This Alaskan Telecom Used a Secret Laboratory and More to Celebrate Its Heritage
While we at LBB are not telecommunications experts, it certainly seems inarguable that servicing a state like Alaska would not be easy. It’s vast, it’s rugged, and when the brand GCI launched 45 years ago, it was facing an uphill battle from the start. Seeking to disrupt the aggressive costs of long distance services which the state was reliant on, it braved these conditions and came up with ingenious solutions (such as dispatching actual scuba divers to connect an 800-mile subsea fibre system to the Aleutian Islands) in order to bring reliable communications, internet and cable services to everyone, creating a network that is over 10,000 miles across in the process.
Naturally, hearing a story like this is pretty awesome. So, you’d think that it’d prove a great angle for marketing, but that’s not entirely the case. In the past, GCI had tried to celebrate angles like these and its unique heritage in order to make it stand out against the competitors surging in from the lower 48 states, but the tone had come off not quite as the brand intended. So, when creative agency Cossette came on board to launch a new brand platform, it knew it needed to toe the line precisely.
The result of this was a super fun campaign centred around a secret laboratory hidden away in the Alaskan mountains. Titled ‘Wildly Ingenious’, the work used the zany location, fun dialogue and great costuming to centre a truth – its incredible heritage and achievements – in humour. Ranging from showcasing Brenda the Alaskan marmot being trained to work for the company to preparing a diver for deep sea exploration, all of it served to showcase that for a brand like GCI, there’s nothing that can’t be done – just things it hasn’t done… yet.
To learn more about just what it took to bring this to life, and why this was the right approach for a uniquely Alaskan brand, LBB’s Jordan Won Neufeldt sat down with Cossette’s associate creative director Michael Pal, as well as GCI’s director of marketing campaigns, Jared Shary, for a chat.
LBB> From the top, what was the brief for this campaign, and what immediate ideas came to mind?
Jared> The brief was to build brand affinity by humanising GCI. We are a local behemoth in the state, but we’re made up of everyday neighbours working and living directly in the communities we serve. We’re tackling technical challenges that no one else has before, as well as connecting Alaska – something that takes guts and serious ingenuity to achieve, considering how vast and rugged it is. So, with this, we saw an opportunity to tell our story in a way that could really capture attention in a crowded media space and resonate across generations.
Cossette had storied experience with other arctic clients in Canada and came in truly excited from the start. Plus, we were looking to reinvent ourselves with this campaign and wanted an agency to push our creative bounds. Cossette demonstrated that skill from the beginning, while grounding all its recommendations in solid data.
Michael> Despite being born out of Alaska and boasting the state’s most advanced telecommunications network, GCI was coming up against perceptions it had grown too big to be local, while at the same time, faced increasing competitive pressure from lower 48 providers who completely lacked regional know-how. We knew we needed to position GCI as the one and only provider capable of tackling Alaska’s extraordinary environments and the unique needs of its communities.
LBB> Launching a new platform and direction is never easy. Specifically, what made celebrating GCI’s accomplishments and desire to push further the right creative tone for this task?
Michael> The truth is, no other telecom in Alaska can make the kind of claims GCI can make. It's a rare opportunity to get to work with a client that has this level of bragging-rights, so, it made sense to lean into that rebellious, confident tone, and celebrate the ‘wildly ingenious’ engineering it does that, frankly, none of the competitors can hold a candle to. Plus, it made it fun as hell to work on.
Jared> Since our inception, we’ve been a company of relentless progress. We’ve had many firsts, not only for Alaska, but for the industry as a whole. However, we’ve tried to tell this story before, but it tends to come across as ‘look what we’ve done for you’. So, for this, we wanted a more entertaining way to celebrate our accomplishments while looking ahead. We think we hit the mark.
LBB> Building on this, what are some of GCI’s greatest accomplishments within Alaska? Can you provide some deeper context to the sequences highlighted by the spot?
Jared> GCI started in a garage 45 years ago to disrupt the enormously high long distance telephone costs of the time. From there, we quickly grew to offer cable TV, internet, and mobile services. GCI was the first to bring one and two gig internet service to Alaska, at a time when many of the biggest cities in the world didn’t have access to those speeds. Today, 80% of Alaskans have access to 2.5 gbps internet from GCI. That includes our largest cities, as well as ultra remote communities as small as a few hundred people.
Later, GCI was the first to deploy a 5G mobile network in Alaska, making it one of the first regional carriers to launch 5G in North America. Today, our network spans more than 10,000 miles across the most treacherous terrain you can find. That’s as long as driving from Los Angeles to New York and back, twice over.
In the campaign, the secret lab nestled in the Alaska range is a playful exaggeration of our real-world innovation. It took a ton of testing to deploy the first 5G network in Alaska. We’ve dispatched actual scuba divers to connect an 800-mile subsea fibre system to the Aleutian Islands. As for training a marmot to be a network engineer – well, we’re still working on that one.
LBB> From here, what was the writing process like? How did you showcase GCI’s achievements in a subtle way, while also striking the right balance of tone and humour within the narrator’s script?
Michael> Writing this was hilarious. I don’t think any of us have ever laughed that hard at work before! The amount of Brenda the Alaskan marmot jokes we have stashed away for future scripts is near infinite.
But beyond the humour, it was about grounding GCI’s achievements in truth, while also showing them in a heightened, more visually entertaining way. After all, modern technological innovation is not the most exciting thing to watch. It’s usually just people on their computers. The dry deadpan tone just fit really well within this world we created.
Jared> All in all, the writing process was super collaborative. Cossette took lead in humour and entertainment, while I played brand advocate to ensure our history and core values were accurately represented. I surfaced GCI’s major accomplishments, milestones, and the challenges we’d overcome. I also shared insights into Alaska’s culture and norms. By combining the team’s creative expertise and our intimate knowledge of the brand and local culture, we were able to strike the perfect balance between creativity and reality. This partnership ensured that the final script was not only entertaining, but also authentically GCI.
LBB> From there, in terms of the shooting process, what was that experience like? How long did it take, and do you have any anecdotes from on set?
Michael> Tone and delivery was really important since the spot is so dialogue-led. Our director, Mike Maguire, is a master at getting the talent into the zone, which frees up time to experiment with alternative takes and see what made everyone on set genuinely laugh. The shoot was a very fast and furious two days, but everyone was so dialled in that it was super efficient and felt effortless. And I can’t say too much, but we may have smoked and eaten an entire giant salmon in the parking lot on the last day, in true Alaska fashion.
LBB> The spot’s visual aesthetics are awesome! How did you go about set design, and making the lab feel remote yet technologically advanced?
Michael> We started by defining a visual world for the lab and approached it like we were creating a film or TV series. We established creative rules such as giving all of our contraptions an engineered, analog look, and including subtle hints of Alaska wilderness, like a marmot, or the fact that the lab exists inside an Alaskan mountain range with occasional exposed rock walls. The goal was to create a space filled with tech that made you think, ‘I don’t know what that is or what it does, but it looks impressive’.
LBB> And what was the post process like? What did it take to bring the final cut together?
Michael> Matt Kett at School Editing and Marco Polsinelli from Fort York were great partners in the post process. They were on set with us, so they already had a good handle on the takes we were liking and what we were aiming for. The edit was mostly just fine-tuning those comedic beats and landing the jokes in the right places, while avoiding oversaturating every scene with too many hats on hats.
LBB> What lessons have you learned during the making of this campaign?
Michael> The main thing we’re taking away from this campaign is just how important trust is between agency and clients. Launching a new brand platform is a big leap of faith, and that trust we’ve built with GCI allowed us to make something interesting that will resonate with Alaskans. More importantly, it laid the groundwork for a campaign that people will be excited to follow as it continues to evolve, with these characters and this world growing over the next few years.
Jared> People love an animal sidekick! I’ve got to admit, when Cossette first pitched an animatronic marmot and shared the cost associated, I was sceptical. To the team’s credit, they came prepared with compelling data on how animals increase brand connection and affinity. As campaign feedback begins to pour in, it's abundantly clear that people love Brenda the marmot. So much so that we’re ordering 10,000 stuffed marmots to give away at our retail stores.
LBB> Speaking of responses, since launch, how have people reacted?
Michael> So far, there’s been an overwhelmingly positive response. Most telecom advertising from the major carriers in Alaska is the same work they’re running in the lower 48 states. But Alaska is unique, so having a tailor-made campaign for Alaskans by an Alaskan brand is definitely striking a chord.
Jared> It’s still early, but I’d classify the reaction as overwhelmingly supportive. The campaign is standing out as intended and is making people pay attention. GCI employees, in particular, have been major advocates of the work. It’s giving our staff a new reason to appreciate and be proud of the place they work, which has been really rewarding to see.
LBB> How does this campaign fit into GCI’s branding for 2024 and beyond?
Jared> ‘Wildly Ingenious’ is here to stay. This brand platform and our secret mountain lab will serve as the theme of our marketing efforts for the foreseeable future. We’ve already created two new campaigns under its umbrella – one for the iPhone 16 launch, and another for our mobile and internet product bundle, GCI+. This platform has considerable flexibility in storytelling opportunities that will differentiate us in the market. We have so many ideas we can’t wait to bring to life.
LBB> Finally, do you have an element of the project you’re most proud of? And why?
Michael> There is a distinct Alaskan feel we think we captured with this platform and campaign, and people up there are responding really well. As a Canadian creative agency, we’re very proud of that. And, of course, the comedy – making people laugh and not just blow air forcefully out their noses is not as easy as it looks.
Jared> I love how uniquely Alaskan and uniquely GCI this campaign is. No other brand could put its name on this and have it make sense – that’s something rare in advertising today. It authentically reflects who we are in a way that feels fresh and exciting.
I also appreciate how it celebrates the achievements of our employees in a way they can embrace. It’s clever, distinct, and genuinely funny, which is precisely what we were hoping to achieve.
