And then it got weird.

In the middle of the pandemic, things got…weird. Life couldn’t go on as normal, but business could—maybe. For GTT, the sudden shift to home offices and hybrid work meant businesses had to re-evaluate their connectivity options. It was a bit of a double edged sword, as a lot of their customers weren’t using nearly as much bandwidth for their offices, but at the same time needed gobs of bandwidth for cloud datacenters that could serve employees at home.

One SD-WAN to rule them all.

That’s where we came in. SD-WAN wasn’t just a great solution in the best of times, it turned out to be a great solve for businesses dealing with the new workforce reality in the worst of times. That much was simple. But all the competitors knew the same thing, and had the same pitch. We needed to talk about what made GTT different.

The extra mile.

GTT is a challenger brand. It can’t afford to rest on its laurels and hope for the best. It needs to try harder, be more committed than anyone else to win business in what the CEO at the time described as a “commodity service.” After interviewing customers, it was clear what set GTT apart was its people—real ones, there for customers the entire way, on call 24/7—during planning, migration, and after launch. No phone trees. No chat bots. No support tickets filed to be addressed in a day or two (or never). All the way up to the branches of the tree where the c-suite hangs, GTT was there in a very human way.

What’s in the box?

Oh—funny thing about those customer interviews. In the middle of the pandemic, the typical approach to sending out a film crew and the creative team to interview a customer on camera was an obvious no-go. So, we got creative. To help tell the story from the customer's side, we devised an interview-in-a-box—a shipped box that contained a DSLR (with settings dialed in), lav mic, portable lights, and a handy setup guide for customers. From there, we could interview them over video chat, and grab footage (more importantly, audio) that was better than a web meeting recording could provide.

We also developed a mechanism to make a customer case study more entertaining—introducing a narrator that could do things like bridge the gaps in the story and handle set up, so we could rely on customer perspectives to provide an emotional lift with words directly from the source.

Bringing it all together.

This, and other assets such as pre-roll, emails, banner ads, and paid social were used in service of an integrated campaign that sent prospects to a landing page. Here, it was possible to explore lots of deep information in bite sized chunks—all thanks to interactive components on the site. And, to pay off the idea that GTT goes the extra mile, instead of a simple lead form, we let the prospect select which expert they’d personally like to chat with. This showed the customer that they aren’t just handed off to some random sales rep, but one of the smartest people in the room—one that takes time out of their busy schedule to talk.

Swing and a drive!

There were a lot of firsts for us on this project that also became standard operating procedures throughout the pandemic. Sometimes you can’t just lay off the curveball if it’s a strike—you have to adjust your timing to knock it out of the park.