T-Mobile’s growth over the past 10 years has been meteoric. But despite being the second largest US telco brand, they hadn’t yet made in-roads into small-town rural America, where our competitor, Verizon, dominates. Claiming the top spot meant winning over these audiences in small towns, who perceived T-Mobile as a brand for city slickers and not for them.

Sales data showed that in-store visitation is the channel most likely to drive switching of new prospects, so our goal was to increase store visitation by 10% in 282 key markets. But to get these rural residents through the door meant first convincing them to trust us.

With so much diversity across our 282 markets, a one-size fits all approach wouldn’t work for these target audiences. We needed a way to connect with their specific, local communities. And with Verizon being a more trusted telco brand by nearly 27%, trust could not simply be bought from afar; it needed to be built on the ground.

Uniting our audiences was a shared belief that local news (75%) was a more trusted source of information than national news (58%). But local news has been disappearing from local communities at an alarming rate, due to a lack of funding, private equity investment, and more recently, generative AI.

News deserts were growing across the country, and sources of trust were drying up.

Our strategy was to prove T-Mobile's commitment to community coverage with every connection, turning media into a mission to rebuild local news, by funding the creation of new, local networks.

We partnered with Patch; a digital network, where residents can enter their zip code and subscribe to local news. Patch wasn’t present in 40% of the 282 markets that we needed to reach, so we leveraged the same technology that’s threatening local news’ survival to save it.

Using Generative AI, we created geo-targeted, digital newsletters that summarized local stories for news-hungry subscribers, who weren’t yet in Patch’s network. Once a subscriber threshold was reached in that market, real journalists could then be deployed to write real stories, in real communities, featuring real people.

To build trust at a community level, readers were invited to nominate people making a difference within those local communities: Student Athletes, Hometown Heroes, Local Leaders. The initiative generated 5,000 positive news stories, written across 9,000 articles, digitally distributed through Patch, across our 282 markets.

We then anchored T-Mobile stores within these communities, creating and serving geo-dynamic maps, which surrounded the articles and directed readers to their nearest retail location.

The campaign ran from 1/1/23 – 12/31/23, leveraging seasonality and holidays to frame the local community heroes being celebrated, surrounding the content with seasonal offers, further incentivizing store visitation.

We beat our 10% visitation target, driving an increase in foot traffic of 14%, translating to 150,000 store visits, while reducing cost-per-visitation by 53%. Local digital emerged as T-Mobile’s most efficient channel in 2023, QoQ, based on MROI.

But beyond the stellar media results, our campaign was directly responsible bringing back local news to 99 communities and counting, reducing an estimated 8 years’ worth of local decline in local journalism, in just 12 months.9,000 articles received 3.8 million unique page views, with the campaign generating 199 million impressions -- 35 million impressions over the planned amount, worth $428,000 in added value.

Patch wrote an article, thanking T-Mobile for helping to expand local news coverage. And our work even received attention from Congress, with US Senator Mark Warner writing a special letter of congratulations.

We successfully managed to build trust for T-Mobile across Small Town/Rural America with commitment to community coverage.