Brand Barometer - Virgin ads offer a much broader appeal

Virgin Media's initial advertising, when it launched last year, featured Uma Thurman and focused largely on the broadcaster's television offering.

Here, Virgin Media publicly endured a rather undignified scrap with BSkyB over the rights to broadcast Sky One.

Even now, Sky is rubbing salt in the wounds by pointing out on its ads for the new series of Lost that "answers are coming" ... but not for Virgin customers.

Virgin Media's latest ad campaign moves the focus from its television offering to its broadband service - an area where the broadcaster can lay claim to a far clearer, unique selling point.

The ads concentrate on the speed offered by fibre-optic cable broad-band, highlighting Virgin's new 10mb and 20mb broadband packages and its forthcoming 50mb package, which dwarfs the sort of speed customers receive from some rival companies that rely upon telephone lines.

The series of ads are built around the theme of "Hate to wait", and show impatient people taking ludicrous shortcuts to avoid having to wait for things.

For example, an angler goes and buys a large fish from the fishmongers, rather than spending the day sitting on the riverside; a man jogging past a liposuction centre decides to just go in and get his excess fat sucked out; a woman on a speed-dating session presses the button before the next lothario has even sat down; and a chap fumbling with a bra strap in a passionate clinch with his girlfriend resorts to just cutting it with a pair of scissors.

Virgin Media's figures on BrandIndex suggest the campaign has been well received. The brand's buzz rating has risen from -2 to +3 since the campaign debuted on 1 February, its quality rating is up 6 points to +2, and its customer satisfaction score is up 4 points to +7.

Methodology
YouGov interviews 2,000 people each weekday to form its BrandIndex, a daily measure of public perception of more than 1,100 consumer brands across 32 sectors.

It is measured on a seven-point profile:
1. Buzz
2. General impression
3. Quality
4. Value
5. Satisfaction
6. Recommend
7. Corporate reputation

In addition, we supply an index score.
By Sundip Chahal, www.brandindex.com

This article was first published on Media Week