Marketing Director at Total Wireless Brand for Tracfone Inc. Provides Students With Insights From The Client’s Perspective
BOLD welcomed Luis Ruben Ortiz on Tuesday, March 30 to talk to students about his work as the Director of Marketing for Total Wireless Brand at Tracfone Wireless Inc. In talking about the campaign creation process, Luis gave students a unique insight into the client’s perspective when working with advertising agencies.
With many notable brands under his belt such as Pfizer, Procter and Gamble (P&G), and SABMiller, Luis brought on his past expertise to his role as the Director of Marketing for the Total Wireless Brand at Tracfone. Rivaling major phone service providers such as T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint, Tracfone is able to provide its customers with unmatched savings because of its status as the first-ever mobile virtual network operator. This means that instead of using their own network infrastructure, they are able to use other wireless network provider’s infrastructure and pass on those savings to their customers.
In talking about his role as director of marketing, Luis explained the campaign creation process by introducing the concept of segmentation. “Segmentation segments the population around motivations, needs and demographics, to give you a broad perspective of how people categorize themselves as within that segment,” said Luis. Based on Tracfone’s services, the company chose to focus on the digital family life line segment to better provide solutions to their customers.
“We start off by asking who do we want to target, who do we want to speak to and what does the brand have more relevance towards in terms of that segmentation,” said Luis about the campaign creation process. Once Luis and his team have their segment, they look at the main demographics and psychographics to see how the company can assist them. “Total Wireless is directed to digital family lifeliners who want dependable phone service to stay connected to their social circles. They want to switch to something that would make more sense to them financially if they can get it all without sacrificing their self worth,” said Luis. With this information, Luis and his team then turn to the agency to create the core of the brand’s messaging moving forward. “[The agency] helps us unearth more of who this person is, not just as digital family lifeliners but who they are as a person,” concluded Luis.
“If you want to be relevant to your consumers, culture is something that you have to keep front and center and culture changes on a dime,” said Luis. 2019 and 2020 changed many things about what is culturally relevant. Low unemployment and political crisis have lowered people’s trust and confidence, thus putting connectivity at the forefront of essential needs. “Connectivity became as important to people as water and food, screen time was soaring and people were spending more time on their screens than ever before,” said Luis. With this insight the creative agency crafted a core message that read: “In a world that is constantly shifting I want the satisfaction to make decisions that allow me to thrive” this message inspired Tracfone’s latest campaign focused around providing customers with the best services regardless of what life may throw at them.
With this information, the agency presented three different ideas to Luis and his team based on the insight provided above. The “Do Amazing” campaign resonated the most with Total Wireless’ target segment and was developed as a campaign. The campaign features a 30-second TV commercial, a 2-minute digital anthem, and a social media campaign titled the “Do Amazing Awards”.
Luis concluded his presentation by reminding students that campaigns can take anywhere from six to nine months from the segmentation phase to the execution of the production stage.
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Written by: Alejandra Chahine, Director of Public Relations.