AT&T Brackets by Six Year Olds
AT&T
Issue 26 | March 2013
Agency
BBDO
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer: David Lubars Executive Creative Director: Greg Hahn Executive Creative Director/Director of Innovation: Mathias Appelblad Senior Creative Directors: Arturo Aranda/Grant Smith Creative Director: George Ernst Copywriters: Alex Taylor/Carl Jannerfeldt Art Director: Jesse Snyder Design Director: George Ernst Designers: Mike Sheppard/Czar Dizon/Doug Loffredo Executive Producer: Diane Hill Senior Producer: Joe Croson
Production Team
Production Company: Caviar Content Interactive Company: The Famous Group Director: Jorma Taccone Editing House: Arcade Edit Editor: Dean Miyahira
Other Credits
Account Team: Brandon Fowler, Brandy Stead, Roslyn Mers, Heather Sheets, Casey Colomb
Date
May 2012
Background
“Brackets” is a cultural sports phenomenon in the United States. People try to predict an entire sports tournament, game by game; in this case, the college basketball playoffs. AT&T is a major sponsor of the college basketball playoffs, but instead of just doing what every brand does (throw the logo everywhere and hand out some free goodies) they wanted to create content that people would find both entertaining and useful.
Idea
Every year, millions of sports fans try to predict the tournament by filling out a “bracket.” The irony is, it’s always those who know the least who create the best bracket. Since AT&T is in the business of connecting people to the information they need, they decided to introduce a new kind of team of "experts," people who knew absolutely nothing about basketball.
Six-year-olds.
A class of first-graders was recruited to help people with their brackets at www.bracketsbysixyearolds.com. Here sports fans found a bracket builder where they could get advice on every game in the tournament. Once the tournament started, there were expert panels on TV at half-time during the games where basketball fans could get the six-year-old’s perspective on what was going on in the tournament.
Results
Brackets by Six-Year-Olds reached more than 52 million media impressions, including a front page section in USA Today and Video of the Day on ESPN.com Conversations on Twitter reached nearly 2 million posts, where clickthrough rate was over double that of previous AT&T campaigns. Users spent an average of 12 minutes on the website, and returning visitors spent an additional five minutes watching content.
Our Thoughts
These six year olds pick up where Paul the Psychic Octopus left off, predicting the outcome of games between teams they’ve never heard of. You can always rely on a six year old to tell you how it is – even when they have no idea what it is. JA
The insight here is that when it comes to sport, “nobody knows anything” (as William Goldman wrote). The joy of this idea is it recognises that we know nothing. But isn’t that why we watch sport anyway? For the complete and utter unpredictability of every game. PC