48 Partners with The Public House to Relaunch Youth Mobile Brand

This week sees the relaunch of game-changer telco brand 48. Originally launched in 2012, 48 was designed for 18-22 year olds - Millennials at the time. Fast forward 8 years and today’s 18-22 year olds are notably different. In order to address the needs of this new generation, 48 overhauled its entire product offering, creating first-to-market propositions such as the ability to share, save and donate your data.

Creative agency The Public House were appointed as lead strategic and creative agency for 48 after a three-way competitive pitch in February of 2019. The project involved developing not just the launch campaign, but also a new brand strategy and positioning, a new brand ID and input into the product experience, including sustainable packaging for SIM cards.

48's new mobile platform idea was to shake up the mobile brand formula. The launch campaign ‘Question It’ illustrates the idea through a co-created approach to brand advertising. The TV, social and digital campaign was developed alongside the inter-agency team: Spark Foundry and Murray Brand. The campaign uses real questions sourced from 16-22 year olds and executes them through a mixed media style.

To create the visual world, the agency partnered with production house Friend’s Electric, director Ewan Jones Morris and a number of animators including Angela Stempel, Future Power Station and Linyou Xie. Eilis Fitzgerald, marketing manager at 48 said: “We wanted to create a campaign that lived up to our ambition for 48 - in other words, something that felt truly and uniquely relevant to 16-22s. Question It allowed us to do that.”

Colin Hart, creative director and founder at The Public House, added: “If there is one thing that we know about the youth market, they don’t like ads. They’ve seen a lot of colourful dancing but not a lot of actual meaning, so we worked with the team to create a brand idea that overestimates the demographic, highlighting the questioning aspect of customers' real lives from the serious questions to the ‘Why are small dogs a bit angry?” questions. This campaign gives benefit to curiosity and demonstrates 48’s intention to change the way people use and see mobile in this market.”

Ewan Jones Morris, director at Friends Electric commented: “I was attracted to this project because there was an opportunity to combine a cool variety of styles with all the different ideas, which is unusual. I love collaborating with other artists and love a pick and mix approach, and it was great to be united with Angela Stempel and Linyou Xie who I worked with on my John Grant 'He's Got His Mother's Hips' video. Also got to work with new pals Future Power station, my fellow directors at Friends Electric”.

This appointment for The Public House continues an impressive run for the creative agency, whose vision is to be the most interesting agency in Ireland, with their mission that ‘Boring Doesn’t Sell’. In an era when customers are going out of their way to block out advertising, the agency strives to create work that people actively want to talk about and share - as evident in recent culturally relevant work for EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum and Paddy Power.