EE is the UK’s leading phone network. In 2023 following worrying reports on teenage mental health & several high profile cases of online bullying, EE wanted to help parents navigate growing up with phones.

Our strategy:

Get parents, who see the light and the dark of phones and tech, to trust EE with a far greater share of their lives by serving them with tools, services & content that help them harness technology to improve their everyday.

Our brief:

First, EE wanted to demonstrate understanding of how difficult it is growing up with phones.

Second, we wanted to start a conversation about online harms, between families on every sofa in the UK, and direct them towards EE’s resources to support, educate and navigate. These included a PhoneSmart license, a training module on online safety.

If successful, EE would help thousands of young teenagers live a healthier life online.

In the UK, when kids go to high school, lots of them are finally trusted with a house-key of their own and a first phone to keep in touch with their parents, is a big moment in life. These walks home can be the longest, loneliest walks, or the first days of the rest of your life. Filled with possibility and jeopardy. Unsupervised in the real world, and unsupervised on their phones. We wanted to capture this authentic world and the role that phones play in them.

Parenthood is the tyranny of teaching your children to leave you.

For working parents, the hours between school finishing at 4pm and getting home from work at 6pm can be fraught with worry. But for their kids it’s a time of unsupervised free time where they learn about the ups and downs of life, friendship, sex, power, and play. All mediated by phones.

Alongside this freedom also comes the threat - with online bullying affecting over one in five British children, with huge consequences at individual and societal levels.

We believed that if we could speak to this moment - in a child’s life and a parent’s day we could trigger a powerful nostalgia for a parent’s own teenage years, while highlighting the harms that their kids will experience.

Firstly for a modern British brand like EE, we needed a British track that reflected the brand's heritage. ‘So here we are’ by Bloc Party is a British anthem from a very British band.

Secondly, the music needed to drive the aesthetic of the film. Bloc Party’s ‘So here we are’ helps to spark a sense of nostalgia in parents, as they associate it with their own teenage years.

Finally the music needed to act as a storytelling vehicle, driving the narrative on. Melancholic riffs land a moment in time. Bittersweet percussion mirrors the progression of the kids' journeys home. A sense of reflection for the struggles they face. The lyrics from “so here we are” helping to mirror the journey of children's lives, here we are, this is how it is, but we can figure it out, there is help at hand - in the form of EE.

This film was part of an integrated brand relaunch with multiple assets. At launch weekend, EE’s TV advertising reached over 23 million people. This drove a huge mention across social, with the conversation reaching nearly 7m. Searches for EE were up 10% YoY in UK.

After the launch EE has seen exceptional results.

Masterbrand (home internet & mobile network) consideration, a metric typically very slow to move, has jumped by 6%, making EE the number 2 telco brand.

For mobile network specifically, this campaign has moved us back above O2 in the battle for #1, opening up our biggest lead in over a year.

While the rest of the category has seen footfall to store decline by 3%, EE’s has increased by 8%.

We heard from social listening and comms tracking the impact the creative had,

“It filled me with nostalgia from my childhood - I miss them days”

“I texted my son to check he was ok - it really helped me see what he has been going through”

What’s more, during the campaign period we drove 800,000 incremental visits to the EE content site, where 24,000 young people have accessed tools and services.