The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2024–2025
Telekom's Bubbles: two girls in snow globes connect when the barrier breaks
Deutsche Telekom's 2024 Christmas film makes division physical: two girls in separate snow globes reach each other only when one breaks the glass.
Deutsche Telekom
What it had to solve
Deutsche Telekom's annual Christmas campaign needed a story about closeness at a time when the world feels more divided than ever and people retreat into their own social bubbles.
How it works
For its Christmas film, Deutsche Telekom and MUW Saatchi & Saatchi started from a paradox of the connected age: technology brings people together, yet society is retreating into bubbles. The agency's answer was a three-minute fairy tale, 'The Bubbles', in which two girls live side by side in separate snow-globe worlds — close enough to see each other, separated by a barrier they cannot cross.
Directed by Alex Feil and produced by Armada Films, the film leans on craft rather than dialogue: the girls mirror each other's loneliness through the glass, and the story's turn comes when a barrier breaks and the two worlds finally touch. Its line, 'Connections Begin When Barriers Break', states the telecom brand's promise as a story instead of a pitch.
The campaign launched in November 2024 in Czechia, Germany and Slovakia for the Deutsche Telekom, Telekom and T-Mobile brands, and festival notes record that the story aired across 11 European countries. The same fairy-tale message — openness and connection across division — carried across markets without translation-specific concepts.
The film was selected for the Short Shorts 2025 international branded-film competition and its entry appears among the Epica Awards 2025 winners credited to Saatchi & Saatchi Germany and MUW Saatchi & Saatchi, making the Christmas one-off a fixture of the agencies' award year.
Why it lands
- It turned an abstract social observation — people in separate bubbles — into a visible, physical world audiences could see and feel in one frame.
- The telecom promise was told as the story's resolution, so the brand message arrived as emotion rather than a product claim.
- A wordless, fairy-tale format let one film travel across 11 European markets without losing its meaning.
- The craft — direction, visual effects and music — made it a piece of film people wanted to watch and share, not an ad to skip.
What it did
The film launched in November 2024 in Czechia, Germany and Slovakia and ran in 11 European countries; festival notes describe it as touching many hearts and inspiring openness, it was selected for the Short Shorts 2025 branded-film competition, and the entry is listed among Epica Awards 2025 winners for the two agencies.
What you can take
Make the abstract visible: an invisible social condition — people living side by side yet divided — becomes moving and shareable when it is staged as two characters separated by glass.
Since then
The film outlived the Christmas slot: it was selected for the Short Shorts 2025 branded shorts program and appears on Epica Awards' official 2025 winners page under Saatchi & Saatchi Germany and MUW Saatchi & Saatchi, and the two agencies continued to field the campaign and its supporting content at international shows through 2025.
Sources
- Deutsche Telekom: The Bubbles — Ads of the World campaign page
- Bubbles ｜ Deutsche Telekom — Short Shorts Film Festival 2025, Branded Shorts
- Saatchi & Saatchi Germany // MUW Saatchi & Saatchi — 'Bubbles' (Epica Awards 2025 winners entry)
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