Company: Vodafone Istanbul, Turkey
Entry Submitted By: Hooper Consulting International
Company Description: Vodafone is the largest mobile communications company in the world with 20 locations. Turkey is Vodafone's fastest growing geography.
Nomination Category: Communications & Marketing Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications or PR Campaign of the Year - Marketing - Consumer Services

Nomination Title: Vodafone Turkey's FreeZone: 'Live Young, Live Free'

In up to 500 words, tell the judges about the nominated campaign: its genesis, development, planning, commission, and performance to date:

How did a female marketing and communications director in a major telecoms company woo and win the most important market segment for mobile and expand its market by 5%?

Vodafone’s Gizem Kececi did just that with a dynamic consumer marketing campaign targeted to young people 18-26 that is still all the buzz in Turkey. The centerpiece appealing to the core value of Turkey’s youth: connectivity. And who knows more about connectivity than women?

Aiming to woo and win young people as new subscribers or to convert them from the competition, Gizem’s all female marketing team came up with a fresh new sub-brand: “FreeZone,” aspiring to expand the market by at least 3% of Turkey’s youth. At the heart of the campaign was a high impact social media program to drive a launch event to maximize awareness, generate publicity and position the sub-brand as a dominant force in the marketplace.

The ambitious marketing campaign included massive advertising to launch the program, countrywide store promotions to promote it, national and local PR to support it. Music festivals were held at Turkey’s top universities to elevate brand awareness, enabling people to engage and interact with the new brand in sensory ways that would create a memorable brand experience, while generating publicity and interaction on social media.

A “must” for young people, digital and social media played an enormously effective role in speaking freely with clever games such as…on Facebook and Twitter which also increased the awareness level of the brand. The long term interaction between the brand and youth to increase the fan rate were FreeZone’s main goals, executed by: with social media at the heart consisting of:

•Unique website with self exposure tools, youth GSM and non-GSM offers, downloadable music platform and lifestyle content

•Interactive karaoke microsite were users could create their own music video clips to share with friends

•Creation of unique “Free Zones” in other websites, “create your own banner” applications and special youth benefits such as free web TV

•Facebook fans chatting about FreeZone festivals

•Sharing music performances real time

•Games and video games

•Facebook videos of FreeZone music festival

•Twitter sharing real time festival

•Twitter fiction competitions; winners meeting festival artists

•Interviews with artists by Facebook&Twitter fans

Leveraging massive social media to universities, more than 200,000 young people attended FreeZone music festivals at universities in five cities.

The buzz was nearly too large to quantify, although the FreeZone Facebook page had the highest interaction not only of all GSM operators, but even of all Vodafone operating companies – punctuated by a whopping 100% increase in Vodafone Facebook fans - …nearly 50,000 and more than 3,000 unique user-generated video clips. This activity, in comparison with VF’s Facebook pages in 19 countries, gave VF Turkey’s FreeZone Facebook page the highest interaction value of any country where VF operates.

Most important, the team’s objective of converting 3% of Turkey’s university students to new subscribers was left in the dust, as Vodafone FreeZone gained 5% market share at universities from this marketing campaign alone.

Provide a brief biography of the person or persons who lead the team that created and carried out the nominated communications campaign (up to 100 words):

GIZEM KECECI, Director of Marketing Communications

Gizem has a strong background in international brand management and marketing, beginning with Grey Advertising Istanbul, and highlighted by her 8.5 years at Danone Turkey where she served as marketing services director and later was responsible for Africa and the Middle East. She joined Vodafone Turkey in 2009 to head up marketing communications, and has been an integral part of the company’s growth in the fiercely competitive telecoms arena. Gizem is a graduate of the Vienna University of Economics, and earned her B.A. her in business administration from Marmara University in Istanbul.