Business-to-business advertising is unparalleled in its detail. It will tell you what a product is comprised of, its capabilities, its capacity and its potential impact on a potential client’s business.
It may even throw in a few reassuring percentages and multipliers just to punctuate its point.
What it doesn’t often do is tell you how the product it’s selling is going to have any tangible effect on the human beings ordering it or benefiting from it. For that, you have to put away the owner’s manual and start telling stories a human being can comprehend.
AT&T’s consumer side understands this. It had spokeswoman/salescharacter Lily Adams—portrayed by actress Milana Vayntrub—work from home during the pandemic and joke around with athletes for March Madness while touting the virtues of its wireless safety features and 5G network. When AT&T decided to launch a campaign reintroducing its AT&T Business b-to-b offerings to the world, it turned to the agency behind those Lily ads—BBDO—to provide its new spot a healthy dose of humanity.
Framed like an action movie chase scene, the spot dubbed “Next Level Moments” follows a muscle car as it swerves through city streets at high speed—the driver taking directions through a headset from collaborators in an undisclosed location. “The Network” not only communicates with the driver, but follows the vehicle through drone cameras and maps out the quickest route to … a hospital, where the driver and passenger drop off an organ cooler to tablet-wielding doctors.
AT&T doesn’t offer a voiceover saying what its tech stack looks like, what its network capacity is or how it compares to competitors (or the industry average): Just that it is capable of supporting all of this at a moment critical to a person’s life.
Alicia Dietsch, svp of business marketing for AT&T, has been with AT&T for nearly 32 years and spent roughly half of that tenure in marketing. As the company emerges from a series of acquisitions and divestitures that made it seem more like a media conglomerate than a communications firm, Dietsch said this AT&T Business campaign refocuses on the company’s once and future core mission—and lone bit of jargon—”connectivity.”
“Here’s the truth about marketing in my sector. It’s a sea of sameness,” Dietsch said. “It was really important to us from the very beginning, that as we reintroduce AT&T Business, that we take a very different approach.”
Back to business
In July 2015, AT&T purchased DirecTV for $48.5 billion. In October of the following year, it bought Time Warner for $108.7 billion. By 2020, those purchases left the company nearly $200 billion in debt. It sold off a share of DirecTV and its U-Verse TV offering in 2021 and, last year, sold off its stake in Warner to Discovery.
Dietsch admitted it was a bit of a distraction where AT&T Business was concerned.
“We are crystal clear, at this point, that we are about becoming the U.S. premier connectivity provider—this is our objective—and as we do that … it required us to really look hard at the way we’d oriented our proposition for all those years,” she said. “Frankly, it was complex, it was very third-party oriented and as a result, was hampering our ability to make the investments that we really wanted to in the core connectivity space.”
Anyone who’s lived around AT&T long enough has “connectivity” ringing in their ears and realizes it isn’t exactly a new goal for the company. In full disclosure, this reporter’s father worked for AT&T for more than 40 years before his death in 2011. His last position was “Product Director for Ultravailble Network Services and Accu-Ring Metro Rings,” which involved him selling companies like Nortel and Lucent on, you guessed it, “connectivity.” AT&T’s network, and the services around it, were the heart of the company’s business-to-business pitch.
Dietsch’s father worked for AT&T as well and recently asked her “Would I recognize it anymore?” As Dietch noted, the answer to that question is at the core of this latest campaign. AT&T Business wants to show what its network is capable of and why it thinks it’s superior to everyone else’s—and how it’s not this dumb 20th Century pipe just shuffling information around.
Making connections
But it had to listen to what customers wanted. They sought reliability, which neither fiber nor wireless offered, but a combination might. They wanted security, which AT&T was still figuring out how to sell as part of its product. They also leaned on AT&T for expertise, figuring a legacy brand likely had more answers to their problems.
They need all of the above even more so today after the pandemic sent everyone home and a mass exodus to remote work left gaps in companies’ network defenses. Yet, Dietsch noted, many of AT&T Business’ partners aren’t strictly “business”: They’re public services like health care, public safety, education and transportation.
AT&T Business has 2.5 million customers, and Dietsch said the key to maintaining those relationships is understanding their business, what they face and AT&T can create value for them. When a company’s marketing is disconnected from its culture, Dietsch said, it eventually shows and the customer will see that inconsistency. It’s where allowing the marketing to speak to customers as human beings instead of accounts comes in handy—and puts some connection behind the promise of “connectivity.”
“Yes, I have to be able to tell a customer why my widget is better than somebody else’s widget,” she said. “But if I can approach it from the perspective of how AT&T can provide better reliability, better security, better guidance and better business outcomes, we think that’s a conversation that our customers are more interested in having.”
