Brief:

• T-Mobile said its Super Bowl ads for T-Mobile Tuesdays discounts and giveaways led to a surge in app downloads, per an announcement. Customers claimed more Tuesday deals than any day in history, outpacing the previous record by nearly 1 million deals claimed.
• The T-Mobile Tuesdays app jumped to the No. 1 spot in Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store’s lifestyle categories after the carrier offered free “Taco Tuesdays” at Taco Bell, as featured in a Super Bowl ad. Taco Bell saw a record high in daily and hourly digital transactions, T-Mobile said in its announcement, but it didn't disclose hard numbers.
• T-Mobile next week will start offering VIP tickets to pop singer Ariana Grande's sold-out "Sweetener" tour. The carrier also will offer two-for-one tickets to other concerts and discounts from Twentieth Century Fox Film and Atom Tickets for "Alita: Battle Angel." It also announced a relationship with gasoline retailer Shell to give customers a discount of 10 cents a gallon on one tank of gas, up to 20 gallons, every week.

Insight:

The success of the T-Mobile Tuesdays promotion demonstrates how the mobile carrier was able to team up with companies to offers deals geared toward audiences of tech-savvy young adults who are more comfortable using mobile apps than older generations to order food, request a ride or make payments.

T-Mobile’s Super Bowl campaign also included free rides from ride-hailing service Lyft. The ads, which appeared during each quarter of the big game, seemed to target the younger mobile generation with its minimalist presentation of text message conversations.

T-Mobile said its T-Mobile Tuesdays promotion, which was launched in June 2016, has led customers to claim 50 million free or discounted food offers, 1.3 million gallons of free coffee, 52 million hours of movies, 38 million entertainment offers and 20 million transportation offers. Dunkin, Denny’s, Petco, Groupon, Walgreens and 1-800-Flowers are among the companies that have partnered with T-Mobile on discounts and giveaways. In the mobile carrier market, the company's rewards app competes against Verizon's VerizonUp rewards program for discounts and deals and AT&T's AT&T Thanks app.

T-Mobile came into 2019 with huge momentum as the wireless carrier boasted 23 straight quarters of net customer additions of more than 1 million. The company is on track to double its user base from 46 million in 2013, and a planned merger with Sprint will make the combined companies the third-biggest carrier behind Verizon and AT&T. Verizon added 1.2 million subscribers last quarter, beating analyst estimates of 800,000, per Barron’s.