The Situation

By Spring 1997, Bell's long distance business had been under extreme pressure for over 3 years. Sprint and AT&T Canada were stealing as many as 10,000 long distance customers per week.

Bell had tried various advertising initiatives, talking about value, about price perception, with varying degrees of success. But finally there seemed to be no way to blunt the competition's momentum.

The Solution.

Mike Smith, my art director at the time, and I were sitting through yet another "what do we do" session at Bell, when one of our clients pointed out that through aggressive telemarketing the moment they lost a customer, approximately 7,000 people per week were coming back to Bell. They were called "winbacks", and nobody seemed to think too much about it at the time.

But Mike and I immediately recognized that we had something here. We had done campaigns where we'd talked to people and businesses who had switched back to Bell, but this was a whole different way of looking at it.

All of a sudden, we weren't talking about rational reasons why you should stay with Bell. We were talking about momentum. About large numbers of people who had tried the competition and then decided to return. We didn't even have to point out that this might suggest something about the quality of the competition's offerings. It was enough to simply point out that all these people were coming back.

We roughed out the campaign idea over lunch. We presented it within the agency the same day. And 2 days later, we were presenting it to Bruce Barr, then Director of Marketing for Bell. Bruce immediately saw the potential, and started moving the campaign through his management, while we did a couple of quick focus groups just to make sure we weren't fooling ourselves.

We weren't.

The campaign was running within 2 weeks. We produced a new 15 second TV commercial every week, detailing just how many people had switched back to Bell the week or the month previous.

Every 2 weeks, we did a new full page newspaper ad, playing off things like Canada Day, the opening of baseball season and the opening of cottage season. Because of the importance of regularly updating the creative and always having fresh news out there, production budgets were miniscule.The TV commercials averaged out at a cost of $14K per spot. Most of the print ads used stock photography or cheap illustration.

For 9 months, everything was designed to suggest that it was in fact Bell, not the competition, that had the momentum in long distance.

The Results

This campaign effectively ended the long-distance wars in Canada.

Sprint and AT&T tried to get the commercials pulled, claiming we had misrepresented the situation, but because we'd been very conservative with the numbers we used, they couldn't do anything.

We were telling the truth.

When I say that this campaign effectively ended the long-distance wars in Canada, I'm not indulging in hyperbole. The holding companies for both Sprint Canada and AT&T Canada have just recently over the past couple of years emerged from restructuring or corporate realignments or whatever it is you call bankruptcy these days. And Bell is still chugging along nicely.

All because of an advertising campaign.