AT&T Digital Life
AT&T
Issue 29 | December 2013
Agency
BBDO New York
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer David Lubars Executive Creative Director Greg Hahn Executive Creative Director/ Director of Innovation Mathias Appelblad Creative Director George Ernst Art Director Marcel Yunes Copywriter Rick Williams Designers Doug Loffredo Eddie Crutcher
Production Team
Production Company Smuggler Interactive Company Caviar Content Director Randy Krallman Visual Effects Company Zoic Studios Editor Tom Vogt
Other Credits
Executive Producers of Content & Development Julian Katz Nicholas Gaul Interactive Producer Diana Try Group Executive Interactive Producer Joe Croson Director of User Experience Design Jeff Puskar
Date
May 2013
Background
AT&T needed to build buzz online around the launch of Digital Life, its new security system that let's people control their homes even while they're away. But home automation security ads are all the same: conservative, informational, and pretty boring. To get people talking about home security, AT&T needed a totally different perspective.
Idea
Introducing Pets Talking, a home security campaign from the perspective of household pets, who are baffled by all the weird things happening around the house when the humans are gone.
The campaign showcased all the ways Digital Life allowed its customers to control their home security remotely, by having pets explain how it disturbed them to see blinds open and close, lights come on and off, coffee makers to fire up and doors to unlock apparently on their own.
Candid testimonial films were released on Facebook, interviews with pets, convinced their house was alive. Or something. One hamster believed it was the devil's work. All the films led to Pets-Talking. com, a Facebook app that encouraged visitors to upload photos of their own pets, who would then talk too, making shocking confessions about themselves.
Results
All the pet testimonials indirectly showed users the features of AT&T's Digital Life security systems.
They were both entertaining and product demos.
Hundreds of thousands watched the films and tens of thousands of user-generated pet confessionals were shared out on social media, serving as teaser ads for Digital Life that lured people back to Pets-Talking.com to create and share more confessions. Weird. Funny. Viral. Social. Very different to every other home security advertising campaign.
Our Thoughts
There’s a virtuous circle at work in this campaign. TV drove viewers to a website where they could see more pets talking and, indeed, generate talking pets of their own, which they could then share on Facebook to send all their friends to talking-pets.com where more videos were created and shared, some being used in online ads to generate more traffic.
And at the heart of it all, a creative idea that taps into our strange obsession with cats (as revealed by YouTube) and pets in general.
In their submission, BBDO NY do boast that this is a very different approach to home security advertising, and it most certainly is. Most home security companies try to frighten us. I’d like to think that amusing us drove sales as well as likes.