The Challenge

In February 2009, BT España. which provides communication and IT services for the Spanish business market, launched its mobile services for corporations, small and medium-sized businesses and freelancers.

The aim was to carry out a PR campaign that would obtain a high return on investment (ROI) compared to an advertising campaign, and that was innovative, in contrast to what the competition was doing.

The service was targeted to a much wider market than BT España’s usual audience of large corporations, so we needed to reach the mass media with a different communications approach.

The Strategy

We designed an event which combined surprise and innovation, in a way that would generate a great media response about the launch of BT’s new Mobile services.

Stephen Wiltshire, known as “the human camera” for his incredible ability to draw detailed panoramas of entire cities from memory, was recruited to fly over Madrid in a helicopter to memorise the city, and to then draw an extraordinary sky-scape of the city – from a different point of view.

Stephen’s work reflected BT´s new mobile services because it was a new form of communication previously unheard of in Spain - with exceptional qualities and capabilities and an extraordinary ability to see both the full picture and the detail – in BT’s case, of customer’s business needs. The new service presented BT to the Spanish business market from a different point of view.

Stephen visited Madrid for the first time and, after a one-hour helicopter ride over the city, devoted the following three days to draw it from memory. We fitted out an area within the Palacio de Deportes in central Madrid for this purpose, and made sure it was directly visible from a busy street and was easily accessible for the general public. The media was invited to cover the BT launch event press conference and to closely follow Stephen’s progress.

The media received two initial communications with enigmatic messages concerning something extraordinary that was about to happen in Madrid. The third and last invitation had two different versions: one targeted at journalists specialising in telecommunications, inviting them to the press conference and including all the details of the event, and a second for general media journalists, television and radio reporters, aimed at encouraging them to attend the development of Stephen Wiltshire’s activities.

The actual press conference on the launching of BT’s mobile services took place on the first day of the event, with the attendance of 30 journalists from the top news agencies, all the economic newspapers, the main national newspapers and technology and telecommunications specialised media.

A further 27 media turned up to cover Stephen Wiltshire’s progress, mainly from radio, TV, national newspapers and news agencies – that is, 57 media in all – to which we have to add more than 100 requests for information received via email and telephone.

To maintain media attention, at eleven o’clock each day of the event, we sent a press and photographic dossier of the drawing’s progress to the media, as well as sending B-roll to all TV stations of the progress, including Stephen’s helicopter flight, and statements and images about BT’s mobile telephony services.

The Result

The result was hundreds of articles featuring BT in the traditional press and online, as well multiple radio and television appearances.

Specifically, the results obtained were:

• Unusual media for BT España: We created brand awareness for BT achieved great visibility in mass media where BT does not normally appear, including live broadcasts showing BT’s logo and the slogan of BT mobile’s launch campaign “a mobile solution for each business”.
• More usual media for BT España: We generated wide coverage in all the media that regularly follow BT; they reflected BT’s messages as an innovative company and the only operator in the market to specialise exclusively addressing the needs of the business sector.
• General Public:We generated awareness of the BT trade name and expectation over the launch of a new specialised mobile operator among the large number of public attending to see Stephen Wiltshire’s progress live and to whom we gave out information on BT’s mobile services.