Situation: AT&T TV was rebranding as DIRECTV STREAM. People had heard of DIRECTV but not the new streaming service. AT&T TV was also seeing a decline in subscribers, so we had the job of creating awareness and engagement plus reversing course on conversion.

Brief: TV is meant to be pure pleasure, but it’s gotten complicated. Let’s highlight this radically new experience where entertainment has no boundaries.

Objective: Drive awareness of a new product people don’t yet know they need, make our marketing as entertaining as entertainment itself, by focusing on engagement, and driving qualified customers to site.

When did TV get so complicated? So many subscriptions, remotes, and dongles. Oh, the dongles! Fun and relaxation are not supposed to be this irritating and difficult. 

Enter DIRECTV STREAM, a new streaming platform that brings together all your entertainment, all in one place. To make the launch of DIRECTV STREAM as entertaining as entertainment itself, we united the very best of live TV and on-demand like never before in a series of iconic mashups under the message: Get Your TV Together.

In our inaugural mashup (and a cross-channel media frenzy) Serena Williams became Wonder Woman and brought our brand story to life. Over the course of the launch, we released channel-specific executions, tailored to the environment, tech, and native behavior patterns. Fans got excited and engaged with the brand, smashing benchmarks along the way, and proving that a well told story starts with understanding the audience and their context.

We needed to find hyper-relevant and contextual stories to meet people where they were. Data gathering and audience targeting were crucial to both how we homed in on the right person at the right moment (in addition to being core components of the MarTech system we've built for our AT&T and DIRECTV work). Using the right audience signals, connected technologies, and fandoms, we reached a massive audience in a way that was tailored to both individuals and touchpoints.

Culture also played a big role in our strategy. Sports, popular films, comic book worlds, superheroes—this work dug deep into the heart of the entertainment zeitgeist. But we also wanted to bring Serena’s authenticity and deep cultural influence to the forefront—in particular, female empowerment. Not only did it influence our creative choices and focus, but we also worked exclusively with female writers and artists when creating our comics.

While Serena Williams and Wonder Woman made an epic splash on TV, we needed to find hyper-relevant and contextual stories in other channels to meet people where they were. Using behaviors, technologies, and fandoms, we reached a massive audience in a way that was tailored to each touchpoint. 

We started with social video—filmed and built for short timeframes, vertical video, and an audience who probably has their in-feed sound muted.

Next, we extended a battle scene from TV into a cross-platform AR game, letting people become Serena and battle evil tennis robots in their own living rooms. Not only did people love playing the game, but it outperformed every other medium, accounting for 20% of all social LTA sales in the month it was live. It also had 2x brand recall and 4x higher CTR than industry benchmarks.

As the Serena William x Wonder Woman mashup started to wear-in, we knew fans would ask for more. We partnered with DC Comics to craft, produce, and distribute a limited-edition comic book—an origin for our Serena and Wonder Woman story. We developed the comic with an all-female cast of writers and illustrators, who also promoted the work in a four-part launch that included a custom Twitter emoji and animated GIFs. Our team of artists even incorporated fan-art in our GIFs, generating a more expansive sense of creative community and driving highly engaged traffic to our landing page (where our audience spent an average 6 mins 48 sec engaged with the experience—20x longer than DIRECTV Site average). We also let fans enter the book itself with a 360º AR portal on Snapchat.

Functional and transactional display. Hard-working social video. Engaging AR technology. Printed comics that fans loved. Our brand story crossed media and platforms with super-powered agility—never a force-fit.

Serena Rebrand Launch Overall Stats

44 New Digital Partners

36 New Ad Placement Types

+36% Social Engagement Rate

+21% Social Click-Thru Rate

+5.5% Display Click-Thru Rate

+892% Site Visit Conversion

Serena Tennis Bot Takedown

Delivered 20% of all Social LTA sales for the month it ran

4x Higher CTR vs FB In-Feed Units

+22% CPM Efficiency vs FB Benchmarks

6x Stronger Brand Recall vs FB Benchmarks

2x Ad Recall vs Standard FB units

Serena Comic Book LP

Avg Time on Page – 6 mins 48 sec (20x longer than DIRECTV Site)

All told, we reversed a 3-year downward trend in 4 months.