Telstra boosts new subscribers on the back of unique ad campaigns
Telstra made a $1.8 billion profit during a cost-of-living crisis, aided by strong performance in its mobile offerings, a slew of new customers, and the fallout from the Optus outage.
Telstra reported full-year profits of $1.8 billion this week, down 13% from FY23, with underlying net profit after tax of $2.3 billion. Telstra credits the profit drop to a one-of $715 million cost incurred due to the downsizing of its enterprise business.
EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) were $7.5 billion.
Tesltra’s mobile services revenues jumped 5.6%, with revenue per user up 2.1%. Telstra has implemented price hike which take effect this month, meaning this ARPU should rise again this current financial year. Telstra added 560,000 customers during FY24, no doubt some of these leaped from Optus.
“There’s a wide range of choice on the Telstra-branded offering, postpaid, prepaid,” CEO Vicki Brady said in an earnings call on Thursday.
“We have a multi-brand approach with our Belong brand, with Boost, and we also have our resellers who operate on our network as well.
“We make these choices in a very careful and considered way. But given the demand, the amount of investment in our network, the experience that people rightly expect, we do need to get these balances right.”
Vicki Brady
The healthy results, and a boost in subscribers, could very well be attributed to the standout campaigns the telco has run this year, which include some memorable stop motion ads and the ‘Is this a pointless ad?’ spot.
Appearing on a recent episode of Mumbrella’s one-on-one podcast series, Telstra chief marketing officer Brent Smart said the unique campaigns were all about rewarding their current customer base, not seeking new ones.
“We want to offer our best deals to our existing customers and really reward their loyalty,” Smart explained.
“And what we thought would be really interesting was instead of just that below the line targeted customer campaign, which a lot of those loyalty campaigns are… we’re rewarding our customers.
“We thought, ‘Isn’t it kind of interesting to sort of say that if you’re not a Telstra customer, then this ad is a bit pointless because you can’t get the deal?'”
Smart said the ad stood out in the “pretty noisy” telco sector, which frequently offers new and unique deals for its customers.
“It’s hyper competitive, the telco category,” Smart said.
“We just thought to position the other way – it would have real cut through and would feel really different. That’s certainly how it’s played out.”
Listen to the full episode here.
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