In a period of post-COVID economic downturn and increasing inflation, Hungarian society faced significant challenges. The proximity of war and future uncertainty created a sense of hopelessness that made customers reassess their expenditures in all areas. People were seeking value for money solutions, trying to maintain their quality of life and outsmart the polycrisis. As the market leader, customers perceived Telekom as high quality and reliable, however also the most premium-priced option. While customers had a good perception of the brand they were not aware of all the included features and benefits they could enjoy at Telekom, therefore services prices were seen as premium and not necessarily good value. Telekom needed a solid strategy to make it worth it for customers to stay with them.

Introducing Hungarians to Mars! A thirteen episode comedy, a unique Hungarian mockumentary, airing for free, on YouTube, to lift spirits and help our brand stay relevant. As co-producers - not just sponsors -, we’ve directly teamed up with A-list trash creators and actors, portraying a small enterprise that by accident becomes a NASA contractor. Yes. In a country where we can hardly build decent highways, we shot a series about building rockets to Mars. And people loved it.

Is that all? We shot a series? So what?

For the whole thing to really make an impact, we’ve used the characters of Hungarians to Mars in dozens of funny commercials, hundreds of display and social assets, to communicate more than eighty factors making us the best choice during a crisis.

Hungarians are famous for their special sense of quite dark humor and their tendency to use this humor as a coping mechanism and place of escape in tough times. Telekom decided to leverage this by creating an entertainment content ecosystem based on a mockumentary series that would inspire many laugh out loud moments the target audience would certainly appreciate and find a way to make them see all the valuable features the brand gives them. Making the content actually funny and also carry the brand messaging was of coarse no easy task. So the brand teamed up with seasoned online comedy creators KMH films who already had some viral comedy productions under their belt. Besides developing the series, the joint client-agency-production team also designed the brand content structure around it, making sure that the Telekom brand and "goodies" were featured in a way consumers can appreciate them.

We saw double-digit growth in areas like “they care about me”, “good value for money”, or “helping me with useful solutions”. And the hard metrics went through the roof as well. Look!

Our ads doubled the ad recall level versus the forecast

+2250% Google search level on making TVs smart, in the first week, +250% during the whole campaign period

+21% in-app visits on the list of experiences, compared to previous month

4-5 of 6 ads in “top recall” were from Telekom on the telco market

Mind-blowing boost in recall across the whole period

Hungarians to Mars went from ad breaks and YouTube, to being bought by the largest national TV station and amazingly even Netflix, proving that when the world makes people leave their comfort zones, a relevant brand has to stay with them.