• by Aaron Baar , April 10, 2014

When things work together, they can create beautiful music. 

AT&T is making the claim that it can help make the world sing via its network and all of the ways it touches people’s lives with a new brand campaign. Using the Beach Boys’ anthem “Wouldn’t it be nice?” as its theme, the campaign, from BBDO New York, links together all of AT&T’s offerings — from personal consumer technology to business technology to home automation — working together in harmony. 

“We thought it would be wonderful to have this creative metaphor [of] when everything works together, the world just sings,” Rudy Wilson, vice president. brand management and advertising for AT&T, tells Marketing Daily. 

An anthemic launch spot begins with a sleepy town waking up. A woman turns on her home lights with her smartphone, school buses get on the move. A mother, singing the first lines of the song, tracks her son’s bus with her phone. The song continues as a man sings to his commuting girlfriend via tablet, and a mother finds her lost child in a mall via a connected device. The action spreads out to other areas of the globe, including a fishing boat, a desert safari, and a marathon. “At AT&T, we help people and things speak the same language,” says a voiceover, as the woman from the beginning goes to bed, turning off the house lights via phone. 

The new campaign employs the tagline, “Mobilizing Your World,” meant to address the lengths to which AT&T is going to develop its network and connectivity, and also how important mobility and mobile connectivity have become in people’s lives. The new line replaces AT&T’s four-year-old line, “Rethink Possible.”

“The goal of [the ‘Rethink Possible’] campaign was to let people know who we are, which is relentless innovation for human progress. But it didn’t tell people what we do in a clear way,” Wilson says. “‘Mobilizing Your World’ is telling people what we do as an organization.”

The campaign, which will officially launch during the 2014 Masters Tournament on ESPN and CBS, also features a heavy business-oriented component. Of the four initial spots created, two of them target small businesses, showing how they can benefit from AT&T’s capabilities and resources. The company is also launching a small business hub (called “Business Circle”) that will offer support, community and product ideas for businesses.

“We really wanted to make sure business leaders knew what we stood for,” Wilson says.