Running a small business is hard. Small business owners’ optimism hit a 10-year low, and they reported suffering high levels of sleep deprivation due to the worries related to their business.
Small businesses are the backbone of America’s economy and one of the largest segments within the telco industry. Our focus was on customers who hadn’t yet considered AT&T Business. By winning their consideration, we could solidify our place in their minds whenever the decision pops up.
Our ultimate goal was to stand out amongst a commoditized category. B2B marketing campaigns are known to be bland and create a sea of sameness. To get small businesses to even consider us, we needed to make sure we didn’t look and sound like everyone else while showing how connectivity can play a major role in their business.
The campaign needed to evoke interest and visits to the .com page with net new small business owners. And we had to ensure campaign engagement was generating association to AT&T Business and driving consideration (even if they weren’t thinking about changing providers).
While we wanted this campaign to stand out, we also wanted to ease small business owners’ anxious minds and help them understand the value of what AT&T Business offered. Furthermore, we wanted to make it interactive and engaging by offering surprise and delight.
We knew the best way to shift business optimism wasn’t through the unrelatable positivity or serious approach commonly used in the B2B category. Instead of hiding the real fears and anxieties of running a business, we transformed these into entertainment and laughs. Because if business owners could see some of their favorite people, famous for being terrible at running a business, successfully start a small company, they too could build back their confidence with the right partner.
We brought back the cast of the TV show “The Office” to launch a fictional “Sleep with Rain” business. But we didn’t just reunite America’s favorite TV colleagues. We put them in real situations that only AT&T Business could get them out of. They launched a product—a pillow with built-in speakers featuring Rainn Wilson’s voice—designed to help with sleep deprivation (a commonly reported struggle of running a small business). A hilarious sleep audio album, with tracks created based on owners’ archetypes, could be synced to the pillow.
First, we went where businesspeople talk business: LinkedIn. Instead of launching on Instagram or TikTok where our actors have millions of followers, we did what every business owner must do and started from the ground with 0 followers. With a single post, Rainn Wilson quickly got thousands of followers and triggered big conversations, including ones with top executives and famous investors like Barbara Corcoran and Daymond John. After the cast joined the endeavor, the product was announced: Sleep with Rain, a talking pillow with Rainn’s voice that helps people sleep.
A full launch ecosystem for the company was created: a website where business owners could learn more and get their pillows, an infomercial, a Spotify album created based on different business archetypes narrated by the cast, and teasers. With the hype at its peak, we dropped a 6-minute film directed by the award-winning Mark Molloy showing their struggles.
In less than two weeks, the campaign became the most successful in the history of AT&T Business. It made a splash in pop culture, with over 2.5 billion impressions in high-impact publications such as Fast Company, USA Today, People, AdWeek, and Entertainment Weekly, to name a few, ranging from Shanghai to Argentina. The films got 150 million+ views in just 7 days.
With a 99% social sentiment score, not only were more people than ever engaging with the brand, but they were happy about it. Our owned social posts received 400% more engagements than the brand’s previous top-performing campaign and an impressive 7,720% increase in social impressions versus 2023. Paid social also outperformed numerous benchmarks. The video view completion rate for short-form social outpaced benchmarks by 57%. And the engaging creative also helped facilitate a more efficient media buy, which outpaced expected impressions by 37%.
