We set out to improve perceptions of Virgin Media. To let people know that Virgin Media offers “the best broadband experience”, we had to remind them what a not so good broadband experience feels like. To do this, we teamed up with Specs, a well known online gamer to help us spread the word (and the love) with a more fun and approachable twist.
A large subset of Virgin Media’s audience on social media are gamers. To help us connect with them, we’ve primarily focused on creating ‘relatable’ content based on in-gaming moments and memes. However, this time we wanted to develop social content with our key brand health measures at heart. Virgin Media provides superior reliability, which means a better gaming experience. In order to win with the gaming community on social and land messaging about being the “better broadband experience”, we set out to show we ‘get it’...
We get their pains: What’s one of the most annoying things to happen when gaming? Unreliable internet connection that breaks your in-game flow.
We get their language: The gaming community commonly refers to tracking this connection as ‘ping’. The higher the ping, the more the game lags. The lower the ping, the better the gaming experience.
Using these insights, our plan was to create a content series to connect with the gaming community through Virgin Media’s owned TikTok and Instagram pages, but also reach new people through Specs’s pages and by investing in paid media. To give it an extra boost, we launched core episodes around key cultural events, like our football episode going live when the EUROs were on.
Brands talking about technical specs and product features can often be dull and boring. To make social content that people actually wanted to watch, we needed to think by the principles laid out by TikTok: Make TikToks, not Ads and ultimately followed by Reels.
Unlike traditional advertising, we needed to think in a way that felt social-first – playful, silly and a bit unexpected. On top of that, we tasked ourselves with watching the type of content our gamer fans would be watching; this let us in on the preferred editing-styles, the inside jokes, the terminology (like “ping”) and even the creators they loved. We enlisted help from a well known gaming creator, Specs Gonzalez, who also “gets it”. With his infectious energy, playful tone and hilarious delivery, he could make this even more entertaining to watch.
In each episode created by our in-house Creator Team, Specs takes on a different IRL challenge, which gets more difficult and silly as it goes on by turning up the ping. We bring to life the ping with recognisable glitching, freezing, blur and more. All of these make the experience more difficult, but the video gets more weird and wonderful as you keep watching.
The three part series gained over +2.5M views across TikTok and Instagram. Viewers not only stayed for the laughs but engaged with the content – over 4,000+ on TikTok, with many showing love for the concept and message. To ensure the message is landing against the brand perception measures, therefore having a greater impact for the brand, we’ll be working towards actioning a brand lift study to see the uplift on brand tracking statements.
The collaboration proved that with the right mix of personality and product, even the most technical features can be made fun and relatable. To help us demo the product benefits in a credible, but still fun and engaging way we worked with Specs, who delivered the right tone to capture attention. This makes way for more opportunities to keep working with him and build a more authentic creator relationship.
