MARKETING PEOPLE
AISLINN O’CONNOR Marketing Director, Three
Since its €780m acquisition of O2 in 2014, the mobile phone operator Three - which is owned by Hutchison Whampoa- has invested over €1.2bn in its Irish mobile network and now controls a 35pc share of the market. With over 2m customers and 1,400 employees the company is one of the most active in the marketplace when it comes to both advertising and sponsorships as marketing director Aislinn O’Connor explains to John McGee.
Describe your role with Three.
I’m responsible for the Three brand here in Ireland working with my brilliant team and partnering with the best agencies to grow our brand and our business. Together we aim to create fresh and creatively powerful work that truly breaks the mould to deliver results in a very busy category and market across consumer, sponsorship and business. What marketing challenges do you face? The challenge we face is similar to that of most other brands – trying to get cut-through in an everchanging marketing landscape. It’s easy to follow the traditions and conventions to create something lazy or predictable. But, audiences are less likely to pay attention and the work is not going to have the desired impact.
How do you overcome these marketing challenges?
I think it’s key to focus on the wider brand experience first and ensure that it’s reflective of the overall brand ambition. Nothing speaks louder than a truly great experience that surpasses your expectation of a brand.
When it comes to advertising, we always aim to bring a bit of enjoyment or something extra to people’s day, whether that’s a story beautifully told via video or creating visually engaging offer-led ads. It’s how you get your message across that counts.
We do this best when we understand what people are really interested in and how they live their lives. We don’t look to disrupt, but to create something our audience will value or enjoy, that enhances that moment in some small way.
In a competitive market-particularly for data- how do you get cut-through for the Three brand?
We are lucky to have incredible customer offerings, for example All You Can Eat Data, which gives something of genuine value to our customers – using data without limits. We know once a customer experiences All You Can Eat, they can’t live without it. So, all we have to do is talk about it. Easy really!
What marketing initiatives does Three have under-way at the moment?
We recently launched Made by Music, a unique campaign that supports up-and-coming Irish artists by making worldclass music videos with them and promoting them to a wider audience using a data-driven digital-first strategy. There is no playbook for this type of initiative, but I’m pleased to say the reaction to date has been very exciting.
We have also just launched a new TV campaign to showcase the benefits of our 4G network, a network that is built for data, both in terms of All You Can Eat Data and the infrastructure itself, which carries more data than all the other operators combined. It really is something to be proud of.