"You still have to get your audience fo fall in love with you,"
said Catherine Borda, AT&T's director-youth marketing. "With
this generation, where they can smell advertising from a mile away,
you have to get creative."
The general campaign, which premiered at South by Southwest,
featured several commercials and a 13-minute video, "The Network
Diaries." For the Hispanic push, the campaign is adding a
short, staged video, which runs less than four minutes, as well as
two 30-second commercials where young Latinos discuss living across
two cultures and languages. Commercials in Spanish will run on
Univision and Telemundo, while the bilingual spots will
appear in ESPN Deportes and MTV Tr3s.
The videos will also be featured prominently on AT&T's
"Mobile Movement" Tumblr and YouTube
pages, as well as other digital properties, including those from
Vice. Print ads will run in People En Español and Latina.
The new ads are slated to run through the end of the calendar year,
but the company said they may continue into 2015.
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Markets across Latin America have been described as the
"crown
jewel" of AT&T's potential acquisition of DirecTV, which is
still pending.
Plenty of marketers targeting Hispanic consumers have utilized
Spanglish. What sets AT&T apart is its focus on authentic
storytelling, said Spencer Baim, director-strategy for Vice. For
the campaign, his agency relied solely on non-professional actors,
who were also AT&T subscribers. "Rather than have AT&T
talk," Mr. Baim explained, "we have the generation talk to
themselves."
The bilingual spots in particular showcase AT&T's attempt to
focus on the "emotional benefit" of the wireless service, Ms. Borda
said, "as opposed to the functional benefit."
The only network feature identified in the general "Mobile
Movement" spots is AT&T's discounted offering for customers
without contracts. That plan follows a brash move to buy out
contracts from smaller competitor T-Mobile. Last year, T-Mobile
signed a contract with Latin American superstar Shakira.
Ms. Borda insisted that AT&T's marketing was not a response
to its rival. She also noted her team intentionally opted not to
rely on a well-known figure, as many Hispanic marketing efforts
have. "Using a celebrity is not going to fit as well," she said.
"The customers are our celebrities."
In 2013, AT&T leapt from fourth to second place in the Ad
Age DataCenter list of top U.S. advertisers, spending $3.27
billion. It is also the No. 2 advertiser in Hispanic media after
Procter &
Gamble, spending $124.7 million in 2013.