Case study
Joined-up thinking changes minds
AOL /discuss for AOL
With more than half-a-million visits to the AOL /discuss website in the first month of the campaign alone, AOL /discuss radically changed public perception of the AOL brand and successfully paved the way for a new era of digital brand democracy.
Capitalising on the halo effect of this powerful brand campaign we streamlined the AOL Broadband acquisition channels and ordering process. This culminated in AOL’s most successful day ever for UK broadband subscriptions in September 2006.
It all began with AOL’s decision to reposition their brand. They were maturing in the UK market and wanted to get their customers ‘discussing’. STEEL delivered a digital brand strategy which seamlessly integrated and optimised every other channel. Our UGC driven website became the living embodiment of the brand repositioning and the heart of the fully integrated AOL /discuss campaign.
With 150,000 votes, 5,000 threaded comments and 150 major articles submitted - this rich and topical discussion environment was alive with opinion from every walk of life.
And it was all based on our impactful new methodology - that of user generated content leading a brand campaign. We drove people to the website; we got them commenting, voting and discussing. And, at every stage, we repurposed UGC and poured it back into the campaign touchpoints - keeping user momentum extremely high. This was achieved with RSS feeds in the advertising to stream live comments and polls directly to and from the AOL /discuss website.
