Shout from the mountain integrated campaign

Background

With AT&T, there are endless ways to communicate. For Valentine’s Day, the company wanted to demonstrate the breadth of possibilities through a unique one-day live communication. Promoting such a short-lived event would require a thoughtful approach.

The solution was to give users something they would actually want to do on Valentine’s Day. It had to feel personal and it had to fulfil the AT&T promise to Rethink Possible.

Such a lofty brand proposition meant doing something that had never been done before, giving AT&T subscribers the chance to shout their love (literally) from a mountaintop, streaming it live on Valentine’s Day.

Idea

First, a series of web films was created to promote the event, featuring an oddly large group of loud mountain men. These were passed quickly around the web by AT&T’s youthful users.

The films encouraged users to submit their love-shout either on the AT&T Facebook wall or by way of a hashtag handle on Twitter, #loveshout.

Blogs, talk shows and other news channels began to feature the event.

Submissions started to pour in. When anyone submitted their shout, an entertaining participation video was posted to their Facebook wall. And on Valentine’s Day, a live webcast was launched where users could see the mountain men shouting their live love-shouts from a real mountaintop.

After the event, AT&T edited the personalized love shouts and rapidly returned them on Facebook walls for everyone to see.

Results

Media outlets like Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Huffington Post and The New York Times featured the event, resulting in over 120 million impressions of free media exposure.

Over 120,000 people visited the site during the one-day event and 20,000 submissions were made. Users spent more than two minutes per visit on the site, double that of any previous AT&T initiative. The brand received more Facebook “likes” than ever.

There were even 11 marriage proposals made from the mountaintop.

Our Thoughts

This is what clients and account service like to call “on-brand”. But I think that term is a fancy way of legitimising the narcissism of a brand. What we should be using as a measure of an executable idea is whether or not it is right for the audience – what I like to call “on-consumer”. This campaign is bang on-consumer.

Quite possibly my favourite piece in this issue, it is a strategically engaging way to connect consumer with the brand. Creatively, it is unique, hilarious and even endearing. Makes me want to shout from a mountain top.