Cool Telekom

Telekom Romania was officially established in the year 2014 following a huge merge and rebranding process. Thousands of employees from different professional and cultural backgrounds were reunited under the DT brand. As expected, this was bound to create internal struggle. Employees were visibly affected by the recent developments on the market and simply found it difficult to understand why being part of Telekom is a great thing for their career and prospects.

In order to positively change the employees’ and candidates’ perceptions and to boost employee morale, we developed two strategic pillars for the approach of the campaign: give the staff reasons to believe that they are part of a great team; give the team the feeling that they are COOL. Using these pillars we also developed the creative concept – Embrace the Reality! and the core messages for the internal rollout – Accept the Challenge – and external rollout – Looking for a warm place? Don’t apply!

For the internal rollout, we created a weekly “Accept the Challenge” contest, with 8 editions, each hosted by a different department. Through a short video, they would introduce themselves in a cool way to the rest of the company and offer everyone the chance to win a cool prize. For each episode, we chose to have a metaphorical theme that embodies in a cool way the strengths and peculiarities of the featured department: Cool Performance, Cool Idea, Cool Help, Cool Collaboration, Cool Sharing, Cool Supporter, Cool Challenger, Cool Point of View. After the great success and instant popularity of the first 3 episodes, other teams in the company expressed their desire to participate. Consequently, the final number of challenges increased by 50%, to 12 challenges. The internal campaign ended with the Cool Telekom Workshop, through which a Telekom Employee Culture Book was developed.

For the external rollout, we created for Telekom a development frame for positive visibility and word of mouth. This involved appearing in interviews with top management and key employees; participating in job fairs, Social Media extended editorials and events related to career and HR. We backend all this actions by communicating extensively and endorsing the key messages of the campaign through social media.

Despite the difficulties of the timing, the campaign was a huge success, with a number of 710 employees taking part in the 12 challenges. Across the company, 56 team members accepted to participate in the video shootings, which had 9,205 views, an absolute record for an internal campaign, with 50% of the employees watching every video of the campaign. Using very disruptive creative and communication approaches, that promoted the key values of Telekom through original ides, the campaign was extremely popular and managed to change the paradigm. The 3 months of continuous communication proved that great effort brings amazing results when you put your mind and your heart to it. The campaign presented a new model of partnership and involvement from the internal stakeholders, proving that the company can use multidisciplinary resources to create something original that inspires and motivates everyone to become better.