On September 11, 2001, the world changed forever. In the aftermath, New York was left devastated and disconnected. With phone lines down, cell service disrupted and Wall Street catastrophically offline, it was chaos and confusion. Verizon’s 140 West Street building—the central telecommunications hub for Lower Manhattan—was badly damaged at Ground Zero. Its restoration became crucial for the comeback of the city as well as the nation. The next day, over 14,000 Verizon employees mobilized, risking their lives to reconnect New York. These stories never made headlines, and were even unknown to many who work at Verizon. So on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we honored those brave men and women from 2001 with an experience created for Verizon employees by sharing an important and meaningful piece of our company’s history.

9/12 was a one-day, real-time live event that actively engaged users with an interactive story told exclusively through text messages. Each piece of content was designed to put our current employees in the shoes of past employees who were in the days after 9/11, risking their lives in the recovery efforts to reconnect New York. The user interacted with each text as the brand story unfolded, in a new chapter every hour, bringing every native app on the phone into the text thread: YouTube videos, photos, voice memos, Safari, podcasts, AR camera, immersive phone calls and, of course, SMS messages.

It was a story that had never been told in a format that had never been used before: text messages. In 2001, it was the latest way to communicate, and now in 2021 it was the most personal. The 1:1 nature of texting provided us a meaningful nontraditional platform to share the emotional stories that emerged in the days after 9/11. With over 30 Verizon employees from 200 interviewed, a timeline was established. Each text documented a moment, action or story and was delivered at the exact time of day that the events happened on Sept 12, twenty years earlier.