SmarTone takes to the streets for insights and top-of-mind awareness

Despite its high penetration in the mobile data market, SmarTone knows it needs to boost awareness when it comes to home broadband. The Hong Kong market is packed with competitors and its consumers are extremely price sensitive. So late last year, SmarTone partnered with Verizon Media to take to the streets and hit two birds with one stone; collecting consumer insights and gaining top-of-mind awareness.

The first phase included a bespoke online poll to collect user feedback via Yahoo Polls (Yahoo民調), and relevant social media pages. Its questions were themed around generic broadband-related topics like speed, price and stability and it received more than 8,500 responses in a single week.

Following this, a second phase of qualitative research was then conducted through face-to-face street interviews. These were held in front of SmarTone’s brick-and-mortar shops to subtly insert soft-branding.

Both results were combined to produce a video labelled as “SmarTone Sponsored” and disseminated through the Yahoo TV program “Yahoo Polls民調話你知”.  Placed alongside the content were native ads promoting SmarTone’s signature messaging, such as affordable monthly fees, excellent speed, and a stable network. This was aimed at tackling the poll result, retaining top-of-m ind awareness, and driving sales. The video was published on several Yahoo verticals, including Yahoo TV, Yahoo Finance, and their corresponding social media pages.

The result of the campaign was remarkable, with more than 448 thousand video views generated on both Yahoo TV and its social media platforms, and attracting nearly four million eyeballs through Yahoo Native Ads and DSP display ads. The CTR of banner ads went very well, of which ads using Yahoo Poll results as the key message saw an 84% uplift compared to branding creative banners.

Client SmarTone

Media Agency OMD

This content was sponsored by Verizon Media