AT&T
CODES OF CULTURE
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.
THE CHALLENGE
Nationally speaking, AT&T was losing relevance among millennials who share increasingly multicultural values. The youth had a perception of the brand as being old, corporate, and non-diverse. In a time when millennial purchasing power was ever increasing, AT&T needed to find ways to connect with this audience or risk losing their dominance in the category.
THE IDEA
At its origins, an area code was simply used to distinguish one town from the next. Since then, area codes have become three-digit symbols of hometown pride.
Our campaign, “Codes of Culture,” reclaimed the area code brackets that AT&T invented by reintroducing them in a way that celebrates the cultural “codes” cherished by locals in the cities they represent.
THE WORK
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.
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
