Virgin Media O2 / UKDigital & Tech · Social · PR Stunts
Daisy v Scammers.
O2 built Daisy, an AI grandmother who answers scam calls and keeps fraudsters talking for as long as possible, then turned the calls into content.
- Brand
- Virgin Media O2
- Agency
- VCCP
- Market
- UK
- Region
- Global
The challenge
Seven in ten Britons were targeted by scammers in the past year, often by criminals posing as telcos like O2. The brand wanted to fight fraud and raise awareness at the same time.
The idea
VCCP combined speech recognition from Deepgram, a GPT model trained with scambaiter Jim Browning's data and an ElevenLabs voice based on a colleague's grandmother, cutting response lag to a few hundred milliseconds. Daisy wasted scammers' time on live calls, and recordings fed a virtual-influencer run on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, including a Christmas special.
Results
- According to The Drum Awards entry, Daisy wasted the time of more than 1,000 scammers, with the longest call over 40 minutes.
- The entry reports 2,000+ media stories and £36m in earned media value from a £20k spend.
- The entry says O2's fraud-prevention perception rose 42% and awareness of 7726 scam reporting rose 44%.
Case study source: The Drum Awards Source ↗
Awards
- The Drum Awards for Advertising 2025 Gold (Use of Gen AI)
Credits
- Creative agency
- VCCP
- Scambaiter (training data)
- Jim Browning
