Vodafone: Gone Roaming

Brief:Pack your suncream, travel insurance and a good book, along with the best roaming service in the UK. Don’t forget to stop at an internet café while you’re away too.

Promote Vodafone Passport as the best roaming service in the market.

Objectives:

We want to communicate to our readers that Vodafone Passport will:

• Cut costs: Talk for longer when you make or receive calls
• Simplify charges: Pay for a domestic UK call plus the connection fee for each call
• Stay in control: Predict the cost of calling from abroad
• Simple: Easy to set up at no extra cost

Campaign | Print:

To establish Vodafone as the best roaming network and in order to increase the value for Vodafone’s customers, we produced four travel editorial features. Each page (1/2 page) feature covered Vodafone’s four ‘key priority’ European destinations.

These editorial travel features, entitled ‘Gone Roaming’ were all based on discovery, delivering fresh and exciting new travel content.

The editorial content was packed with useful and inspiring information for all destinations, from cities to the countryside and mountains to beaches, this idea communicated that Vodafone are the best network to go roaming with and to keep discovering.

Online:

Vodafone wanted a celebrity podcast. We persuaded them to use an established travel writer. This way the campaign would have credibility, be cost efficient and be better at convincing the consumer to switch to Vodafone. The podcasts were part of a multi-media campaign, which utilised print as well as Independent online. To convince readers, we commissioned a pilot podcast by sending our travel editor, Simon Calder, on a tour of Barcelona, Dublin, Athens and Nice. Each podcast was hosted on The Independent’s and Vodafone’s websites, Vodafone live!, itunes and yahoo!.

Independent Readers’ View of Vodafone:

“This has been an exciting, rewarding and ultimately very successful project with The Independent. We wanted to promote Vodafone Passport in a way that reflected its unique and innovative properties and our partnership with The Independent allowed us to do that. This campaign has set new standards in both innovation and customer targeting.”

Tim Yates, Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone.

“Vodafone are always looking at new and interesting ways to communicate the strength of their roaming offering to their consumers, and this cross-media deal with the Independent allows them to provide some excellent travel content across a variety of platforms”.

Ben Reilly, OMD.