CUSTOMIZABLE VIDEO: “WORK FOR WILL”

The Nokia Lumia 920 smart phone was the first smart phone using the Windows Mobile live tile interface. We wanted to figure out a way to encourage users to experience how they could customize these tiles on their phone to create a personalized experience. We hit upon the metaphor that this phone functioned like a personal assistant, bringing to a person the information and applications that was most important to them in real time. A team of high-powered creatives and technologists from companies like BBDO, Caviar, The Famous Group and Good People worked together to bring this idea to life.

We did so in the form of a contest — a contest to become the real-life assistant to “Arrested Development” star and comedian Will Arnett. AT&T challenged users to personalize their own virtual Lumia 920 and submit it — like a job application — to Will, who would “judge” the submission and select a winner. The winner of the contest would become his personal assistant for a day. To enter the contest, users explore the customization possibilities that the Lumia allowed, exploring the features of the phone at the same time. Upon submitting the customized Start Screen as their contest entry, users would immediately get a personalized reaction video from Will, based on the apps selected. Users were prompted as well to campaign for votes on social media in order to attract Will's attention, further spreading the word at the contest, and the phone.

My role on the project was to flesh out the initial creative idea and explore the initial user experience for the phone exporation and contest entry portions of the experience. We worked with our partners to further define and refine the end experience — we worked closely Microsoft’s mobile UX team to help ensure that the virual phone’s UI was an actual reflection of the actual phone’s UI — made somewhat trickier by the fact that that UI was still in flux and the phone had not yet been released as we were working on this project.

In the end, “Work for Will” served over 130,000 customized rendered videos, each unique to the person who created it. The Work for Will contest received over 1.2 million votes.

Year: 2012
Client: AT&T