John Bollow – Creative Director, Writer & Brand Strategist – Los Angeles | The Call of the Road Warrior: Plantronics Case Study

Role: Creative Director and Strategy Lead
Client: Plantronics
Agency: OIC

Overall category awareness for headsets in Europe was low. And within the category, research revealed Plantronics consumer brand awareness to be lagging. While the Plantronics B2B business was healthy, the road warrior (or “mobile professional”) had B2C habits when purchasing electronics for business and didn’t have Plantronics in his consideration set.

The objective was to make Plantronics Bluetooth headsets and audio devices relevant to these mobile professionals with a conservative digital media spend spread over four countries — US, UK, France and Germany. Campaign goals sought aggressive metrics for landing page visits; users viewing other media; and conversion to product pages.

Phone interviews with stakeholders across the territories were crafted into a Consolidated Portrait, which revealed how mobile professionals live 16-hour days where life and work overlap. They need help managing a life that never turns off. Our key insight guided the entire campaign: The more momentum I can achieve, the faster I can reach my potential. 

With in-territory media partners, we leveraged a wide array of tactics to show the Plantronics appeal across the “Work, Play and Life” of the mobile professional. This included video amplification; contextual targeting; mobile ad buys (both geo-targeted and day-part); and behavioral video placement. 

In conjunction with display banners and other digital tactics, the campaign was spearheaded by the “Charlie” campaign, which eventually became so successful that the client requested an additional spot for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, “Airport,” which ran in taxis.

One quarter into the campaign, our client reported, “This is the most traffic any one of our campaign landing pages has had, across all of our different category and audience campaigns for the company.”

• Onsite engagement (further action after landing page) was 27.4% with 4 out 10 of those visitors watching more videos and a full 60% of site visitors clicking through to product/ecommerce pages.

• Overall Click-through Rate (CTR) was 0.52%, over 7x industry average.