Hats off to Mercury: How advertising put Mercury on the map in the residential phone market

Sara Ablett

The paper shows how Mercury, with a modest ad spend and the 'Hats on the phone' advertising campaign, took on British Telecom and began to establish itself in the residential phone market in the early 1990s, despite an initial lack of support by the trade.
Agency: Hoare WilkinsAuthor: Sara Ablett

Hats off to Mercury: How advertising put Mercury on the map in the residential phone market

INTRODUCTION

The object of this paper is to show how Mercury Communications took on the might of BT and began to carve a niche for itself in the residential telecomms market with the 'Hats on Phones' advertising campaign, a direct response based campaign that repaid the investment in a short space of time.

The enormity of the task must not be underestimated and the advertising had to work hard to overcome existing perceptions of Mercury as...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands