Point Oh!

It’s hard to really figure out what the strategy was behind AT&T’s “Build Your Digital World” campaign except that someone probably yelled out “social networking!” in a room full of advertising creatives.  The campaign appears to be a half-hearted attempt to build community in order to either engage AT&T wireless customers with the company’s key messages or possibly to gather data on prospects to figure out how to better market to them.

Although hosted on an AT&T wireless domain, the site is credited to AT&T Knowledge Ventures, which is supposedly now know as AT&T Intellectual Property (although both sites are still copyright Knowledge Ventures).  While it isn’t a bulletproof theory, AT&T Knowledge Ventures exists to protect trademarks and is generally only used for the company’s advertising.

The site basically has two main components.  The first is that it allows you to build a profile in a DNA-like way for how you use digital communications technology.  The exercise is simple but not really entertaining enough to make you want to share it with anyone.  Since viewing what are essentially survey responses from strangers isn’t appealing to anyone, the other main draw of the site is that you can view an NFL quarterback’s (Vince Young) profile, except that all the answers are still pretty boilerplate.

The main problem is that AT&T gives you no reason to register and share yourself on this site, which defeats the purpose of all social media.  A better way to go would’ve been to focus on the experience of creating your digital DNA and then make the exploring process as visually engaging as possible.  Otherwise the digital world that you create is a very lonely world, which hardly speaks to AT&T’s “new direction.”