O2 Priority
Client
Virgin Media
Industry
Telco
Category
Sponsorship, campaign, social, film
Most loyalty programmes have a believability problem. People see the big competition and the once-in-a-lifetime prize, and somewhere underneath, they assume nobody real ever actually wins. That gap is a problem for brands that use these programmes to retain and reward their customers. The creative idea I led for O2 Priority was built to close that gap.
When Virgin Media and O2 merged in June 2021, a set of O2 perks opened up to Virgin Media customers, chief among them Priority, O2’s loyalty programme and one of its strongest drivers of customer satisfaction. A lot of my work in Virgin Media Edit went into making customers aware that Priority was now theirs and getting them to download the app, through perk explainers and deep dives into individual rewards. But the most persuasive thing we could do was not tell people the prizes were real. It was to show them.
Two pieces of work did exactly that. The first was the blue-carpet world premiere of the second Downton Abbey film. The second was the premiere of a documentary, co-created by O2 and the RFU, on England’s Red Roses and their record-breaking unbeaten run. Both put real customers alongside the talent at events they could only have reached through Priority.
The hard part was control, or the lack of it. Alongside our own filming crews, we had to weave in b-roll and film footage supplied by the production companies, material we could not direct and could not always get in the form we wanted. So I storyboarded every film and social cut before a camera rolled, working out exactly what each edit would need and writing an interview approach that could deliver it. The questions were built so the answers would land on the central message that these are once-in-a-lifetime experiences you can only get with Priority, while still leaving talent and customers enough room to sound like themselves. That authenticity mattered: the more it felt like a brand film, the less anyone would believe it, which was the whole point.
None of it was guaranteed. We wrote the talent questions from a loose list of attendees, knowing some would never stop to speak to us and had no reason to. Customers, meanwhile, were not used to a camera in their face, so I planned for that too, gathering enough kinds of answers that the edit would always have something real to use. We also had brand and social asks to honour, including app-download call-to-actions, so I built multiple storyboard routes to get those lines from either the talent or the customers, whoever delivered them best on the day.
With the storyboards and assets signed off in advance, we could turn the edits around fast, which mattered because both premieres landed just before their films reached the public. The finished work then ran right across both businesses: in Virgin Media Edit and in The Drop, O2’s own customer email programme, which we also produced, on social for both brands, and inside the Priority app itself.
What the work delivered:
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Two brand films built on a show-don’t-tell idea, from the Downton Abbey world premiere and the O2 and RFU Red Roses documentary
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Real customers filmed enjoying experiences they could only get through Priority, closing the believability gap
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Films and social cut-downs engineered around supplied footage and unscripted interviewees we could not direct
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Distribution across Virgin Media Edit, O2’s The Drop, social for both brands and the Priority app
What it shows: leading a creative idea from customer insight to finished films across two brands – holding a production together when much of the footage and many of the interviewees were beyond my control.
