The formal brief: To tell the Masters audience about AT&T satellite calling, the future of calling for help. AT&T satellite calls will make it possible to call for help even when you find yourself way off the normal cell phone grid.

The real brief? Make people laugh, make The Masters more relatable, and make AT&T the hero. And catapult our commercial from a very small run for a very small, niche audience into mainstream culture.

FILM: We see Ben Stiller playing an absolutely awful round of golf. Stroke after stroke, mistake after mistake, he strays further and further off course.

After who knows how long, Ben finds himself outside an abandoned petrol station with tattered clothes and chapped skin. He’s gained a beard, but he’s lost his mind. A passerby asks: “Are you Ben Stiller?” – Ben whispers: “I don’t even know anymore.” The grunt of a nearby water buffalo interrupts. Then we see Ben riding the water buffalo, golf bag still slung over his now-dirty shoulders, through a remote, high-altitude desert. So remote that an AT&T satellite call is the only hope for help.

When he finally finds his golf ball, Ben satellite calls his buddy, golf pro Jordan Spieth. Jordan asks “Where are you this time, Ben?” and Ben explains, voice quivering: “I’m a little off the green…somewhere between heaven and hell.”

We learned that Ben Stiller seems genetically engineered to be perfect for our audience. Average age of people who watch The Masters golf tournament: mid 50s. It’s a niche, discerning group and many of them are among AT&T’s most powerful and valuable customers.

Despite The Masters’ reputation as being exclusive and old-fashioned, their fans love Ben Stiller movies and his quirky, quotable humour. We needed to use their favorite actor to disarm them into laughing at how frustrating golf can be, how impossible it can be to get good at, and to make golf relatable to new audiences. Instead of showing golf professionals playing golf beautifully, we showed someone totally destroying a game of golf instead.

Our commercial ran during the live coverage of The Masters tournament games in North America only, and for less than a week. So, it was crucial to create a story exciting enough to be propelled from this very small run for a niche audience and into mainstream culture.

It was our goal to have our AT&T commercial for The Masters’ audience also seen by eyeballs all over the country and all over the world. It went even further than that. It became the first commercial ever to be streamed from space to a smartphone on Earth.

The Masters’ audience loved it, non-golf-players loved it, social media loved it and soon after launch we reached 100 million impressions and Ben’s (minimal) dialogue was being quoted liberally on TikTok. The Masters’ old-school reputation was for once not the focus, our work outperformed the previous year’s campaign and competing campaigns by 51%, our placements during the final round of the 2024 Masters performed 64% above the brand’s primetime average, a 66% improvement overall, and brand perception was, and is still, on a steep rise.