A three-month advertising campaign is expected to roll out in the coming weeks following recently-granted regulatory approval for the merger. Batey created the campaign, with media planning and buying handled by Zenith and FCB working on below-the-line assignments. As StarHub's lead agency, Batey ousted incumbent Dentsu Young & Rubicam on the SCV account.
Batey's joint chief executive officer, Nick Marret, said the inclusion of SCV had boosted the StarHub account by a third. The agency has added another seven people to its StarHub team, giving it a total of 35 executives.
He added that decision to proceed with one brand was taken because part of the strategy for moving forward was to take advantage of convergence.
For StarHub to gain ownership of convergence, Marrett said the company needed to unify branding across its products and services range - broadband and narrow brand internet, mobile telecommunications, long distance IDD, pay-TV, data-services, etc.
Another key to the merger is selling bundled services and ensuring there is "a high degree of cross sell and up-sell by leveraging the two customer bases", he added.
As a consequence of the merger, StarHub's group revenue has increased by a third to S$900 million (US$520m).
Regulatory approval for the merger only came through in June even though both sides announced the deal a year earlier. The main competitor - SingTel - had tried unsuccessfully to quash the merger. It argued that StarHub's pay-TV monopoly would allow the merged company to parttake in "anti-competitive pricing, discrimination or cross-subsidisation".
