Overland Park, Kan. — Sprint is launching an integrated ad campaign to highlight its new Framily Plan, which lets subscribers designate up to nine other people whom they consider family so that all can share in discounted service pricing.
The campaign features the Frobinson family, promoted as “a typical American family” consisting of a “strange mix of individuals that care very deeply about each other.”
Two TV ads featuring the Frobinsons air starting tonight on national network and cable TV along with in-store signage and digital and social extensions, the carrier said. Print and out-of-home advertising will launch in the coming weeks. The TV ads are titled “Framily Portrait” and “Meet the Frobinsons.”
In the campaign, Sprint will feature the new “Happy Connecting” theme, said to represent “Sprint’s belief that the connections we make are as emotional and meaningful as they are practical and necessary.”
The ad campaign also features a new color palette to complement the carrier’s long-standing black and yellow logo colors.
“Our families today are more than our relatives, but also our friends, our neighbors — basically all the people we love,” said Sprint chief marketing officer Jeff Hallock of the campaign. “So we created a product to give the new American family the flexibility and value they need from a wireless plan, brought to life through the Frobinsons.” The campaign “acknowledges that we all have families that are unique with interesting personalities,” he added.
Separately, Sprint launched a three-city print and out-of-home advertising campaign in Kansas City, Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston focused on “America’s Newest Network.” Sprint says its new network “has been built from the ground-up providing faster speeds, better call quality and fewer dropped calls.” The campaign also features the new color palette featured in the Frobinsons campaign.
In the Frobinsons campaign, Sprint envisions the new American nuclear family as a talking hamster (voiced by Andrew Dice Clay), a sane mother, a son interested in ventriloquism, a sweet 8-year-old daughter who speaks French and is always surrounded by animated birds, and an older college-age sibling played by new “Saturday Night Live” cast member Kyle Mooney. The family also includes the older sibling’s Goth roommate, an African-American grandpa and Aunt Tia, an avant-garde artist with Latin roots.
The Sprint Framily Plan, available to new and existing customers, lets subscribers add up to 10 lines to a group, with everyone’s pricing reduced as more members join the group. For one line, new Sprint customers pay $55/ month for unlimited talk, text and 1GB of data. For each additional customer in a Framily group, the cost per person goes down $5/month up to a maximum monthly discount of $30/line. A group of at least seven people will get unlimited talk, text and 1GB of data for $25/month per line. Members share savings but can be billed separately.
