In today’s media landscape, reach and frequency alone do not guarantee recall and resonance – especially for hypercritical audiences like Multicultural Millennials. This forced us to reimagine their relationship with media as less of a personal invasion and more of a public incentive. The impact of our message hinged on AT&T’s ability to leverage media to show up to the right place at the right time with the right people. Getting this execution right would effectively turn each placement into a media multiplier by those who felt emotionally connected to the message and compelled to share it.

AT&T was losing relevance amongst Millennials. The lack of awareness and what the brand stood for created a perception of it being old, corporate, and non-diverse. Inclusivity was a major issue because Millennials are a highly diverse group, with nearly 40% being Hispanic / African-American. The cohort has become the group with the largest purchasing power in the US, and if AT&T didn’t make inroads, they wouldn’t be set up to be a market leader in the future.

AT&T’s brief was to gain trust and win in the largest Multicultural Millennial (MCM) markets of LA, NYC, Atlanta, and Chicago, because they’d seen upwards of a 20% difference in share of gross ads (SOGA) between them and the third-largest carrier, T-Mobile, with this audience.

The KPIs to assess success of the campaign were outlined as an increase in brand awareness, relevance, and switching intent with MCMs.

In 1947, AT&T invented what is arguably their biggest cultural contribution to date: area codes. These three digits that precede our phone numbers were originally designed to indicate what town or neighborhood you live in. But over time, they grew to become symbols that represent hometown pride.

AT&T’s Codes of Culture began by seeking out hometown heroes in each city to curate the rituals, artifacts, language, and people that define each city. We tapped into the parentheses traditionally used in area codes, and introduced our own set in AT&T blue that helped frame the most coveted cultural nuances (i.e. “Codes”), that were declared by these local heroes.

We used this motif in all media, from large-scale OOH in their own neighborhoods to localized experiences in a multi-city celebration that finally allowed consumers to feel a brand visibly celebrated their passions and did “more for their thing.”

To learn what area codes mean to our audience today, desk research alone wouldn’t suffice, so we traveled to each of our markets and conducted in-depth ethnographies. This is how we discovered the rituals, artifacts, language, and people that embody the “code” that brands often overlook.

During our research, we learned that MCMs felt unseen, unheard, and underrepresented by big corporations like AT&T. This tension led us to define our creative strategy: make the invisible feel impossible to ignore – which informed not only the creative execution, but the media strategy as well.

To prove our promise, we dedicated AT&T’s entire media inventory to the very communities we were celebrating. We would go on to source all campaign content from local residents and elevated the most “coded” stories onto massive billboards in their very own backyards.

AT&T’s approach to casting talent for this campaign was based on the audience’s belief that fame does not equal influence. Multicultural Millennials in these markets were numb to the same celebrities being featured across all media, so we had to take a different route. Instead, we pinpointed micro-influencers who were vocally proud of their hometown and were focused on making an impact on their community. We started by featuring them in the most nuanced local OOH placements, and eventually elevated them to media spaces that are usually only reserved for A-list celebrities, like Times Square’s godzilla billboard.

To invite participation, we launched a mobile meme generator that allowed our audience to create their own area code content. The best submissions were used to refresh AT&T’s entire media mix with each placement crediting the social handle of the user to make sure they were being celebrated publicly and proudly.

Our mobile meme generator resulted in over 22K unique pieces of user generated content that was repurposed across AT&T’s social, digital and OOH media, further cementing the campaign’s authenticity.

Our unaided awareness scores with MCMs saw a 350% lift in NYC, 150% lift in LA, 500% lift in CHI, and a 280% lift in ATL. Because we tied the campaign to the real people, rituals, artifacts, and language of the code, consumers felt the brand connected to them in relevant ways: LA 110% lift, CHI 52% lift, ATL 19% lift, NYC remained static.

However, the biggest success we saw was switching intent. In a category where only 2% of the market move to a new carrier, we saw top two box scores seeing lift in intent ranging from 37% to as high as 74%.

During our ethnographies, we interrogated the relationship between multicultural millennials and brands, which led us to the single biggest insight about our audience. What we learned was that they were actively chasing “clout” as a form of social currency and public status. This meant that partnering with a brand was no longer seen as “selling out” and instead was perceived as a sign of upward mobility.

We dug deeper into this and pinpointed the most valuable clout symbol in culture, which is the blue “verified” check badge that is given out to influencers and celebrities by platforms like Instagram and Twitter. We used this as inspiration as we designed our own clout system for the campaign, which would come to represent the ultimate form of clout across all of AT&T’s media at a hyper-local level.