Señal Abierta
Six months of listening that killed the campaign we were hired to make.
- Client
- Claro
- Markets
- Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua
The challenge
The brief was youth acquisition for a new prepaid data plan, and it assumed price was the barrier. We asked for six weeks to test that assumption before committing production budget. The client agreed.
The idea
Señal Abierta began as research and became the work itself. Across four markets, we ran intercept interviews at top-up points and instrumented a panel of 800 prepaid users to compare actual data behavior against what they reported.
The gap was the finding. Price wasn’t the barrier — unpredictability was. Users weren’t avoiding data; they were rationing it, because nobody could tell how long a top-up would last. We recommended against the acquisition campaign and proposed a usage transparency feature instead.
The advertising that eventually ran was small, and pointed at a feature rather than a promotion.
The results
- Recommended campaign cancelled, returning 60% of planned budget to the client
- The usage forecast feature reached 1.4M active users in five months
- Top-up frequency rose 18% with no change to pricing
- Churn among new prepaid users fell 12 points year over year