In February 2020, Sky bought Lightbox from Spark NZ to merge it with their existing Neon streaming service. The goal was to consolidate two Kiwi-operated platforms into a stronger competitor against global giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV, and a publicly funded TVNZ On Demand.
The challenge was to migrate Lightbox customers to a paid model, minimising churn, and to launch the ‘new Neon’ in a way that retained both user groups and built momentum and excitement.
Using customer data and research, we designed a multi-step, micro-targeted direct marketing campaign. The complex segmentation covered over 100 audience groups. Messaging combined brand and content storytelling with key updates on terms, billing, and consent. The strategy migrated all customer types from Neon, Lightbox, and dual subscribers to the new Neon platform, with a focus on converting previously free Lightbox users to paying customers.
We grew the user base by 80%, converted a third of Lightbox’s free users to paid, more than doubled Neon’s base, and simplified the competitive environment – Neon is now NZ’s most popular locally-owned paid subscription video on demand (SVOD) service.
