TE Connectivity is a global industrial technology leader working side by side with engineers around the globe, to enable today’s most revolutionary breakthroughs. Our challenge was to re-inspire the next generation of engineers with truly poignant, culturally-relevant content to create meaningful engagement and outsized awareness. As a brand with 75 years of history in a highly commoditized industry that heavily thrives on facts and figures, we needed to go against traditional B2B brand practices to breakthrough. Short-form video gave us the opportunity to captivate our audience with innovative and exciting creative, as well as invite them to learn more. We utilized this video format for seralized video content to unfold the story of Alita and kept our audience engaged through various types of short-form videos including celebrity/actor interviews, live storytelling, and behind-the-scenes content.
Our customers are engineers that spend 80% of their time searching the internet for key parts to build their technologies. They wade through technical marketing materials, compare facts and figures from competing brands, and ultimately become lost in the sea of sameness. By partnering up with 20th Century Fox and James Cameron, we leveraged culturally relevant entertainment in a natural way that conveys our brand purpose, with relevant content that’s actually valued – to reach the next generation of engineers.
Filmmaker, James Cameron, started writing Alita: Battle Angel beginning in 1990, about a futuristic earth with the intro line, “the force behind this world is stronger than magic: it’s engineering.” Alita introduced key themes of technology enabling a better world, female heroine empowerment fighting for justice, and the inspirational potential of technology of the future. By tapping into James Cameron’s beautiful storytelling and culturally relevant themes, we saw the potential to integrate our brand purpose with a natural and authentic campaign.
The Science Behind Science Fiction evolved out of this entertainment opportunity to drive brand creative, create engaging content, and spark genuine dialogue that truly resonates with our engineering customers. The platform provided an avenue to elevate our brand promise, excite engineers around future technologies, and challenge the B2B brand marketing status quo.
Long-term, we continually fed the growing audience fresh content over time, with global events, social media discussions, tech-talks, and e-mail content that rewards engagement. We purposefully developed a long-term nurturing approach to ensure we retain new followers, increase brand trust, and provide value to our engineering customers for long-term brand loyalty.
Video Content Strategy
Organic Social Strategy
Paid Social Strategy
Distribution Strategy
Additional Activations
Impact: Across all media and internal employee metrics, this campaign exceeded our desired impact by significantly increasing our brand awareness and relevancy with young engineers. It also had a profound positive impact on our 80,000 global employees that had a renewed sense of pride for the brand and appreciation for the impact they make every day
Reach: We saw a clear spike on social media with 15.5M impressions across global platforms. Comparing all previous campaigns, our brand search increased 73% with a 78% increase in new arrivals, total site arrivals increased 62%, and China & Japan both exceeded industry reach metrics. The site page views spiked from 1.2 to 3.2, indicating time on-site and campaign content proved valuable.
Engagement: Due to production-quality creative, the campaign returned 16M video views on TikTok, 1.8M video views on YouTube, 243K clicks through to TE.com (a 58% increase), 3.5% increase in social media followers, and added 7,130 new contacts to the CRM database globally through sweepstakes contests. More importantly, the boost in comments, UGC, shares, followers, and meaningful discussions around the future of engineering was impactful for employees and engineers alike.
