Former Telstra chief marketing officer Brent Smart transformed the Telstra brand in just four years. Its work, produced by +61 and Bear Meets Eagle On Fire, consistently won Cannes Lions and Effie Awards, among countless other accolades.
In March, Smart revealed he was stepping down and has since set up a consultancy called B.Smart that provides the C-suite with the sort of marketing advice he wished he had earlier in his career.
Smart caught up with the Uncensored CMO presenter Jon Evans for a podcast where he opens up about his time at Telstra, the NRMA and his views on marketing.
When asked why he left the telco, the Liverpool FC fan said: “I’m much better at building than maintaining, and it started to feel like maintaining”.
“I love the challenge of transforming brands and I think I’m a bit of a gluten for punishment because I’ve worked at telcos, insurance companies,” he said. “I’m drawn to these low involvement categories where creativity can make all of the difference.”
Smart said that one of the greatest challenges that marketers face is trying to convince c-suite colleagues to back your ideas.
“Nothing has ever been invented that is better at killing ideas than a corporation. It’s a real skill and a superpower to be able to navigate those complex organisations and keep a creative idea in tact,” said the B&T CMO Power List alumni.
“Whenever you are embarking on a creative exercise, and particularly if it is a transformative one where you are trying to change things. You don’t have the data that backs up going on that journey, it doesn’t exist.
“All you have is conviction and that is critical. If you don’t believe, they are not going to believe.
“The way you tell a story to an organisation is critical. You have to explain why this will work commercially based on your experience and expertise.”
This means being creative and using emotion in how you sell an idea internally and not resorting to the sort of language that a CFO would use.
To show why Telstra needed to change, Smart commissioned a study that asked people to draw how the Telstra brand feels.
He presented three drawings from people that illustrated Telstra’s perception problem.
The first was a white guy in a suit—corporate, traditional, serious.
The second featured a Monopoly man, cash registers and money, which illustrated that Telstra cared more about shareholders than customers.
The third drawing was two stick figures, a large one bending over and pointing down to a small one, illustrating that Telstra was a bully.
“It was so powerful to tell the story in a really compelling way to get people to back you,” Smart said.
“Staff pride is also super important. If you can make them proud of the brand and doing work they really feel emotionally connected to, you can improve NPS overnight.
“Boards love things like reputation, advocacy and NPS…but these are just measures of how you feel about a brand.
“If you want to change how people feel about a brand, change how the brand feels.
Transforming Telstra
When Smart joined Telstra, he commissioned a study that looked at how its corporate reputation compared to other large Australian corporates. Telstra was in the bottom 10 alongside banks.
Telstra’s customers rated the brand quite highly but non-customers, including ex-customers, didn’t rate the company at all, illustrated by a 15 point delta in NPS scores between customers and non-customers.
As non-customers were not experiencing the brand, Telstra had to change their perceptions through advertising.
“We had to turn up in a surprising way that no-one really expected from Telstra,” Smart said.
The first campaign that Telstra released, working alongside Bear Meets Eagle On Fire and agency partners within the +61 unit, was Telstra’s stop-motion puppet campaign ‘Better on a Better Network’.
It featured whimsical Australian animals in stop-motion animation and plants voiced by real everyday people from regional towns.
It aired during the Paris Olympic Games and showed the Telstra brands as a charming and cute alternative to a lot of other advertisers running Olympic themed work.
This was followed up by ‘Wherever We Go’, an animation with a relaxed character walking through the world with a bird on his shoulder whistling Islands In The Stream by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers.
Wherever We Go initially received backlash, particularly due to its high frequency during the footy.
Fans who had seen their teams losing during a match found the ad particularly irritating but then the ad went viral as people on social media started mimicking the Telstra walk, including rugby league players celebrating a try.
“We modelled the character on a young Mick Jaeger, and he’s called Mick,” Smart said.
“Initially, the sentiment wasn’t looking good on social media. Then it suddenly turned as rugby fans started imitating the walk and the sentiment started to turn,” he said.
To amplify the Telstra walk, Telstra ran an ad during the State of Origin with fan videos of the Telstra walk from TikTok edited in a way where it looked like one continuous walk.
“Then it really took off and became a celebration during the rugby league and AFl. A girl did the Telstra walk on the North Korean walk.
The trend reached 30 million views, and at one stage Telstra had 90 per cent of all searches for a telco brand on TikTok.
An ad starring a donkey, Together is For Christmas’ featured in Christmas, creating a John Lewis style emotional ad that helped Telstra gain mental availability.
“It’s all based on emotion and feeling and that’s been a hallmark of all the work we have done. It’s a very different personality for a big telco and humour has played a big part,” Smart said.
“It has really changed how people feel about the brand. I would say they all still like us, but we’ve made it hard for them to dislike us.
Smart points out that Telstra’s brand work was converting to sales.
“Half of our sales came from retail and performance activity, the other half came from brand work we had done four months earlier,” he said.
“All of the brand work is not only working throughout the whole year, but also during intense sales periods like Christmas.
“Our approach was that we think we have a very consistent voice, and there’s a consistent level of craft but the executions are quite varied.
“It’s a more sophisticated way to think about consistency rather than a slavish consistency where it’s all the same all the time. If you are a brand that is trying to win reappraisal, you can’t be consistent because people will tune out right away. You need to get them to spend more time with the work and get under their skin a little bit to think differently.”
There is little doubt that Smart has not only gotten under the skin of non-customers, but has transformed how Australia, and the advertising industry feels about the brand.
