Sarah H. Rogers
Cricket Wireless
Market Relaunch – New York & Detroit
12+ years on the Cricket Wireless account · Social, Digital, OOH, Store
THE CHALLENGE
Two cities, two different credibility problems. New York had thinner store density than the competition and was getting lost in a loud, cluttered media market — plenty of New Yorkers simply weren't considering Cricket at all. Detroit had the opposite issue: a wave of store closures had convinced a lot of the city that Cricket had left the market entirely. Different symptoms, same root cause — neither city felt like Cricket actually knew them. The stakes were real: Cricket's stores are 100% dealer-owned, so foot traffic isn't just a brand metric — it's what keeps independent dealers invested instead of switching carriers.
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Positioning. One consistent brand promise, restated city by city so it felt native rather than translated.
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Creative, neighborhood by neighborhood. Not "New York" or "Detroit" branding — Staten Island got Staten Island work, Dearborn got Dearborn work, down to specific subway lines and bilingual content where it mattered.
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Media built on proximity, not reach. Paid social, CTV, OOH, transit, and digital audio — but the targeting logic was the differentiator: media ran in a tight radius around actual dealer-owned stores, so the ad on someone's commute pointed to a real door minutes away.
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The store carried it through. Tailored storefronts and in-store graphics picked up the same neighborhood-specific creative, so the idea followed the customer inside.
THE WORK
I led the team that built the response: not a one-off campaign, but a scalable localization playbook that could flex from city to city, and inside each city, block to block.
The campaign drove
triple-digit percentage growth in new customer sign-ups in both New York and Detroit, with strong growth in customers switching over from other carriers as well.
THE RESULTS
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Store footprint in both submarkets grew at a strong double-digit clip over the campaign period.
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Individual pieces of hyper-local creative — a Staten Island transit placement, a Dearborn out-of-home piece — posted click-through rates dramatically above channel benchmark, in some cases by an order of magnitude.
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New York in particular moved the needle on a budget well below what the market usually assumes is required to make a dent there — proof that precision beat scale.
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The playbook worked well enough that it's now being adapted for several additional major markets.