A few years ago when I was a 21 year old aspiring planner struggling to get through my dissertation and a 6 month placement at AIS London, I worked with classmates to develop a strategy for a new service from o2 called Life Caching. Life Caching had 2 key functions:

1: It was to become an online content sharing community - ‘a place to distribute your mobile phone images, text, video and contacts with friends…’

2: It was a storage device - ‘a place that automatically backs-up all your mobile phone’s images, text, video and contacts etc’.

Life Caching was to become the ‘differenciator’, the big difference between us and the rest (Orange, T Mobile etc), the hope being that Life Caching would help bind customers to o2 by becoming the guardians of their personal information!

My job was to develop a strategy to raise awarness of the service amongst 16-25 year old customers.

My Approach: To develop a creative solution that highlighted the benefits of having a back-up of all your mobile phone content online.

The observation: For many young people, the mobile phone had become their diary, address and contact book as well as a digital storage device.

The insight: Life Caching ensured that losing your mobile phone didnt mean losing your ’social’ life (contacts, addresses, memories etc).

Creative proposition: ‘o2 Life Caching is your Social Life Insurance’.

1 of 3 films we hoped would go viral: Man gets text message from a female friend whilst in the shower - his girlfriend deletes it… However… The message was automatically backed up by Life Space online and he is able to recover it.

I pitched to Sam Ball from o2 and various directors and planners at AIS - It went well, we made a few people smile, but Im not sure the tone was quite there.

I left AIS a few months later and didnt really hear about Life Caching until its launch last year. Launched as ‘o2 Bluebook’ I was happy to see that the ’store’ function had kept centre stage.

Curious to test whether my own thinking had changed I sat down with a pen and had a think about Bluebook, and whether o2’s new positioning - ‘we’re better, connected’ changes the stakes at all!

I started thinking about sharing, and being ‘connected’… and how maybe I had been overly critical of share, focussing too much on content sharing when in fact it is our experiences that connect us.

Kyte is a product that truly connects people, it allows users to live stream video footage taken on a mobile handset to multiple platforms including other mobile phones, the internet and television.

At present Kyte is a bit of an unknown quantity, and I think both they and o2 could get something out of a partnership to deliver something like the following (very top line) idea:

o2 hand out 100 (or so) Kyte enabled mobile phones to attendees/fans at live broadcast events e.g. gigs, festivals, football matches.

During the interval/ ad/ half time break, o2 would stream the footage being filmed by fans at the event to television sets and the Bluebook website - connecting everyone with an experience they would not otherwise have (without attending)…

The output would be pretty incredible, the proposition - ‘we’re better, connected’ would become a little clearer, fans would have a reason to visit the Bluebook website, and Kyte could be recognised as the next big advancment in mobile technology! ‘We’re Better, Connected, online, with Bluebook’.