There's something special about Saturdays during college football season -- parties, excitement, cheering, camaraderie, action and fun. Life rocks.
That is IF you are watching your favorite college games on AT&T U-verse. But without U-verse, life's just not as interesting.
That's the basis for the AT&T U-verse "Saturdays With/Without" video series that AT&T and FleishmanHillard created and published via social media in the summer and fall of 2014.
"Saturdays With/Without" aimed to generate excitement around AT&T U-verse TV's college football line-up. It further aimed to demonstrate the various scenarios from which U-verse subscribers could watch games – via a standard set-top box at home, via a wireless set-top box in the back yard, and via a mobile device while at the mall or on the go.
The campaign utilized hyperbolic and humorous situations of what a college game day Saturday would look like if you were a U-verse subscriber with access to all of the big football games compared to what life would be like without U-verse.
The strategy was to tell a story that was funny, relatable, and shareable rather than make a hard sell for a specific product or offering.
The outcome was a series of four videos that were shared and promoted on the AT&T U-verse Facebook and Twitter pages. The videos generated a significant increase in engagement compared with other content on the channels within the same timeframe.
The main objective of this campaign was to generate excitement about the college football season and the channel line-ups on AT&T's U-verse TV service. The secondary objective was to demonstrate the added value of being able to watch football in various ways via a mobile device, a wireless receiver, or a standard set-top box.
With those two objectives in mind, we crafted four scenarios that would demonstrate how the enjoyment of a Saturday could be amplified by watching college football on your terms and on your turf. Those scenarios are then contrasted with a Saturday full of mundane everyday activities.
By telling these stories in this over-the-top style, we aimed to evoke an emotional response from our viewers that would help humanize the AT&T brand. Further, we didn't specifically call out the wireless receiver or the capability of watching the service on a mobile device. Rather, we softly incorporated these technologies into the scenes.
On the AT&T U-verse Facebook page in October and November (the lifespan of the campaign), the view rate of the videos was 35 percent higher than all other video posts for that channel.
The posts have been seen by more than 2.4 million AT&T U-verse Facebook and Twitter users, and the videos have earned nearly 650,000 video views.
