Mini Metaverse or Holiday Holograms?
Either way, T-Mobile gave Twitter users with a memorable way to close out 2021!
Each of the past five years, T-Mobile's Senior Leadership Team (SLT) has banded together in a show of holiday cheer to host a light-hearted social media campaign, chock-full of giveaways, donations, laughs and celebration. Coming off the 2020 holiday campaign, where SLT put a socially-distant spin on neighborhood caroling, the bar was set high to ideate an original production for 2021.
In addition to coming up with a net-new holiday concept, the executive social team needed to 1) lightly weave T-Mobile's 5G leadership into the messaging, 2) ensure inclusivity with respect to multi-cultural holiday beliefs, and 3) include a charitable component with a geniune tie to the campaign.
With its industry-leading 5G network, T-Mobile's emerging technology presence has ramped up considerably over the past few years. And as fate would have it, "Metaverse" was the buzzword on the tip of everyone's tongues in the second half of 2021. It was only fitting that the best way to flex T-Mobile's 5G capacity was to build out a custom augmented reality experience.
The original concept was to have SLT "trapped" inside an advent calendar, in need of users' help to deliver holiday gifts. Upon release, the T-Mobile exec would appear in AR with giveaways galore. However, the team shifted the dates slightly and pivoted from an advent calendar to snow globe to ensure the campaign didn't lean to hard into one religious tradition.
Each weekday over the final two weeks of 2021, a different executive would be featured and bring with them unique AR content and a new set of premium prizes to give away. At the midway point of the campaign, the team would shift the look and feel from holiday wreaths and gift-wrapped boxes, to fireworks and champagne glasses, as the calendar drifted from December 25 and towards January 1.
For the philanthropic element, the team landed on donating the value of each prize given away during the campaign to help fund AR and VR projects at schools in rural America.
The user journey would be simple on the surface (albeit quite complex underneath the hood)
Let's check back in on those objectives...
For two weeks, SLT was seen all over America in living rooms, dashboards, kitchen counters and more, garnering an engagement rate of 14.2% during the campaign, T-Mobile's highest ER of a multi-day campaign in 2021.
The campaign was well-appreciated by Twitter users, earning 75% positive sentiment overall, 99% higher than the positive sentiment accrued from all other December 2021 content. On average users watched 24.7 seconds of each video, which was 12x longer than the standard view length on Twitter.
All told, the campaign racked up 2.5 million impressions, 100,000 engagements, 40,000 VR video views and 5,000 contest entries. The performance was better than expected, but the overall scale of the campaign could have been larger with more paid media allocation.
But the best part of it all? The campaign benefited the next generation of tech-lovers, raising $100,000 in donations which fully funded 171 AR, VR and tech projects for students across rural America, via Donors Choose.
