to do all the administrative effort that is involved with have a mobile contract at the place they spend most of their time: Facebook. We also pitched an additional revenue stream for Vodafone by offering to users the ability to purchase and download selected music tracks.