Spark wins gold at Pressies for Best Experiential or Event Campaign

Spark’s ‘All In: Spark’s Digital Equity Mission’ campaign has been awarded gold in the Best Experiential or Event Campaign category at the 2022 Pressie Awards. Ally Young, Domain Chapter Lead Brand Marketing at Spark New Zealand, shares the insight behind this campaign, the problems it solved, and what made it an award winning entry.

What was the most compelling insight behind this campaign? 

‘Digital equity’ is a hard term to understand, yet it is a key strategic pillar for Spark. The best way to explain it is: as a country we can’t all win big in a digital world until we can all participate. The people of Spark are in a privileged position to do something about it, however it was hard to get engagement.

When we dug into why our Spark people were struggling to engage we uncovered a few things such as; there was a misunderstanding of what ‘digital equity’ was, our people thought it was a topic too big to tackle, and they didn’t know how to make a difference because they didn’t think they had the time or resource to invest.

The insight that was found was Spark people will support digital equity if they are emotionally connected to it.

Why do you think it won gold? 

We have a very real problem that affects 1 in 5 New Zealanders. Imagine who we could be missing out on if there are digital inequities. The next Taika? The next Jacinda? Digital equity is complex, nuanced and multi-dimensional. It’s not something that can be understood in a report with numbers and facts over email.

In a time when people’s value of work has been tested through Covid and working from home, this event gave our staff the opportunity to take some time out of their day and think about how they could make a real difference to the future of New Zealand. 

The implementation of the day itself was thoroughly thought through. From making sure those at home were included and could contribute, to those in person who felt safe with Covid swirling around. We also had a plan for those who couldn’t make it on the day. 

The event was a huge success and we saw the highest attendance of any Spark event, generated 1000+ different solutions, and created a companywide impact that prioritised digital equity to our core metrics.

What was the biggest challenge you faced while creating the campaign?

There was so many! But asking 4000 people across the country to prioritise something they didn’t understand or felt connected to was tough going. We had to make it worth their while without giving too much away of what the day was about. We considered our key retail staff who couldn’t stop work for the day (we created a self-guided two hour session for them). We considered those at home who really didn’t want to be around people at that time (we live-streamed from the stage at Spark Arena and used an online whiteboard during the workshop section). We considered who our keynote speakers should be (and even more importantly who our keynote speakers shouldn’t be) that would drive impact. We even considered those who were invited that failed to RSVP after the first, second and third prompt. We made sure that we considered every single person – the event was called ‘ALL IN’ after all.

What was your biggest learning? 

In a time with an influx of digital communications hammering our people rather than face to face communications (which we had the luxury of pre-Covid), it was very hard to cut through the multitude of messages that our people experience every day to get them to RSVP. An email could get lost in two minutes. We had to really think outside of the box with how to reach our audience. One example was to create an attendance ticker on our company-wide intranet to show our people how many RSVPs we had received, which then drove advocacy and a response. Our biggest learning was not to assume a few emails were enough to drive attendance, even if one of them did come from our CEO!

What does it mean to you to win a gold at The Pressies in 2022?

 Absolutely thrilled! Big corporates often get a lot of flak when it comes to trying to ‘do good’, as sometimes it appears inauthentic. So it was important that our purpose to drive Digital Equity was internally-focussed first to get everyone behind it. For our work on ‘Spark’s digital equity mission’ to be recognised by the judges is brilliant and will encourage others at Spark to back projects that aren’t necessarily commercially driven, but have an impact on those outside of our business – and in turn helps drive our country forward. Thank you!

The post Spark wins gold at Pressies for Best Experiential or Event Campaign appeared first on stoppress.co.nz.

stoppress.co.nz