Beyond the Big Game

On one Sunday, every year, over 100 million Americans gather around TV screens for nearly five hours, forming one of the most engaged audiences a brand can find. Brands usually use this annual platform as a firework moment—a one-off flash of A-list celebrities, Hollywood explosions, and fantasy locations. While these commercials may entertain you for thirty seconds or so, I doubt at the end of the day you can recall which brand created which commercial or left an impact. This year, at T-Mobile, we did things differently. We launched a campaign. And, we broke some news.

Our celebrity-less commercials were actually very Hollywood.

The other day, my friend and our VP of Advertising and Brand Strategy, Dan Goldstein, said it plainly: “Why couldn’t a company spend its Super Bowl ad budget on writing talent instead of on-screen celebrities and Michael Bay style production?”

And, that’s exactly what we did! This year, we went to Hollywood to tell our story with Panay Films, a team who has writers with credits in movies such as Hot Tub Time Machine, Wedding Crashers, and Serendipity. Founder, Andrew Panay, his incredible writing partner, Brian Klugman, and all-star head of production, Nate Tuck, led a remarkable team of Hollywood’s most talented writers, editors, and producers to create a new campaign that speaks to why T-Mobile is the most loved brand in wireless. 

Our spots were about moments we all share. In Brian’s words, “Every phone tells a story both big and small; these spots are about those little moments we’ve all experienced or heard about that make us smile.” 

Ok, so our ads were written by incredibly talented people, but does that matter? Yes, it matters. It matters because we featured moments we share in the way most of us communicate today: through messaging. When was the last time you opted to call your best friend instead of messaging them? It’s how we connect with everyone, from our loving tech-illiterate parents to our Lyft drivers ??.

We also knew it was important to share moments of humor. When you have a whole room of people laughing at the same thing, it’s magic. And, that’s because, as Andrew puts it, laughter is the highest form of creativity and unites us all. That’s why we targeted relatable—and humorous—moments inspired by real life experiences, written by some of the best in the business. Sure, we could have shared these moments lots of ways, but memes have become an integral part of modern life. It’s one image or one idea that can spread like wildfire with the right turn of phrase. And, rather than blatantly copy other people’s content like some brands do, we worked with creatives and comedy writers to create new content or license the rights of memes that shared similarities with our spots! In fact, we even hired famous meme author, @decentbirthday, and Panay Films to create more of these hilarious conversations that will be featured in our on-going campaign! In short, we created engaging content: amusing, relatable, and uniquely T-Mobile.

How did we do?

This year, traditional broadcast viewership of the game itself was down from 2018. But, that didn’t stop over an 858% increase of @TMobile mentions on Twitter.

Of course, measurement tools like ACE Metrix and iSpot are extremely useful (our 98.7% attention score told us a lot), but if you want real-time, unfiltered reviews about your brand and the content you produce, ask the internet. One aspect of our customers’ reaction to this we didn’t expect was the bump the featured musicians’ songs received in digital downloads. The Fine Young Cannibals’ song, “She Drives Me Crazy,” saw downloads increase by a whopping 2235% in one day! 

In the end it’s all about our customers.

T-Mobile is famous for breaking the rules of the stupid, broken, and arrogant wireless industry (as our CEO John Legere calls it) and putting customers first—this is what makes us the Un-carrier. We listen to our customers and give them what they want, and this year’s Super Bowl was no exception. It was two magic words—FREE TACOS. Free tacos from Taco Bell. Every. Single. Week.

Did it work? Let’s just say all Taco Bell’s one-day sales records were broken and we can officially confirm our customers love free tacos! During our first official Taco Tuesday, Taco Bell had their highest daily and hourly digital transactions to date.

On top of that, we announced our partnership with Lyft, offering a free ride with a $10 credit in the month of February. This was our biggest Lyft activation yet, by over 50%!

How do customers get these incredible benefits? With T-Mobile Tuesdays, where we give customers free stuff and great deals every week just to say “thank you” for being a customer. We launched T-Mobile Tuesdays in 2016, and on February 5, T-Mobile customers snapped up more Tuesday “thankings” than any day in history—smashing the previous record by nearly 1 million deals claimed and rocketed to #1 in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store Lifestyle categories. We just keep giving customers more reasons to be the happiest in wireless.

But our Super Bowl spots were designed to kick off something more. It’s about a world beyond wireless, where customers come first. And, a chance for us to share our vision for the mobile future, our way.