SpinVox: Spanish consumer services launch
Challenge
The world's largest privately-held speech company, SpinVox, launched its consumer services in Spain in February 2008 under Vodafone Spain’s name “Dicta SMS”. Hotwire Spain was hired to support above-the-line sales and marketing activities. The client’s brief was simple – to build brand profile and drive take-up of the service.
The main challenge was educating the audience on how to use this new service and how or where they could access it, as it was only available through Vodafone Spain. This is simply because Vodafone are incredibly sensitive about any indication that a supplier may be supplying to the whole Group, so the precise geography needs to be specified. Voice-to-text is a new concept for most people so needed explanation in clear and simple language. To do this, the campaign was divided into three pillars – thought leadership, brand building and executive profiling.
Campaign
Hotwire devised a PR campaign that combined exciting real-world events that brought the solution to life, with strong news stories that highlighted SpinVox’s deep understanding of the way Spanish consumers communicate.
Thought leadership pillar – “How do we communicate?” This pillar provided insight into the way Spanish people like to communicate based on commissioned consumer research. These stories received widespread media coverage and meant that the SpinVox brand became closely associated in consumers’ minds with understanding communication.
Brand building pillar – “SpinVox on parade” To reach a large consumer audience quickly and demonstrate how the SpinVox service works, Hotwire recommended SpinVox join some of Spain’s most popular national events for PR and marketing outreach. In July 2008 SpinVox took a float in Spain’s Gay Pride parade while January 2009 saw the company participate in the ‘Three Wise Men’ parade in Madrid. At each parade the crowds watching were encouraged to send messages via SpinVox. The voice mails would be shown as text to the rest of the crowd on a giant screen on the float. These activities were used to interact with audiences as well as generating significant media interest.
Text highlights included:
Gay Pride: “Grab the crazy animal inside you and take on the world!”
Three Wise Men:”Please can everyone recycle more?”
Profiling pillar – “SpinVox is a Spanish innovation story” SpinVox’s CEO and co-founder Christina Domecq is a young entrepreneurial Spanish woman whose family founded the Domecq drinks empire and a great figurehead for the SpinVox brand in Spain. Hotwire secured profiles of Christina in national media as well as using her extensively for media interviews and comment opportunities to build the SpinVox brand and to position it as a leader in communications technology.
This is because the family sold out of the drinks business to what became Allied Domecq a couple of decades ago and it needs to be clear that the work was about promoting the SpinVox brand not the Domecq drinks brand.
Outcome
In 2008 alone Hotwire secured 317 pieces of print coverage, with a total opportunity to view (OTV) of over 90 million (90,509,675). Seven television interviews and 15 radio interviews for SpinVox spokespeople were also secured. Success however, is not solely about column inches – the business saw a significant increase in brand awareness across Spain, an18% increase in traffic to www.spinvox.com and a 22% increase in converted messages through the Spanish system during the course of the campaign.
According to Ema Linaker, Global Consumer PR Director, SpinVox: “The campaign has been a phenomenal success, generating not only some fantastic, quality coverage but really increasing our brand awareness among our target audiences. Most importantly Hotwire came to us with integrated solutions which meant that our investment had more of an impact across the whole of the marketing mix, both offline and online.”
