After exercising for a year straight, mobile phone provider Koodo is giving its workout campaign a rest with the launch of a new national advertising campaign today.
The previous campaign, which launched the brand last March, touted the concept of “fat-free mobility” and featured ’80s-inspired male and female characters in bright spandex workout apparel using exaggerated expressions to convey their excitement about the savings offered by the Telus discount brand and their disdain for the billing practices of competitors.
The new campaign, which includes television, print, out-of-home, radio, cinema and online executions, retains the bright colour scheme and emphasis on comical facial expressions but introduces a new cast of characters.
Television creative features groups of people clad in colourful clothing with letters on their chests. The characters then rearrange themselves to form a variety of words and expressions before settling on invented words such as “textelation,” “contractophobe” and “fee-ectomy.” Print and out-of-home ads, meanwhile, feature characters with wildly exaggerated smiles words like “bigbillification.”
Creative for the campaign was developed by Toronto agency Taxi 2.
Kevin Banderk, president or “chief Koodo officer,” said last year’s “Koodo-cisers were successful in introducing the brand, but after 12 months, it was time for a creative update.
“After wearing spandex for a year, it starts to sag, so we thought we’d change it up a bit,” Banderk said. “We wanted to make sure we kept the brand and the campaign separate so that people didn’t just know us for the campaign.
“We stayed true to the colour scheme, the tonality and our offering, but we wanted to make sure people didn’t just think of us as the Koodo-cisers in spandex.”
Lance Martin, creative director at Taxi 2, said the concept behind the new ads was to develop a new way to talk about Koodo’s value proposition.
“We’re still using fun, quirky and colourful characters, just in a different way,” said Martin. “In this case, we needed to redefine mobility and create our own language as a way to talk about the great savings you get with Koodo.”
Koodo’s latest campaign is slated to run throughout 2009.
