Client Brief:

Create a brand awareness campaign across New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta, to drive affinity with an audience wary of AT&T and all other carriers: Multicultural Millennials.

Insight:

We conducted ethnographies in each city, to discover the nuances (and connective threads). No two cities were the same, but they shared one sentiment: Area Codes. Three numbers that told the story of our audience’s preference in music, fashion, food, and culture. As a bonus, AT&T had invented area codes in 1947. Reach out if you’d like to see example of the ethnography reports.

The Creative Framework:

Each city launched with an experiential event called “Code Day” featuring local artist performances, catering by local restaurants, merch by local brands, and more. From there, we shined a spotlight on each city’s hometown heroes, by placing them in spaces typically reserved for national names: billboards, radio spots, and even short films.

• View the social film series here

• View the experiential event series here

Strategic Guidance Through Execution:

Over a period of 12 months, strategy was the consistent presence holding all four cities together, building each city’s communications rollout plan, to experiential executions, managing third party partnerships, and guiding authentic talent casting.

Result:

Every other carrier offered the same area codes, but AT&T knew how to translate those codes into something our audience valued. The campaign’s “blue brackets” spread from our 4 markets to UGC across all 50 states. Watch a more detailed version of the three-phase rollout below.