Best One-Off Content Campaign
Vodafone #CreateConnections Campaign
Introducing our web page entry for the ‘Best One-Off Content Campaign’ category for the Corporate Content Awards Europe 2023.
Here at Vodafone, we firmly believe in the power of technology to drive positive change for society and the planet.
Our networks keep family, friends, businesses and governments connected, and we play a vital role in keeping economies running and critical sectors like education and healthcare.
300+
million mobile customers
Across
21
markets
47
partner markets around the world
Europe’s largest
5G
network
Welcome to the #CreateConnections Campaign
Forget the Metaverse—2.7 billion people worldwide are still offline—as a result, unable to access basic digital education, healthcare and job support services.
While poor network coverage plays a role, one of the biggest barriers to digital inclusion is the cost of smartphones. We want to change this.
As part of the Broadband Commission For Sustainable Development, a working group bringing connectivity to global policy discussions, we launched a report which examines the barriers to smartphone ownership at the 77th UN General Assembly.
In support, we wanted to create a stand-out creative campaign to raise awareness of current digital injustice in a way that brought to life the issues being discussed and reached the widest audience possible.
The digital divide: What does it mean to you?
Setting our sights high
We're on a mission to give more people access to smartphones. With #CreateConnections we want to raise awareness of the challenges of smartphone access costs and help shift focus from network coverage as the primary problem consumers face.
Our campaign goals:
To deliver key messaging in a new, exciting and impactful format that will connect with a younger everyday audience, not just industry experts.
Build support for the policy interventions across all audiences.
Build Vodafone’s reputation as the Digital Enabler by highlighting its leadership in addressing the issue of smartphone ownership.
Contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goals
The #CreateConnections Campaign ran parallel to our Universal Smartphone Access Report. It played a pivotal role as a gateway to promoting this development challenge by broadening our reach through visually stimulating content, highlighting the critical campaign messages in a more accessible and creative manner.
Using art to raise awareness of the digital divide
In this campaign, we meet Liso, Jebet, Derrick and Lethabo—four artists from some countries most affected by digital access disparity—Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. We explore how digital art can be leveraged to celebrate the transformative power of smartphones and showcase the challenges around access.
As part of the campaign, the artists were all asked to illustrate how smartphones had transformed their lives, communities and broader African society and why access to them is crucial for creating a fairer and more sustainable continent.
Driving stories with a human-centric approach
To effectively present the visual narratives, multiple assets and explore endless layout possibilities required to share our artist's varied stories, we needed a new content platform.
To achieve this, we combined human-centric design and innovative functionality to create a new long-form content experience specifically to host the #CreateConnections campaign.
The format focused on providing deep and emotional story telling that aligned and reflected the subject matter in a medium that today’s digitally savvy audiences want, need and expect
Key challenges
To bring the campaign to life as a long-form content experience and ensure the messaging and artists’ stories were delivered with high impact and reach—we faced some challenges:
To present the subject matter in an accessible, easy-to-understand and inspiring way without diluting the seriousness of our message.
As long-form content is over 3000 words, we needed to consider the use of design and functionality to keep the readers' attention and encourage them to continue on the journey.
To explore new formats and content experiences, moving away from traditional approaches.
Creating immersive stories to promote inclusive and sustainable digital societies.
A key feature of the #CreateConnections Campaign is the use of scrollytelling animation—this ensures audiences don’t feel like they are reading a long text, which risks being tedious and disengaging.
Instead, as the imagery scrolls with the reader, supported with audio clips, artist interviews and b-roll—the experience becomes interactive and immersive for the audience, allowing them to explore the artist's worlds, works and inspirations.
Lastly, we introduced an audio reader to drive further audience accessibility.
Driving engagement
The #CreateConnections Campaign was launched on 27th September 2022.
We’re incredibly proud of what the campaign has achieved so far.
#CreateConnections content has the biggest engagement hits in recent Vodafone.com history, with users dwelling 4x longer to read this content than for our previously best-performing story.
While all our engagement results have outperformed all our brand benchmarks, making #CreateConnections one of our most successful campaigns.
8.76m
impressions
1.03m
engagements
11.7%
engagement rate
432k
clicks to website
4.93%
Avg. CTR
Delivering impact with long-form content
Reached people in NGOs, government administration, World Bank, UN and USAID.
370 downloads of the report on the Broadband Commission website to date
Content shared by Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, the UK and Vodacom/Africa
Coverage in tier one media including, Dow Jones, Reuters, El Confidencial (Spain), Europa Press (Spain), La Repubblica (Italy), La Stampa (Italy), Il Messagero (Italy) and The Citizen (South Africa), plus more local and trade media
Over 45,000 Vodafone employees have interacted with the campaign materials on internal comms channels—better than any other campaign in the past 12 months.
What’s next?
We’re excited to build on the positive engagement we’ve achieved with our #CreateConnections Campaign.
We’re committed to constantly improving the experience for all audiences by continuing to learn, review and adapt.