How a high concept BT campaign convinced us ‘It’s Good to Talk’
Big ideas, human truths and Bob Hoskins came together in this IPA award winning campaign to help BT put itself at the heart of communication.
There was a big idea at the heart of the ‘It’s Good to Talk’ campaign from BT.
At a tactical level the telecoms brand, which in 1994 was a clear market leader, wanted to grow the size of its overall market by encouraging customers to make more, and longer, telephone calls.
Yet, at its heart the campaign was trying to achieve something far more ambitious. Essentially, BT needed to redefine itself.
“At the time it wasn’t a much-loved brand,” explains Adrian Hosford, then BT director of customer communication and brand marketing. The company had a reputation for poor service and out-of-order telephone boxes, which it had worked hard to solve. Updating its image to reflect that work was the next step.
“We’d had other successful call stimulation campaigns, like Maureen Lipman and the ‘Beattie’ campaign. But the difference was with this one we were trying not just to do call stimulation on its own, but to build a stronger brand and have every piece of communication working together to build something that was really meaningful to the customer,” Hosford explains.
