Hearts & Science - Online Marketing Campaign of the Year

Company: Hearts & Science, New York, NY
Company Division/Group:Hearts & Science
Company Description: Media Agency
Nomination Category: Marketing Campaign Categories - Specialty
Nomination Sub Category: Online Marketing Campaign of the Year

Nomination Title: 5 Reasons

Specify the date on which this campaign was launched.  March 19 2020

PEOPLE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT MADE FIBER BETTER THAN STANDARD BROADBAND (OR IF THEY COULD EVEN GET IT). WE NEEDED TO BOOST AWARENESS.

Fiber optic broadbandis faster and more reliable than standardbroadband. Its name is based on its plastic or glass cables, which allow for faster data transfer than copper wires.
For AT&T, one of the USA’s biggest broadband providers, promotion of its AT&T Fiber services will be a priority over the coming years. However, despite its advantages, adoption to date has been slow.
Crucially, this has been because of two reasons:

Availability. As fiber broadband uses different cables to regular broadband, it is not yet available across the whole of the US. Currently, the service reaches 30% of households (mostly in major cities), with coverage expected to hit 50% of homes by 2025.

Awareness. Perhaps because of the availability issue, awareness of fiber services is still low. Despite a prolonged marketing roll-out, many consumers are still not sure what fiber is or why it is better than regular internet. As a result, of the 39.2 million US households that can access fiber services, less than half (18.6M) have subscribed.

While we couldn’t increase coverage overnight, to help drive long-term adoption of AT&T Fiber, we needed to do two things:

• Raise awareness of the benefits of fiber broadband among all consumers.
• Develop our target’s understanding of AT&T Fiber services and strengthen their connection with the brand. Our targets were: homeowners, millennial renters, and tech-savvy consumers.

Describe the development of the campaign: the planning process, the goal setting, the creative and media development, the scheduling, etc. (up to 249/ 250 words). Required

There’s one place people go to learn about home tech: consumer electronics publisher, CNET. It attracts 47M readers every month.

From robot-vacuums to video-doorbells, experts show tech in action from the CNET Smart Home – a real house in Louisville.

Knowing that 70% of our audience engage with native advertising (written content and topical videos), we’d partner with CNET to create informative videos showing how fiber broadband can improve the home.

While we originally planned to film at the smart home, when COVID lockdown restricted access, we became creative to ensure we launched on time:

We created a home of our own – a scale model – and told our story via a unique content format: stop-motion animation.

We launched ‘5 Reasons you Need More Fiber’, an online video highlighting how household tasks are enhanced by Fiber broadband.

In our animation, we saw a family completing high bandwidth tasks simultaneously – mom on a video call, dad using AR to plan dinner, son streaming HD videos, gran zapping zombies in her VR headset, and daughter uploading videos at lightning speed.

We supported videos with a branded article on CNET.com, highlighting the benefits of fiber, and providing an overview of AT&T Fiber’s features.

Additionally, we created a visual infographic – a video and shareable image – aggregating key stats about fiber and a checklist of features.

We promoted content on AT&T and CNET social channels, including cross-site banner ads promoting our monthly offers and bundled deals available at ATT.com.