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Bigpipe gets weird in its first two spots of 2015

Witnessing a grown man with an impressive girth pouring what is hopefully chilled coffee all over his topless body isn’t necessarily an aesthetically pleasing experience, but this hasn’t stopped Bigpipe from featuring this bizarre scene in a new spot that promotes its unlimited broadband packages.

Bigpipe has also released a second equally bizarre spot that touts the fact that its subscribers aren’t contractually obligated to stay with the internet service provider after signing up.

In keeping with its digital trend, Bigpipe is only releasing the spots on YouTube and TVNZ Ondemand. And rather than having an agency develop the spots, the internet service provider commissioned the comedic triumvirate of Tim Batt, Guy Montgomery and Tom Furniss to work on the project. And it turns out that trio’s talents extend beyond the remit of comedy, as they conceptualised and produced both spots independently.   

Forming part of the Spark Digital Ventures portfolio of start-ups, Bigpipe launched in February 2014 as a stripped down, naked-only broadband provider targeted at a younger market. Since its inception, various elements of the business model have been shaped to specifically accommodate millennial consumers, with one of the clearest examples of this lying in the fact that the company doesn’t have an call centres.     

“It was very clear when researching customers’ needs, we found they absolutely hate call centres,” Oliver Smith, the head of Bigpipe, told Idealog in October last year. “They’d much rather get stuff done online themselves and not be kept waiting, but their experience of online service with other ISPs is that it was treated as a second class citizen, always ready to fall back on the safety net of the call centre. That’s why we made the bold decision to not have a call centre at all, forcing us to provide the best online service possible.”

According to a worldwide study covering 79 countries conducted by Dimenson Data, people born between 1980 and 2000 prefer not to talk on the phone when dealing with a customer service issue. 

Andrew McNair, Dimension Data’s head of global benchmarking, told online publication Memeburn that the younger generation sees the phone as the third choice of correspondence behind electronic messaging and smartphone apps.   

“While the silent generation (born before 1944) and the baby boomers (born between 1945 and 1960) prefer the phone as their most popular channel of engagement with a contact centre (55.2 percent and 59.5 percent respectively), the pace of decline in ‘voice only’ contact centres — now down to 67.5 percent overall compared with 67.9 percent 12 months ago — demonstrates the continuing trend to multi-skill telephone agents across emerging ‘non-voice’ contact channels,” he said in the interview.

Smith also says that the company only offers uncapped internet packages and always ensures that its internet speed is more that 100Mbps, as these were the other two issues that were important to the younger audience. 

Until now, Bigpipe’s has been relatively quiet on the marketing front releasing only a few digital and social campaignsbut at a press lunch held late last year, Smith told StopPress that the company had laid significant groundwork since its launch and that it would now be more active in public space. And if this first two clips are anything to go by, then it seems that Bigpipe intends to add a bit of insanity to the marketing landscape in 2015.  

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