He brings extensive expertise from his eight years with the Virgin Group.
A recent campaign that Virgin launched is the The Devil Makes Work for Idle Thumbs'; they launched this campaign to support their 3p texting tariff. Virgin decided to drop prices in a bid to attract more users to its network, which was established as a joint venture between Virgin Group and T-Mobile in 2000. The operator wants at least 3m users by the end of the year.
The company revealed it added more than a quarter of a million subscribers to its network in the first three months of the year, taking overall numbers to 2.6m. In the same period, Orange attracted just 1,000 new customers to its network. Virgin believes the aggressive price cuts will create significant brand differentiation, as well as leading to an inevitable price war. There is much to play for, as UK mobile users send about 55 million messages every day, according to the Mobile Data Association.
This campaign has created a lot of controversy especially with one of the advertisements that were created, featuring a clip that includes a "mangina" scene that was deemed too saucy for television.
The ad, created by Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R, is set in a psychiatric ward and the web version includes a "mangina" scene -- where a man has tucked his penis between his thighs so it can not be seen, a pose used in the film 'The Silence of the Lambs'. .
The ads ends with the strap line "the devil makes work for idle thumbs", and promotes Virgin Mobile's 3p tariff when texting other users in the same network. While the "mangina" scene was already deemed too risqué for mainstream broadcast, the television version of the ad is already under investigation after 48 people complained about the depiction of mental illness and hospital workers. One scene shows a man stapling a nurse's dress to a table, which then rips as she walks away, revealing her bottom.
