When Sprint Business seized the 5G high ground

Sprint Business: the B2B arm of multi-billion dollar telecoms giant Sprint, which merged with T-Mobile in 2020

In 2018, Sprint Corporation was the fourth biggest telecoms provider in the U.S. Its B2B division, Sprint Business, pioneered what was then an emerging technology for businesses…5G. Here’s what we said at the time:

5G is big news for business. But most businesses assume it’s just a faster version of 4G (hmmm… might be the name). To fix that—and to position Sprint Business as a 5G leader—we set out to be the best explainer on the internet on how 5G will affect businesses.

To do that, we did a ton of research, had a few dozen conversations with Sprint’s brilliant network engineers and architects, and out came a massive, integrated campaign. In short: our idea of fun.

The Ultimate 5G Explainer is the heart of the campaign. It’s a dynamic, scrolling experience that explains 5G in five ‘big leaps’—and drives people to a whole set of deeper content.

The Explainer is rich content in its own right. But it also contains 10 animated demos, 5 technical Q&As, 4 tech drill-downs, a search-optimized 5G Glossary, a Future Readiness Assessment and a new YouTube series called “Okay, But How?”.

To scale this campaign, we created ‘Planet Sprint’, a whole world built in CGI (like the city shown here). To make new visuals, we just zoom in, turn the virtual camera and—voilá—a new image for content, banner ads, social posts, whatever.

The 5G campaign has its own look and feel (still very much in the Sprint brand but also its own thing). We captured this campaign look and feel in a pretty comprehensive set of guidelines.

We didn’t want to do everything in CGI. We also needed a visual language for these mini-demos of 5G use cases.
Here’s some parting eye candy—wireframes that led to the final CGI animations.