AT&T Business: Wake Up with CrAIg

AT&T Business | Wake Up with CrAIg

Role: Senior Social Strategist | Critical Mass (2025)

The Setup: AT&T Business needed to matter to small business owners, not just serve them. The category is full of brands talking about speed, uptime, and savings. But small business owners don't wake up thinking about their telecom provider. They wake up thinking about whether today is going to be worth it.

The Insight: Small business owners wear every hat. Sales, ops, IT, HR — it all lands on the same person. AT&T Business wanted to own the tech hat: to be the SME small business owners trust when it comes to speed, reliability, and security. But credibility with that audience isn't claimed through specs. It's earned through recognition.

So we asked: who does the American small business owner actually see themselves in?

Not a Silicon Valley founder. Not a Fortune 500 exec. Someone scrappy, lovable, and figuring it out as they go. Someone from The Office.

The Strategy: This campaign didn't start from scratch — it built on the Cannes-winning Sleep with Rainn (featuring Rainn Wilson), which proved that an Office cast member running a real small business with real AT&T Business tools could move consideration with enterprise decision-makers.

Year two went further. Craig Robinson. A bigger business. A wilder premise. And a simple, powerful message underneath all of it: if he can do it, you can too with AT&T.

We shifted from telling small business owners what AT&T Business does to showing them what's possible when you have the right tech partner in your corner.

The Play: Before AT&T ran a single paid impression, earned media had already done the heavy lifting: 443 media hits, 4B+ estimated reach, and 1.5M+ organic views from Craig and Rainn Wilson alone — 40K likes and thousands of shares before launch day.

When the reveal dropped, Craig quit comedy to start a business, Wake Up With CrAIg, an AI alarm clock that wakes you up with personalized affirmations, my role was to make sure social didn't just amplify the moment. It had to sustain it.

Our team and I built the campaign's social ecosystem across Meta, TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat, and LinkedIn — extending the narrative through paid while keeping the world of CrAIg grounded in the daily realities of small business owners. Every platform had a distinct job. Together, they kept the story alive across an entire year.

The Signal: Post-launch, I led social listening to track what was actually landing. In the first week alone: 7,030+ mentions, up 154% vs. prior period. Positive sentiment up 165%. Those numbers weren't just a health report — they shaped what got made next. Insights from the listening work fed directly back into content and production decisions, letting the campaign evolve in real time rather than run on a fixed calendar.

The Result 8.9B total PR impressions. 2.3B mentioning AT&T specifically. 467M digital impressions. 26M social impressions across AT&T handles. 853% increase in AT&T handle impressions. 33% lift in TikTok engagement. "Meet Wake Up With Craig" became the highest-performing spot against Enterprise Business Decision Makers.