A year after its Cannes Grand Prix triumph, Special’s Tony Bradbourne recalls how Orcon Broadband’s ‘Iggy Pop’ campaign came about

CB asked Special’s CD Tony Bradbourne how they pulled off what has been described as ‘the quintessential 21st century ad campaign’.

The major marketing issue Orcon faced was that they had extremely low awareness. And if people had heard of them they were confused about what they offered. The then Head of Sales David Joyce, and Head of Marketing Duncan Blair pitched the account, we won, and they tasked us with changing that and driving sales. Both of these guys are really smart and visionary, they knew that their total media budget was under 2% of the total telco market spend, so they needed something really smart and well… attention grabbing.

Basically they were product demonstration ideas – but taken to extremes. Our recommended route featured a certain Mr Iggy Pop.

Why Iggy Pop? Why not? He was the first artist that came into our minds when we were trying to explain the idea around Special – and then we couldn’t think of anyone else who could possibly be better.

He was someone that was known but not overused, he was someone you would love to have a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience with, he had a song that we loved and was kind of easy to learn, he was a frontman, a showman, he was completely unexpected and he is a pure rock and roll legend.

The challenges didn’t get any easier from there. We found Iggy Pop’s manager (appropriately by google) – he was in Poland and Iggy was in Miami. Luckily they both really loved the idea. I think for Iggy a big part was that we didn’t want him to hold up a product and say ‘buy this’ we just wanted him to be Iggy Pop.

We only ever wanted Darryl Ward to shoot it, he’s been around musicians for a lot of his life, we thought that would help. And his reel is full of well put together and beautifully shot ads. So we gave Matt Noonan at Curious a call. I guess it’s not everyday a production company gets an idea that will require them to shoot in 9 separate locations across New Zealand and Miami – all at the same time. But Curious made the seemingly impossible possible. We recorded the first ‘get involved’ ad over a skype call with iggy at Curious in Auckland before shooting the main event in Miami two weeks later.

We ran the audition process through facebook which we think was the first time a major TV campaign in NZ had pointed people towards facebook rather than their own website. We only had 10 days to get the auditions in but the huge amount of PR attention the campaign was generating really helped.

And luckily we found 9 really interesting and different musicians who wanted to give this a go.

We met Iggy by the roof top pool of the hotel we were staying at in Miami – he had his shirt off in about 2 minutes flat. He was really interested in the technology that was being used, had worked out parts for each of the musicians based on their auditions, wanted an extra one brought in at the last minute and was, well, pretty cool.

The recording day itself was fascinating. In New Zealand we sent out 9 mini-production teams around the country to the homes of the musicians. Meanwhile in Miami Iggy basically took over and orchestrated the whole event – he had a great time with each of the New Zealand musicians – it was a lot of fun.

We took the countless hours of footage back to NZ where Luke Haigh did a brilliant job in piecing it all together. The track itself was reassembled at Neil Finn’s Roundhead studio on the same desk that Meatloaf’s Bat out of Hell was mixed on.

Leading current affairs programme Campbell Live dedicated an unprecedented 5 minute slot to the ‘making of’ on the night we launched (with a 1 minute 45 second ad) – by that stage the campaign had generated over $650,000 worth of unpaid for coverage.

The sales and awareness impact was incredible. Orcon’s CEO called it a ‘step change’ for the brand. Unpromted awareness rose by 60%, sales were over budget by 47% and all at a lower cost per sale that in the previous year. It went one to win 3 EFFIE awards.

But we almost didn’t enter it into the Direct section of Cannes – I guess we never saw it as a truly ‘direct’ campaign – but in the last couple of days before the final extension we decided to give it a shot. Good call.

CREDITS: