Meet the Man Steering EE's Consumer Marketing Into A New Era

Almost a decade on from its takeover by BT Group, EE has experienced a major evolution. Helming its marketing during that time is Peter Jeavons, consumer marketing director, who has been behind ad campaigns featuring robots shaving actors up mountains by remote control to major sponsorships including the Football Association home nations and the Bafta Film Awards.

Working with retained agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and Essence Mediacom, Edelman and Digitas on a long-term basis, EE has been on a journey of rediscovery as a band, and it's marketing communications has evolved in step. And in recent years, their advertising has won awards of their own, including the Campaign Big Award last year in the Film category and a Graphite Pencil for 'Home, Learn, Work, Game' at D&AD.

The brand was also named as Advertiser of Excellence at The British Arrows for the culmination of its recent work.

There are only a few bigger advertisers in the UK currently.

Jeavons got into marketing by accident, having left university, where he was studying integrated land management, early. He suddenly needed a job, which led to working in a contact centre for Orange during the telecom boom of that era.

“It was an incredibly exciting place to be from a technology point of view,” he states, with opportunities everyone due to the phenomenal growth of the sector. This led Jeavons to quickly move from the world of customer service into customer experience and then from there into customer insights.

This allowed him to build an understanding of the Orange brand including its investments into advertising and sponsorships, which piqued his curiosity to learn more about engaging customers as well as the products and services it offered.

“An opportunity came up to work on the brand, which felt like a complete no-brainer, and that’s how I got into marketing. It’s the best job in the world. But that start means I come at it from a real customer start point, rather than a traditional marketing training perspective.”

He believes that experience has helped reinforce the work EE has been producing in recent years in using marketing and communications to transform the business, shifting it and its portfolio from a purely mobile brand into new areas such as consumer tech, broadband and gaming. This was introduced as parent BT Group aims to overcome a decline in consumer spend brought about by several years of higher-than-normal inflation.

“We changed so much about the brand when we relaunched back in October 2023 - literally everything. We refreshed the brand identity; we changed the creative platform massively. So, we moved away from Kevin [Bacon] walking and talking and created this real-life view of the nation and real people and how we solve problems for real people,” explains Jeavons of the brand shift.

He sees that move as having involved some “big calls” to walk away from what had been built over the years prior, and now the creative approach is bedding in while the marketing team learns which elements work and which do not, while aiming to maintain momentum.

“We're now just trying to optimise those [creative leaps] and make sure we're utilising those shifts as best as possible.”

The company's most recent work 'Weekender' promoted the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra's release on EE with a 60-second film created by Saatchi & Saatchi that follows a group of Millennial friends escaping the city for a weekend in the Peak District.

Showcasing the network's connectivity - its key message as a brand - the campaign reinforces how EE ensures consumers always get the best out of their mobile experience – wherever life takes them.

The legacy of Kevin Bacon and repositioning EE

“Consistency is probably the biggest thing with him ,” responds Jeavons when asked about working with Hollywood actor Kevin Bacon, who has been the face (and now the voice) of EE for the past 13 years.

It initially began with a link between the theme of connectivity and playing the game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'. That initial campaign, created by Saatchi & Saatchi, that has steered its marketing ever since.

Jeavons compares the brand ambassadorship to another long-standing partnership; Walker’s and Gary Lineker, which has evolved while remaining consistent in its messaging.

“What's really interesting is that with Kevin, there is a whole generation of people now who don't know Kevin as an actor, they know Kevin as the bloke who does the EE ads, which I'm sure he won't like, but it's an interesting dynamic,” adds Jeavons.

Introduced in October 2023 with a refreshed brand identity and the biggest brand campaign since Bacon’s maiden ad, the communications underlined it delivery of four customer need states: Home, Learn, Work and Game.

EE is now a technology brand following a repositioning that aimed to broaden its significance to customers to see it as a company that can empower their everyday lives. It does that by facilitating the ability to work from home, connect with society, and support gaming with friends online.

Included among the new services have been WiFi controls for parents to better protect their children online, and in 2023 it launched an education platform – EE Learn Smart, developed by Digitas UK to support external learning from the classroom and help kids be smarter, safer, and kinder online.

“The biggest challenge for us has been - how do we find these people in the world and talk to them at moments that are most relevant to them?" he says. "For me, it's probably more the changing media landscape - how people consume media, and the massive explosion of platforms and channels that people are consuming, and how we understand that and use those to deliver our message. And that world just changes constantly.”

Jeavons believes that the brand’s reliance on traditional media platforms has diminished ‘drastically’ in recent years, with a wider media mix and variety of communications to keep their communications effective.

Deciding what works and the right level of investment to achieve desired outcomes is proving “tricky’ in the current world, he admits, crediting the work undertaken by both his team and agency partners in supporting that challenge.

The World According to Peter Jeavons

What has been your favourite piece of work of late?

Great question. Do you know when you're at Cannes and you are wandering around the massive hall and there's always some great inspirational stuff there? One of the things I saw there - and then subsequently saw it out in the real world, which I thought was so clever on many levels, was for the V&A. The line was ‘If you're into it, it's in the V&A’ and, and I just I loved it. You could almost imagine the brief which was; there's a perception around it as being a dusty old museum and people just think of it as being something where there's just old stuff that they can come and look at.

But the solution of that campaign was so good and it was so surprising. ‘If you’re into BMX we've got BMXs. If you're into gaming, we've got gaming. If you're into fashion, we've got fashion.’ And then the way that they executed that, it comes back to the point I was making about the media choices where they showed up to different audiences, in places where those audiences were with that messaging. I just thought it was so clever.

What has been the boldest creative play?

It’s funny because people ask me this and I sort of forget what we've done, because you move on so quickly that you forget what we've done. Do you know what I think, I think the the things that we've done to support and amplify our relationship with the Home Nations. Those have been some of the most provocative things that we've got the biggest reaction to that we've had to be pretty brave about. One of my favourites was probably the one that we did ahead of the Lionesses' Euros campaign, which was tackling misogyny. I always think, when you can point your brand at something like that and use the power of your brand and your ability to have a voice to try and change people's perceptions on things, that is powerful.

What frustrates you most in marketing now? You can say your financial director if you want.

We’re incredibly lucky on that. I think the level of understanding and appreciation for the role marketing communications play in a business is well understood here. And don't get me wrong, there's always tension about budgets, because it's a massive OPEX (operating expense) budget, and it's always under scrutiny because it's a lot of money. But our ability to demonstrate responsible and effective use of it to drive business results is recognised. So that's less of a frustration for me, if I'm honest.

The real frustration is that the world of communication has changed so much and the overall communications journey and experience that you need to create for people to lead them from something that you've hooked them in with to whatever the destination is that you want to take them to… and trying to orchestrate that, and make sure that that your communications are as effective as they possibly can be because of the experience you then build around it and the journey that you take people through.

It can be frustrating because you're reliant upon things that aren't directly within your control and sometimes, they're not quite as you would want them to be.

What makes a good creative agency partner and what do you look for in your agencies?

We've had a very long relationship with ours. I think the thing for me with them is that they are provocative and challenging in a positive way. It's not a sort of acceptance of a brief and the business challenge that sits behind the brief but the interpretation of how we can tackle that and challenge that is always something that we get real positive provocation and challenge on.

The second thing would be their level of understanding of us as a business and as a brand, as we are essentially one team and they need to understand our business as well as we do.

Therefore, everything is always based upon that genuine understanding, which means that we get to work much quicker. That solves the problems that we're trying to get to. And the third thing for me is an unrelenting acceptance of ‘no’.

Honestly, the turnaround that we have on things, and their can-do attitude on stuff is just absolutely phenomenal. For a business like ours, which can change its mind on a sixpence, and the thing that we thought we were doing last month, we're not doing, we're doing something else - that attitude within an agency partner is so valuable because it means that we're all trying to do the same thing to the best of our ability.