BT launched its new brand platform ‘Beyond Limits’ at the end of 2019, with the ambition of reflecting the changing nature of BT, and helping consumers once again recognise the brand as a fundamental part of the fabric of the nation. Part of this was showing their commitment to teaching digital skills to 10 million people through its ‘Skills for Tomorrow’ programme.

While mass awareness of BT’s overall brand message was driven through a high reach through-the-line campaign, the objective of this brief was to drive engagement with a more focused audience, showing them how ‘Skills for Tomorrow’ can provide fun and engaging educational experiences.

When we first considered Skills for Tomorrow, we initially jumped to the same place many others do. Children. Obviously children are the future, but we also know there are hundreds of learning platforms out there for them. What about the parents? Typically generations pass on information down to one another, but many parents can’t really help their kids with technology.

Our research gave us insight into the relationships between tech, parents and kids. Parents are not necessarily bad with technology, but they don’t feel confident talking about it. Their kids, on the other hand, are fearless. They learn by doing, clicking and sometimes breaking. So we needed to find a way to help bring parents and kids together to share tech experiences.

We picked an activity they had most likely done before together, baking, and we built our experience as a metaphor to teach the basic principles of code.

We created a real physical kitchen, with five custom-built working robots, to help young and old connect their choices of code to real world effects. On accessing the robot bakery website, parents and kids go through three parts of the kitchen and at each one they are taught a basic principle of code – sequencing, variables and repetition.

The media launch was planned to coincide with Easter, but found even greater relevance as it was released just as the UK was going into lockdown, with millions of parents suddenly taking on the role of home tutors.

We launched the activity through targeted social and digital display ads, boosted with influencer and PR activity. The campaign was also called out in homeschooling resources to help parents.

The experience lives on as a key learning resource on BT’s Skills for Tomorrow educational hub: https://www.bt.com/codeacake

We drove 89,250 unique visitors to the site, with 10,655 successfully completing the full experience during the campaign period of April 2 to May 13, which contributed towards BT’s overall goal of teaching tech skills to 10 million people.

In terms of achieving against business targets, a brand impact study run showed an extremely high +38% point lift in awareness of BT’s Skills for Tomorrow initiative (against a benchmark of +13% points) and a visit intent lift of +6%. Highlighting Code a Cake’s success at driving engagement to BT’s ‘Beyond Limits’ brand platform.

On top of this, social ads helped reach 2.8 million people across Facebook and Instagram to drive awareness about the campaign site.