Nine years in three minutes: the story behind the Euphoria brand reel

We've just released a three-minute reel that pulls together the work of almost a decade of brand building at Euphoria Telecom. It covers the campaigns, the content, the characters and the zany ideas that have shaped how this business presents itself to the market. I’d encourage you to watch it before reading on, because the reel makes the argument more efficiently than I can.

And that argument can be summed up in a single sentiment: business-to-business brands are not obliged to be boring.

Coming from an agency background that was rooted in B2C work I wanted to bring that same creative energy to the B2B world. I wanted to zig where our competitors were zagging. I wanted to shake things up and Euphoria gave me the opportunity to do just that.

The culture came first

When I joined Euphoria almost nine years ago, the company had been trading since 2010 and was well past the point of needing to prove itself. What surprised me was how little of the usual institutional weight had settled in. The atmosphere was collaborative and quick, and people were visibly invested in what they were building. That energy is difficult to manufacture and almost impossible to fake in marketing material.

My job, as I understood it from the first week, was not to invent a personality for the company. It was to find an honest expression of the one that already existed. Brands designed in isolation from the culture they represent tend to look exactly like what they are. The ones that hold up over time are usually the ones that were already true internally before anyone wrote them down.

Leadership that didn’t ask me to tone things down

The second advantage was permission. The founders gave the marketing function unusual latitude to produce work that looked nothing like the category standard, and they held that position consistently. In a sector where most communication defaults to the same bland corporate slogans and stock images, that freedom was worth more than any budget line.

The name “Euphoria” describes a state of intense happiness, and a company that makes that claim cannot reasonably follow it with cautious, forgettable creative work. The brand had to match the promise behind the word on the masthead. This is not simply a matter of taste. I’ve argued elsewhere that B2B buyers respond to trust and emotional conviction well ahead of feature comparisons, and that distinctive, recognisably human storytelling is what separates brands from one another in an increasingly uniform market. Humour and warmth are not a departure from serious marketing. They are what makes serious marketing stick.

Made by hand, and not expensively

Everything in the reel predates generative AI. All of it was produced by a small in-house studio working with modest resources.

That includes four productions shot outside South Africa: two commercials in London, one in Berlin and one in Namibia, all of which I directed remotely from Cape Town. None were large-budget shoots. Each required careful planning, considerable trust in the crews on the ground, and a willingness to solve problems with ingenuity rather than money. Constraint shaped the work, and in most cases improved it.

The creative high point was Miles, our brand mascot, launched in 2022. Miles is a fully functional business phone mounted on wheels, built as a physical demonstration of a system designed to move with the business that uses it. He is a real object rather than a render or an illustration, and he has since appeared everywhere from Africa Tech Fest to charity golf days, where he is regularly photographed by people with no professional interest in cloud telephony whatsoever. Our mascot campaign culminated at Euphoria’s 15th birthday party where special guest Darren “Whackhead” Simpson took Miles for a spin on the Camps Bay Promenade before prank calling the friends and family members of our guests. It was a fun and festive evening where Miles was front and centre. That tangibility matters more now than ever. As more marketing material becomes synthetic, assets that demonstrably exist in the physical world carry a distinct advantage.

Our birthday party was also where we launched our popular No Bull Prize campaign that celebrated businesses that operate ethically and fairly — an initiative that was proudly endorsed by Darren Simpson. His comment on the night really sums up the essence of the Euphoria brand.

“Everything about Euphoria is novel, fresh and exciting and that’s what I love about it.”

Where AI fits

Having emphasised that this body of work was made without AI, I should be clear that we use it extensively today. The distinction is in what we use it for.

The foundation was built deliberately and by hand: the ideas, the tone, the films, the characters, the accumulated visual language of the brand. AI now helps us extend that library, adapting and reformatting existing material, testing variations and improving how efficiently good work reaches the right audiences. And it allows us to effectively A/B test new creative work like our recent cost-cutting campaign which pokes fun at the ridiculous measures some companies implement in order to reduce spending. And we simply asked the question: why deprive your staff of the benefits they enjoy when you can rather switch to Euphoria and instantly save up to 50% on your monthly phone spend? We made 10 ads in this campaign, all shot in-house on a cellphone camera, using our own staff as actors. And we’ve used AI to leverage this work across all our social media platforms. The response has been fantastic. And it proves the case I made in five B2B marketing strategies for competing in an AI-saturated market. Create something genuinely distinctive first, then use automation to scale it.

Our brand reel is the clearest evidence I can offer that a distinctive identity matters. Nobody has ever been persuaded by a brand they didn’t notice. In a category where most competitors sound interchangeable, the advantage belongs to whoever is willing to be unmistakable. Boring is a choice. It’s just never been a competitive one.