People have a deeply embedded fear of using data roaming when they are on holiday because of something they call “bill-shock”. Yet their desire for being online increases when they are abroad because they want to find their way around to great shops, parties and sights in an unknown environment and even more importantly: share their precious holiday experiences real-time.

We picked up on this and developed a digital campaign for Telekom’s “Travel & Surf” data roaming passes, with the objective of no less than overcoming a deep fear and turning around consumer behavior. We knew this could not be done by an educational campaign loaded with rational information in a segment that is per se characterized by constant information overflow. So in order to earn peoples’ interest in a cluttered communication environment, we came up with an entertaining online “Mockumentary” that humorously mirrored travellers’ behavior of constantly being on the quest for Wi-Fi instead of enjoying their vacation. The story: José, our protagonist, lives in a sunny holiday paradise where all the tourists are constantly searching for Wi-Fi. To answer the holidaymakers’ needs, José trains and rents out dogs that can hear at much higher frequencies than humans to find great Wi-Fi signals. All the content created around this story lead to the website of José’s business - which turned out to be an entertaining but non-functional page – redirecting our audience to the fantastic local Travel & Surf product website instead.

Wi-Fi Dogs’ simple message ”Look for the Fun, not the Wi-Fi” directly answered a core consumer need and was communicated systematically to the target group at relevant touch-points and crucial moments. Because we knew that once the roaming fear sets in, it would be a very tough fight to convince people to use their Internet abroad. So we used media cleverly to win this fight before it even started. We focused our media on showing the relevance of data roaming abroad before people had even landed at their holiday destination through “Pre-travel activation”: We wanted to reach our customer during their travel preparations and make them consider packing mobile Internet into their bags as well. So we targeted our campaign towards social and news-related online contexts during the holiday season. And then there was a last call at the airport: geo-targeted mobile banners popped up to remind travellers to book their Travel & Surf pass.

As a result we were able to achieve an average sales growth of 26% across markets, where we had a marketing objective of 15%. We managed to achieve an average revenue growth of 52,5%, where marketing objectives were at 20%. We increased the first time user rate by 22% and were able to reach an above average engagement rate across all markets.

With the “Wi-Fi Dogs” campaign Telekom proved once more that they enable and encourage consumers to share their memorable moments, even when they are abroad.