AT&T
National CAMPAIGN and Experience
Head of Content
When AT&T needed to reconnect with youth culture in pivotal top-ten markets, Translation used their 75-year-old brand innovation – area codes – to spark a nationwide conversation among the most diverse generation of AT&T customers yet.
How do you connect with the masses, and elevate a brand into a cultural icon? We tapped into people's undeniable pride in their area codes and created content and experiences rooted in the culture they care about, coming from the voices they respect.
The Idea: Codes of Culture is a celebration of the culture embedded within the various area codes of major cities throughout the US. It celebrates the local codes and customs — the typical things people do, as well as the “if you know you know” moments.
To scale, we knew we had to redefine our targeted audience of “multicultural millennials.” Our research gleaned that we needed to be less about demography, and more about multicultural values. This nuance opened the campaign’s aperture, allowing us to create messages based on cultural understanding.
To do so, we built a meme generator that allowed users to showcase the best of their cities via a design language which employed area code brackets. These memes would become the trademark of the campaign and populated AT&T’s entire media mix including OOH, Digital Display, Social, and Events.
OOH We turn out-of-home space into a canvas by inviting local street photographers to showcase the rituals, local spots, and hometown heroes of different area codes.
Live Events: To ignite the conversation, we turned the area code into a city-specific date event called “Code Days” and celebrated each local culture through music, fashion, food, and art.
THE RESULTS
In a category where only 2% of the market moves to a new carrier, we saw the top two box scores seeing lift, ranging from 37% to 74%
Over the 12-month campaign duration, the number of people who agree “AT&T is culturally relevant” more than doubled in metropolitan areas
15-30x higher switching intent vs. category baseline
150% lift in AT&T’s cultural relevance in Chicago
132% lift in AT&T’s cultural relevance in NYC
117% lift in AT&T’s cultural relevance in LA
Cannes 2021 Silver
Direct Co-creation & user-generated content
Cannes 2021 Silver
Media Cultural Insight