Managers have often doubted that employees can be as focused and productive when they work from home as they could be when they’re in the office. Then the pandemic hit. Work needed to still happen but now it needed to happen from home (or the car or your kid’s bedroom or the garage).

Our objective was to drive consideration of Apple products as a critical business investment. We needed to demonstrate that if you give people insanely great tools they’ll do insanely great work — even when they're working from home. With up to half of American workers still working from home today, the ability to collaborate and be productive and creative from anywhere is just as important now as it was a year ago.

Apple helps unleash creativity and productivity, no matter where teams are. What better way to demonstrate that than giving everyone’s favorite relatable coworkers, The Underdogs, the toughest assignment of their careers?

With no notice — on a Monday morning no less — they’re assigned a project that came back from the dead but with new specs, not enough time, suddenly half the budget, and due next Monday. Scratch that, this Friday. Just like in The Before, it’s still a world of deadlines, group chats, conference calls, coworkers, and bosses. But in The Now it also became a world of kids, roommates, and a hairless cat. And it's definitely a world where collaboration never missed a beat.

WFH isn’t new, but we proved both with the film and the process of making it that when you give people insanely great tools they really can make insanely great work — from anywhere.

We dug into pre-COVID perceptions of remote work and found executives didn’t trust it because they didn’t believe their staff would be as productive. We needed to show how Apple products could unlock the potential of remote teams.

The buyer audience is fairly narrow — business leaders and IT decision makers. But given the moment, we knew there was a massive audience suddenly sharing the same challenges of working from home. We tailored the film for YouTube which commands sustained attention online. YouTube audiences are willing to watch 8+ minute-long videos, as long as they’re entertaining and engaging right to the end.

Like YouTube creators, we created “chapters” that move the viewer along. The film is structured as five-days-in-the-life of The Underdogs as they worked from home, each “chapter” being signaled via Apple features — a calendar date, a reminder, or an alarm.

“The whole working-from-home thing” captures an extraordinary moment in culture and business — a time when those who were working from home were hungry to see their experiences reflected in culture and almost everyone was reliant on technology and devices for professional and social connection.

From a reach perspective, we tailored the film for a YouTube organic presence and paid tactics via the masthead. It garnered 35M views total from paid. (Please note: this number differs from the number reflected on the video on the site due to measurement methodology).

YouTube commands sustained attention online, with audiences regularly watching 8+ minute-long videos. But with hundreds of hours of content uploaded every minute, viewers have plenty of choices. We needed to make sure our approach was entertaining and engaging right to the end and that it appealed not just to our narrow target audience (business leaders and IT decision makers) but also to the suddenly massive audience who could relate to the story.

At almost 7 minutes long — 42% longer than other Apple long form spots — this film maintained completion rates as high as those shorter videos. “The whole working-from-home thing” was the 6th most watched ad on YouTube (according to YouTube’s ad leaderboard) and drove more than 130K viewers through to learn more about Apple products for business.

“The whole working-from-home thing” struck a big cultural chord, going viral immediately. But more importantly, it resonated with our business audience who saw themselves and their teams as Dave discovered he had a scanner on his iPhone, when Bridget filled their team calendar with milestones, when Brian realized he could measure a prototype with his iPad, and when they all collaborated on the final Keynote presentation in real time — all from home.

“The whole working-from-home thing” was listed as the 6th most watched ad on YouTube, as indicated by YouTube’s ad leaderboard. The YouTube leaderboard ads are determined by an algorithm that factors in organic and paid views, watch time, and viewer retention.

Half of the ads that made this list were Super Bowl ads. “The whole working-from-home thing” made it onto this list without any TV support.