MagentaTV is the latest TV-entertainment product by Deutsche Telekom, Germany's biggest telecom provider. It brings together the whole world of entertainment on an innovative interface and revolutionizes TV-watching in Germany. We tried to prove this with an entertainment format as revolutionary as MagentaTV.

For our campaign we teamed up with two of Germany’s best-known actors: Fahri Yardim and Christian Ulmen. Thanks to their talent for improvisation, they particularly appealed to a young target audience. So we planned to engage this audience even more. As they primarily use smartphones and messaging services to stay in contact and consume content, we quickly decided on the fitting medium to use for our approach: WhatsApp. But since the platform does not allow conventional advertising, we developed a format focused on dialogue, which was no advertising in the traditional sense – the world's first interactive comedy show on WhatsApp. The basic idea: Christian and Fahri failed to read the small print in their advertising contract – and now they try everything to avoid the promo jobs they asked to do.

Our target group was between 18 and 44 years of age, at home in the digital world, particularly on social media. They are exceptionally passionate about watching TV series, which makes them the perfect target group for MagentaTV. However, they have a negative attitude towards conventional advertising. And they frequently use WhatsApp. A medium that does not allow conventional advertising.

So we developed a highly entertaining format tailor-made for MagentaTV and WhatsApp. An idea perfectly matching the talent of our testimonials, the target group, and the requirements of the platform.

The first ever comedy show on WhatsApp opened a completely new communication channel for the brand: Entertainment created particularly for WhatsApp. We used all types of media supported by WhatsApp and created the illusion of a real chat: from texts, photos, audio-files to films. For nine days, the young target audience freely engaged in the dialogue and with the content. The underlying idea of the (unread) advertising contract allowed us to organically incorporate the brand Telekom, its products as well as parts of the advertising campaign into the communication.

Over the whole duration of the campaign, a five figure number of people participated. On average, each of the participants wrote 4.2 messages. In total, users engaged with the content for more than 3.000 hours.

90% of the feedback was positive and the interaction rate was four times higher than on Facebook. Many participants recommended the content to their friends and helped to spread the word – 15% of all registrations were a result of "word of mouth" recommendations.