Wi-Fi Dogs
Deutsche Telekom
Issue 37 | December 2015
Agency
DDB Germany
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer, DDB Group Eric Schoeffler Managing Director Creative, DDB Berlin Matthias Schmidt Creative Director Art, DDB Berlin Veit Moeller Creative Director Copy, DDB Berlin Alice Bottaro
Production Team
Director, DDB Berlin Jens Mecking Film Editing, DDB Berlin Nikita Kiril Kronlund Camera La Visual Composition Butter, Music and Sound Sound Design Studio Funk
Other Credits
Business Director International Coordination Daniela Hoffmann- Hofmann Senior Account Manager Annika Glander
Date
June 2014
Background
Everyone knows the problem. When you go abroad, you waste huge amounts of time searching for free Wi-Fi to avoid the horrendous phone bills roaming usually involves.
To avoid this, Deutsche Telekom created 'Travel & Surf' passes which gave a fixed price for data roaming in more than 100 countries outside Germany.
The problem was, many holiday-makers still loitered in hotel lobbies and uncomfortable cafes rather than enjoying what were supposed to be the most relaxed days of the year. The task was simple. Let everyone know about the Telekom deals.
Idea
The idea was to make people laugh. About the strange and ridiculous things people would do to get Wi-Fi while abroad.
Enter Jose and his Wi-Fi dogs. Jose was a Spaniard, who knew about the problems tourists were experiencing and set out, as a canny businessman, to provide a solution. Wi-Fi dogs. Dogs that had been trained to lead tourists to spots where they could get online for free.
A video was created, seeded in social media and uploaded to YouTube.
Results
The video, 'Jose's Wi-Fi Dogs' received more than 1.7 million views on YouTube.
Wi-Fi Dog content was watched for over 2 million minutes, or for four and a half years. Across all markets, more than 30 million (30,983,800) impressions were achieved. Blogs writing about the campaign reached another 3.4 million unique visitors.
19% more Travel & Surf passes were sold after Wi-Fi dogs Campaign.
Our Thoughts
“Fun, fun, fun!” noted Matt. Yes, yes, yes.
The great Howard Gossage once said, ‘People will read what interests them and occasionally that may even be an advertisement.” He was talking about print but the same holds true for online video. People will watch if the idea is intriguing, amusing or even astonishing. What makes this so watchable is that it is an idea about people rather than an idea about a product and it seems to me that this is the first rule of branded content. No-one will watch an advert online unless they are forced to. But they will watch a little film about a charming dodger, a character we have all encountered at some stage of our lives, and about the absurdities of human life.