Skip to main content

Deutsche Telekom set out to change how people viewed the role of a Deutsche Telekom employee. This innovative campaign challenged the expectations of potential employees. Immersing them in an interactive day-in-the-life experience and getting them to visualise themselves in the exciting role of a cutting-edge Telekom employee. 

DEUTSCHE TELEKOM - employee onboarding video

Engaging the Employees of the Future : the project

As a leading global company in communication and information technology, Deutsche Telekom has always faced preconceived ideas about what it would be like to work for them. 

Deutsche Telekom wanted to show that they are a fast-paced, fun company where everyone communicates at eye level regardless of their position. A company that describes itself as “shaping the digital world of tomorrow with innovative solutions”, attracting and engaging cutting-edge future employees to continue this mission. 

Their aim: Create an innovative way of communicating with potential candidates in order to change the perception they had of Telekom as an employer. 

The team decided that creating an interactive video was going to be key for this project early on. They want to engage their audience and get them thinking about their future career possibilities with Deutsche Telekom. 

Matthew Murray, U.S. Digital Learning Leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers recently wrote that “Interactive video puts you in the middle of the action and enables you to drive the experience”. By making the viewer/gamer the central character of this interactive day-in-the-life experience, they can truly start to visualise what their day-to-day life would be like if they worked at Telekom. 

You decide:
Where to go,
Who to meet with,
What to do next.
You play your day. Think wisely, the decision is yours

Calling the Creatives : the brief

With an audience built up of thousands of potential employees, the pressure was on. The team needed to teach, engage and, most importantly, challenge any negative preconceived ideas about having Telekom as an employer. 

By creating an interactive video, the team were hoping to engage a young and tech-savy audience. With this interactive day-in-the-life experience, viewers/games take on the role of a Telekom Employee. They are able to virtually experience working with Telekom and, in doing so, begin to visualise themselves in that role and gain a different, more updated perspective on the company. 

As part of a wider project LOVE IT TO BITS, #PlayYourDay was designed to feature on a site with other games, mostly nostalgic 8-bits. Onboarding prospective Telekom employees to the company in a fun, innovative and engaging way.

DEUTSCHE TELEKOM - employee onboarding video

Interactive video made simple : getting Stornaway.io involved in the conversation

“When we were starting the project we knew we wanted to do an interactive video but were unsure how to do it … We even considered coding it ourselves!” – Leo Bentley, Deutsche Telekom Global Business Solutions Iberia

We often discover that new customers are relieved to find us! This was not the first time that we’ve heard that a team were about to take on the daunting challenge of coding the video themselves. 

In fact, the reason that Stornaway.io exists is that we were in need of software just like Stornaway for our own interactive productions.

Our vision for Stornaway.io is to make it super easy for filmmakers to dream up and deliver fun, complex, multilayered non-linear stories. Without coding, without complexity…

DEUTSCHE TELEKOM - employee onboarding video

#PlayYourDay : the interactive story

The video takes the viewer/gamer on a journey through a typical day of a Telekom employee. Beginning when the character (you!) wakes, making decisions within the first minute – choosing tea or coffee as the morning beverage. 

The story progresses with the choice of travel to the office – and the decisions that come out of this, such as who drives / what music you listen to. When you arrive at the office, your decisions continue to have knock-on consequences, allowing you to interact with other members of the company (a fantastic way to introduce some of the key people within the company). 

DEUTSCHE TELEKOM - employee onboarding video

This video has a huge amount of replayability factor – who might you meet if you take the elevator instead of the stairs? What if you went by bike rather than car?

Why Stornaway.io was the perfect tool for creating #PlayYourDay

1. Stornaway – built for everyone! From non-technical people to creative experts

“Stornaway.io was great it really made the whole process simpler we had been looking at other tools and none offered the simple interface that Stornaway.io did. It really helped to keep the overall storyline of the video organised.”– Leo Bentley, Deutsche Telekom Global Business Solutions Iberia

You don’t have to be technical or a video editor to use Stornaway.io – we have people from all areas of business, marketing, education and entertainment using the tools and loving them! 

This versatility unblocked any major problems for interactive content creation in this project.  Allowing the team to move from idea to reality quickly and iteratively – and to communicate across large teams based in multiple locations.

2. An editing application, as important to your team as Adobe Premiere 

“We decided to take the leap and get Stornaway.io approved by the business as it really met all our needs” – Leo Bentley, Deutsche Telekom Global Business Solutions Iberia

Unlike other interactive video systems, Stornaway.io is a subscription as a service and built to be interoperable with other production processes.  We provide support and scale as required but we don’t need to be involved with any of the technical or creative processes. 

Getting started is easy – you sign up for a free trial online and then when you are ready, choose our monthly or annual subscription plans.    

Bringing this new tool into Deutsche Telekom increased collaboration and productivity on this project. The marketing department could work easily with the video team and share early iterations with stakeholders for approval.

3. Spend time on content creation, not coding 

“The tool was super easy to use, we had no issues. We will be using it more as we are going to produce different language versions of the video.” Leo Bentley, Deutsche Telekom Global Business Solutions Iberia

Until now, interactive/immersive video experiences have been hard and so the creative output has been limited. 

With Stornaway.io, the Deutsche Telekom creative teams could up-skill quickly and, rather than spending time working out how to code the interactivity, more money and time could be spent ‘onscreen’ and on the “playability” of the story. 

Upload complete : Project Success & Next Steps 

The interactive day-in-the-life experience is live, globally, and playable on the LOVE IT TO BITS webpage. 

The team are getting ready to produce different language versions of #PlayYourDay which they can do by simply duplicating the Story Map in  Stornaway.io and adding subtitled clips to the same Story Islands. Then the whole project can be exported in minutes and shared on any website or LMS. 

Why Interactive video is so engaging?

For years, Marketing departments have used interactive video to increase engagement, with recent research showing that interactive content is 81% more effective at keeping an audience’s attention.

Companies that put a big emphasis on the onboarding process are also seeing an increase in engagement. New employee retention improved by a whopping 82% in companies that had a strong onboarding process. Find out how you can use Stornaway to create your onboarding videos.

Until Stornaway.io came about, creating playable stories like this has been very hard to do without big budgets, consultancy and large teams. 

With Stornaway.io’s Analytics feature, stakeholders are also able to track the paths that most viewers take, the most popular choices, giving them crucial insight into their audience’s preferences* and enabling them to improve the story with live updates at any time. 

Please get in touch if you would like to talk about using Stornaway.io for your business.

Find out more about why people use Stornaway for their Scenario-based learning and training with interactive videos.

*Stornaway.io’s analytics protect viewers data and privacy by only tracking overall information about total number of viewers
for different Story Islands and choices as well as average watch time without specifics on viewers.
Our API enables businesses to integrate Stornaway.io within their own data tracking systems if required.