To show phone users how much they spend on data, we turned six-second pre-roll ads into price tags. So before a basketball highlight video, for example, we ran a basketball-themed ad with the real dollars-and-cents cost to stream the video. Same for makeup tutorials, game reviews, movie trailers, gadget-unboxing videos, music videos—well, every YouTube video became an ad for Xfinity Mobile.

To pull it off, we partnered with YouTube, who provided the file sizes for some of its most popular videos and the default resolution for videos on its mobile app. With that data in hand, we calculated the price of each video based on the cost per gigabyte with each of our competitors. And we showed these prices to our target audience right when they were about to waste money streaming a YouTube video on 4G.

“Data in Dollars” was a campaign made of six-second ads designed specifically for YouTube and exclusively for mobile. The campaign went live on March 16, and it’s slated to run until June 16. As of the day we submitted this entry (April 9), the campaign has put prices on over 2,000 of YouTube’s most popular videos, with 4.5 million impressions.

The campaign is still running, but by the time we submitted this entry, YouTube’s most popular videos had made Xfinity Mobile popular too.

- More than 2,000 YouTube videos got price tags.

- With this highly targeted campaign, we reached 4.5 million customers of competitor carriers.

- Online searches for Xfinity Mobile more than tripled (a 221 percent lift).

- Brand interest increased by 113 percent.

In a category marked by competitiveness, we wanted to give other carriers’ customers a solid reason for switching: the expense of streaming a YouTube video.

Thanks to YouTube’s targeting capabilities for bumper ads, we were able to create a campaign targeted specifically at phone users (YouTube allows targeting exclusively to mobile) who were connected to one of our competitor carriers (YouTube allows targeting by carrier), streaming one of YouTube’s most popular videos (YouTube allows targeting by genre). Which was perfect for our concept, allowing us to deliver a message that was tailor-made for each viewer. And by helping our competitors’ customers see for the first time the real price they were paying to stream their videos, we turned YouTube’s most popular videos into compelling ads for Xfinity Mobile.

In the US, phone data is expensive. But with Xfinity Mobile, it isn’t. In fact, Xfinity Mobile is a new carrier that was designed to help phone users save a lot of money on data by connecting to any one of its 18 million WiFi hotspots. Sounds great, huh? But our competitors’ customers didn’t really care enough to switch—until we showed them how much they were spending on data just to watch a YouTube video.