The main idea behind the concept was: Let us create a report that reflects the customers’ state of mind. These are uncertain times, things are changing at an ever-increasing speed, and people are asking themselves a lot of questions about the future, for example about the digitization of society. Deutsche Telekom takes these questions seriously, and the company does not pretend to have all the right answers. Actually, there is not one right answer – instead, the report provides different types of answers by different types of people: Deutsche Telekom top management, employees, business partners, customers. This is an honest and a non-hierarchical way of addressing peoples’ concerns about the digitization – an approach just waiting to become the industry standard.

The production process for an annual report in a multinational corporation is fairly detailed, and is modified only as needed from one year to the next. The 2015 report was special insofar as we had to produce various videos about Deutsche Telekom, including quotes by all members of the Management Board. Once these videos were finalized, they became the basis for an augmented reality app and for the online report. As there was no blueprint app available at the time within the Deutsche Telekom Group, coordination with the app programmers was key. This proved to be successful: On the day of the publication of the annual report, the app was available in the Play Store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.telekom.geschaeftsbericht) and in the App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/geschaftsbericht-2015/id1085111894?mt=8).

From a PR perspective, the annual report has already produced one positive result. A current study investigated how the DAX 30 companies (Germany’s most important stock index) communicate on digitization in their annual reports. Deutsche Telekom came out no. 1 in this study.

Traffic on the annual report microsite increased significantly compared with the prior year.