Since its founding in 2007, congstar, a product brand of Deutsche Telekom, has developed into an established mobile communications provider with more than six million customers that focuses on fair, transparent and low-cost mobile communications contracts. Since 2019, Macaw has been designing and producing successful content for all of congstar’s relevant social media channels in order to increase brand awareness among the user groups represented there. As part of the large-scale summer campaign #StehtDir, the focus was recently on clear attitude messages instead of classic product advertising – with the aim of reaching and emotionalizing the young target group of Gen Z in particular.
congstar is an early adopter of TikTok and YouTube Shorts
congstar was launched as Deutsche Telekom’s second brand with the goal of expanding the German market with fair and low-cost mobile contracts as an unconventional and young alternative. While congstar’s offerings target young audience such as Gen Z and Millennials, the majority of its users are mostly significantly older. Macaw’s goal as the lead social media agency is to increase awareness of the brand and its offerings, especially among young people.
With the support of Macaw (full service from social media strategy, creation and production to community management), congstar often breaks new ground and experiments. For example, congstar relied on creators in front of the camera on its social channels at an early stage and was already able to successfully launch a TikTok channel in 2019 as an early adopter and the first mobile brand in Germany. In addition, congstar was again one of the pioneers in 2022, demonstrating increasing organic growth and remarkable engagement rates with YouTube Shorts. The key to successful communication is for the agency and client not only to recognize the trends in the fast-moving marketing landscape, but also to adapt and implement them.
#StehtDir campaign demonstrates growing importance of social media communication
The best example of this is the #StehtDir campaign, for which congstar used a consistent social-first approach for the first time for its overarching annual campaign in the summer of 2022. With success: the campaign won a gold award in the “Social Media & Influencer Marketing” category at the “Annual Multimedia Awards”. The special features: This time, the creation did not start with a TV spot that was then extended to other channels. Instead, Macaw developed the creative concept of the campaign together with the classic and media agency from the very beginning. In doing so, the company deliberately relied on attitude messages that paid tribute to congstar’s brand values of “honesty” and “fairness”, rather than deriving the advertising from specific product offerings. This increased brand awareness, especially among the young target group.
The campaign was implemented with four established creators in the congstar cosmos, who had already played the leading roles in the two TV spots. The activation then took place via a total of 16 additional content creators and their personal #StehtDir moments – prepared in more than 160 unique video assets for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts. A special branded effect on TikTok, which generated more than 10 million views in the first three days of the campaign, was used as a hero asset to playfully engage with the campaign message.
“Macaw is a team player who easily collaborates with other agencies to achieve top-notch results – that’s a unique selling point in a competitive market.” – Emelie Izquierdo Torres, Social Media Manager at congstar
Social media strategy is not a rigid manifesto, but a guideline
Its success proves that tried and tested approaches can quickly become outdated, especially in the social media cosmos. That’s why Macaw is working with and for congstar to develop a broad strategy for various channels. The strategy does not serve as a rigid manifesto, but rather as a content guideline that is constantly adapted to specific channels in order to meet the growing challenge of producing and managing a high volume of relevant content.
