At its core, our idea was simple: enhance our consumers’ lives by connecting them with their favorite influencers through original series designed for social media. Over the course of the year, AT&T Hello Lab created ten shows including:

· Dare to Travel: a multi-platform show featuring travel vloggers Damon and Jo where fans not only learned where to travel, but how to travel through a series of social dares.

· The Disappearing Girl: a scripted YA romance, YouTuber Collins Key asked his fans to help him track down the girl of his dreams by unlocking clues scattered across social media.

· Writing with Grace: the world’s largest writing workshop hosted by Grace Helbig on Wattpad, Twitter, and YouTube where fans co-authored a novella which was then performed live.

· Public Record: a social series with influencer musicians, Us the Duo, who sourced fans’ stories to release an entire visual album.

Over the course of the year, we rolled out ten original influencers’ series. In choosing influencers, we looked for innovators in spaces where our audience was connecting with friends and being entertained—platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Wattpad, Twitter, and Snapchat. Once we connected with an influencer, we never handed off a brief or slotted them into a readymade show. Instead we sat with them, listened not only to what they wanted to make for AT&T Hello Lab, but also their career goals. This enabled us to create shows that were right for their audiences and the brand, and were exciting for them. Each series lived on the influencer’s social channels, included one-to-one social activations, meetups, and custom merch. Our investment in the influencers’ audiences and careers moved our relationship from being strictly transactional to a true partnership—as showcased by our influencers going 405% above the contracted deliverables.

As a result of AT&T Hello Lab, fans were far from viewing AT&T as an intrusion. They invited us into their friend group, commenting they loved what AT&T was doing, calling the ability to co-create content with their favorite influencers “life-changing” and passionately requesting second seasons of these series. This passion helped us surpass social KPIs in the lab’s first year. We achieved 443% of our views goal with 44.1M views and achieved 358% of our impressions goal with 492.5M impressions. We logged 30.4 million fan engagements in this time frame, a stat that further affirmed success of our friendertainment approach and the power of 1:1 interactions. “We’ve seen a huge positive impact on brand metrics after fans engaged with Hello Lab content. They’ve begun to see us as more innovative and as a brand they might actually use,” describes Valeria Vargas, VP of Advertising and Marketing Communications at AT&T.