Situation:

Christmas is traditionally a highly competitive season for advertisers. It’s the season where one emotional Christmas ad follows the other and it’s incredibly hard for brands to stand from the crowd.

However, for Deutsche Telekom the main goal wasn’t only to make the year’s most view-worthy Christmas film, but to share a story that accompanies the Germans through the whole Christmas season.

Brief:

Create a multichannel Christmas experience that accompanies people during the whole Christmas season and that inspires them to share the experience.

Objectives:

Get people in touch with the story daily and motivate them to share it.

Following Deutsche Telekom’s claim: Life is for sharing, the Christmas story “The magical advent calendar” was made (next to

a 2-minute online film) into a whole audiobook of which a new episode was shared daily, from the first till the 24th of December,

on Soundcloud With over 3 hours playtime divided in 24 chapters and read by the famous German actor and voice behind the

Harry Potter audiobooks, Rufus Beck, the story accompanied the Germans during the season. The audiobook charted No.1 in

the official German audiobook charts and No. 6 in the official German album charts.

Due to the wide range of offers on behalf of the Telekom, the task was to create a campaign that would reach young and old, to be demanding for Internet-affine users, and not to overcharge first users. All developed mobile first and for cross device.

Thanks to an interdisciplinary design the adventure was a consistent experience throughout all devices and channels.

Our 360°-storytelling experience entertained and surprised users every day anew throughout all channels: the YouTube online film, the Soundcloud audio book and the 360°-adventure made users explore the story interactively.

The highlight: The magic advent calendar. Every day our calendar led to a new chapter of the interactive audio book. Each one with attention to detail: hand drawn illustrations, all animated, set up in WebGL with multiple layers to generate a 180° view in 3D.

On top gamification elements for an immersive character of the digital adventure. Or the option to experience the whole story via Google Cardboard.

The campaign's core was deeply developed out of Deutsche Telekom's claim „Life is for sharing“. So users could experience the power of sharing themselves behind every door of the advent calendar. For example fundraising via Twitter: For every Tweet using the campaigns hashtag, Deutsche Telekom donated one Euro for a good cause. And by sharing the story users could unlock upcoming chapters for themselves.

In the end we did not only convince users to share our story, but to also convince our target group, that life gives us more, when we share.