Cell C is shaking up its approach to marketing and advertising. Comedian Trevor Noah, who had become synonymous with the brand, is out. In is a more “experiential and testimonial-style” approach to capturing market share.

Cell C, which has just over 10% of the mobile market in SA, has released a new advertising campaign aimed at the youth market. Compared to previous campaigns, some of which have landed it in hot water at the Advertising Standards Authority, the new “Be Now” campaign is rather tame.

Featuring a selection of seven video spots that talk up consumer individuality, the first ads in the new campaign promote Cell C’s new R25 prepaid promotion for new prepaid customers and its Control Chat post-paid package.

The prepaid package is applicable only to new customers and gives them R25 worth of airtime, 25 SMS messages and 25MB of data when they activate a new prepaid Sim card and load R25 airtime.

The operator’s recent campaigns centred heavily on Noah as customer experience officer, or “CEO”, but Cell C says it has had to move beyond these to reassert the brand’s identity independent of Noah.

Cell C marketing communications executive Mandy Waddington says the company’s brand identity had become ensconced with the image of Noah and that it was “becoming difficult to separate the two”.

She says the campaign achieved what Cell C had hoped for but that when it came time for a new approach, the decision was taken to reaffirm Cell C’s brand principles of “individuality and honesty”. She says she hopes the Be Now videos encapsulate this.

Cell C has in the past irked rival operators with controversial campaigns, including one where it referred to its network as “4G” (it was later changed to “4Gs”, meaning “for great speed/service”).

It also raised the ire of Vodacom when it took a not-too-subtle dig at its rival’s decision to change its branding to red of parent Vodafone.

Waddington says the new campaign was produced by Ogilvy.

Although the Noah ads were “successful as a response-driven campaign”, the brand and Noah needed to be separated again, particularly in anticipation of new products that will be introduced this year.

The Noah campaigns were the brain child of former Cell C marketing director Simon Camerer, who quit the mobile operator at the end of last year and who has recently taken on a similar role at DStv-owner MultiChoice.

Cell C’s new campaign is based on the findings of a company called Added Value, which produced what Waddington calls a “much clearer, much more granular view of what Cell C as a brand is all about and how we can make that personality, position and tone relevant for the next five or 10 years”.

She says the decision to target the youth market relates to “where the brand is in its life cycle”. The youth market “wants a conversation rather than being preached to” and advertisements directed at this segment “need a tone and style that demonstrates you understand the market, and that’s why we chose the approach we did”. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral