Filmmaker David Fortune was the winner of AT&T’s 2023 Untold Stories Pitch Competition.
A longstanding partner of the Tribeca Festival, AT&T activated during the New York film event, June 7-18, with the AT&T Untold Stories Lounge, which resulted in three-times the amount of foot traffic, year over year. Designed to give attendees an open, creative space to discuss ideas, hear from industry experts and gain inspiration, the lounge was a facet of AT&T’s festival sponsorship centerpiece: the Untold Stories Pitch Competition. The now six-year collaboration between AT&T and Tribeca Festival awards $1 million, mentorship and distribution to underrepresented filmmakers to produce their film and premiere it at next year’s festival. The 2023 Untold Stories event gave six emerging filmmakers the opportunity to present their stories to a jury of industry professionals in front of a live audience. (The pitch event is available to watch on YouTube. Filmmaker David Fortune won this year’s competition with “Color Book.”)
“This year was our second year in front of a live audience in Tribeca. We doubled that live audience from about 125 to 250,” says Bill Moseley, director-sponsorships and experiential marketing at AT&T. “There was the deliberation [of the jury], and then we invited everybody up to the AT&T Untold Stories Lounge for the winning announcement. And so that’s also a great traffic-driver to the lounge because when you look at the finished production, it shows the stage at Spring Studios, and then it shows the payoff in the winning announcement in our lounge on the seventh floor.”
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The AT&T Untold Stories Lounge in the festival’s first week saw 30,000 attendees coming through—three times the number of attendees compared to the same time last year. Decked out in AT&T’s signature blue and white color scheme, the lounge featured panel discussions that were programmed by both Tribeca and AT&T, including a collaborative talk on “The Art of the Pitch” and LGBTQIA+ content that tied in with Pride Month. The positive results and influx in traffic, Moseley says, came from working with Tribeca to understand what attendees want and need: “a place to chill and to network.”
“This is where our approach to sponsorship is really focused on one-plus-one-equals-three with our partner Tribeca,” he says. “It’s a true collaboration. In our mind, if you’re going to do it right, we don’t come in there and just talk about AT&T. We make sure that Tribeca lets us know what their folks want and what they’re looking to accomplish. And that really helps us add value to the festival. That’s our goal. If we can help make the festival better, and do that in our name with our technology or our content, that to us is the winning combination, versus coming in and just talking about ourselves and have it not fit.”
A second space Tribeca identified a need for was a pitch studio—somewhere newcomers could go to connect with previous Untold Stories winners and established filmmakers, get advice and one-on-one coaching, and come away with a professionally edited video of their pitch to share. This year, AT&T expanded the studio to make it look more relaxing and inviting, and moved it toward the back of lounge from the front where it had been placed previously.
The Untold Stories Lounge included a pitch studio that catered to emerging filmmakers who received one-on-one coaching.
“We think through the journey of the film festival attendee and make sure that it’s very apparent, and then we take pride in refining it,” Moseley says. “We thought last year’s space was really nice, and we got a lot of compliments, but we looked at it and very quickly—I want to say two weeks after last year’s festival, when the paint was still wet—assessed what we did and had a collective conversation about what worked and what didn’t. We felt we needed to warm up the space, literally from a tone and color perspective. We redesigned it.”
Since panel discussions weren’t being presented at all times, AT&T reworked the space for better functionality. Plush white couches and chairs were available for seating during panels, and when the stage was inactive, they could be used for catching up on emails, networking and coffee meetups. Wayfinding was a focus for this year in making sure attendees were aware of and could easily find the AT&T Untold Stories Lounge, with signage directing passersby to the space and a labeled button on the elevator pointing to its location on the seventh floor.
“We don’t put up a million bucks for a contest for every activation; that’s certainly unique here, and it’s really getting to the core of what Tribeca’s mission is, which is diverse storytelling, storytelling in general and the arts,” Moseley says. “Our approach here is kind of a balance of marketing but also a reflection on us walking the walk.” Agency: Wasserman.
Photo credit: Getty Images for AT&T
