By Jeff Goss, CEO

The Virgin Islands Telephone Company had been our client for about three years before our greatest opportunity presented itself: a chance to do a Super Bowl spot. Our focus had been on print, television, and a public relations  campaign, with a concentration on  stemming complaints about the quality of service in the US Virgin Islands, as the weather, including the humidity and annual storms, continuously wreaks havoc on above ground lines.

The biggest challenge was keeping the swaying palms, ocean breezes, alluring local rum, and the lapping, turquoise Caribbean from washing my mind out to sea.

Our focused  campaign was successful  in touting, “Although we’re not perfect, we demonstrated the lengths to which VITELCO will go into  the storm for its customer.” The campaign included a very notable television  spot, which became known as “live wire,” and featured  a dancing phone cord plugging itself into the wall and connecting  to the phone service.

 

The success of the campaign created the opportunity and budget to have some fun. You can imagine breaths being held when the Director of Advertising and Public Relations, Katrina, said “I have some good news and some bad news; the good news is that we want you to do a TV spot for the Super Bowl; the bad news is that we only have  a $5,000 budget for the production."

Our approach has always been  to come up with a compelling idea within the budget versus trying to do an idea outside of the budget. So here is the spot, a use of animated type to convey the message, and capture the audience, and only spend $5,000.

 

 

What a a surprise ending and “feel good” spot for VITELCO! We are proud to say that we have had a spot on the Super Bowl, a feat accomplished by an extremely small percentage of advertising professionals.