Coming into the new year with a strategic re-focus on its legacy telecom offerings, AT&T wanted to reintroduce themselves into the market and create a connection with their social audience without pushing the hard sell. As we started thinking through ways the company has changed through the years, we couldn’t help but get in all of our nostalgic feels.
We started pondering the ways Millennials have grown up in the age of the internet — and all specifically remember the ways AT&T’s offerings grew up alongside us: from our parent’s carphones, to $0.20-per-text conversations (sorry, Dad!), to hot pink flip phones and beyond. We were met with a sense of pride knowing that our generation was the last to not only survive, but thrive living life before the smartphone.
Enter: “Ponder This” the first-ever fully scripted 9x16 made-for-social sitcom that set out to build brand affinity, drive engagement, educate, and bring some laughs along the way… live audience laughs, to be exact.
Future generations will never know a world without text, a constant tap to the internet or what it was like to have your little brother answer the landline and yell across the house “Eden…. your boyfriend is on the phone!” With that, we knew: as Millennials, we had an obligation to educate our younger audience and create a safe space for our peers to Ponder how things used to be.
So we created the first-ever 9x16 sitcom, targeted at a nostalgic Millennial audience. Think ABC’s TGIF block, meets Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, with just a splash of Lizzie McGuire. We built a 3-wall set with space for a live audience and spared no detail - props on set included not one, not two, but three CD binders full of burned CDs, as well as phones (with cords!) and pagers and beepers a-plenty. 07734 (iykyk)
But with Gen Z’s ever-increasing influence and purchase power, we didn’t want to completely alienate our generational next-door neighbors. With some help from Gen Z influencers, episodic creative paired the younger set with our cast of Elder Millennials to tell the tales of the growing pains of early technology… kind of like those old stories of “walking uphill in the snow both ways,” but updated! Our actors interviewed the young content creators on what it was like to grow up in a more modern-day and age, how life as a young adult is different now, but also the ways it’s not so different.
The series ran for 12 weeks, with 13 different episodes and one after school special-style PSA about the Digital Divide, a societal issue AT&T is dedicated to tackling. More than 30 content pieces lived in and around the series, including short-form video, full-length YouTube uploads, graphic design, GIFs and audience-engaging Stories. Content living in and around the campaign asked users to decode T9 text message strings, asked for songs from their favorite personalized mixtapes, and drove users to watch the full-length videos on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
The classic three wall set and nostalgic styling effected a visual break in format from AT&T’s previous content, making a splash and encouraging views - more than 1.5M of them, to be exact. Videos from the series generated 65k engagements, and content shared to influencer’s channels generated an additional 6M impressions.
