ADT Asks America What It Truly Wants to Protect
ADT launched "What Do You Want to Protect?" in the United States in August 2019, a narrative-led omnichannel campaign created by McCann that repositioned the brand from a conventional home-security provider to a personalised protection platform encompassing people, possessions, passions, and peace of mind.
The campaign represents a deliberate brand transformation. ADT announced the effort on August 23, 2019, per Investor Adt, describing it as a major shift in how the company would communicate its core proposition. Rather than anchoring the brand to physical premises and hardware, the creative strategy invited consumers across the United States to reflect on what they personally value most — a question posed directly in the campaign's new tagline. That tagline, as documented by Ads of the World and reported by PRWeek, extended ADT's relevance across five distinct territories: people, possessions, passions, independence, and peace of mind.
The campaign comprised five film assets, each employing narrative storytelling to make the abstract concept of protection emotionally concrete. Sitting at the intersection of the professional services industry and a healthcare-adjacent framing, the work positioned security as a component of broader personal well-being — a strategic broadening that gave ADT a credible presence in conversations about health, independence, and daily safety. McCann was appointed ADT's lead creative agency following a competitive review concluded in April 2019, approximately four months before the campaign's public debut, according to reporting by AdExchanger and MediaPost. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting solid strategic ambition anchored in a well-structured narrative format.
ADT grounded the campaign in a single universal truth: protection is not one-size-fits-all. The creative brief, as characterised by Jochen Koedijk, ADT's chief marketing officer at the time, began with an intentionally personal question designed to open a dialogue rather than deliver a broadcast message. As Koedijk stated, per Chief Marketer's August 26, 2019 coverage, the campaign would "showcase our unique ability to customize solutions for our customers" by addressing the full range of what people want to keep safe.
This strategic pivot directly addressed competitive pressure in the United States security market. Rivals including Ring, owned by Amazon, and SimpliSafe had gained significant consumer traction by emphasising accessible DIY installation and technology-forward positioning, attracting a younger, more digitally native homeowner demographic. ADT's response was not to out-technologise competitors but to out-humanise them — shifting the conversation from devices and monitoring contracts to values, relationships, and personal priorities. That distinction gave McCann's creative team a differentiated platform from which to build emotionally resonant film content.
The campaign also acknowledged a structural change in how ADT was operating. According to reporting by AdExchanger and MediaPost, ADT brought media buying in-house around the time of the campaign's launch, a move that signalled the brand's intention to own its data relationships and optimise channel performance directly. Universal McCann handled media strategy in partnership with the broader McCann Worldgroup engagement. In the United States, where home security is a mature and crowded category, the decision to compete on meaning rather than specification represented a high-risk, high-reward strategic posture — one that the campaign's omnichannel structure was designed to sustain across multiple consumer touchpoints.
The campaign delivered protection as a feeling before it delivered it as a feature. Across five film assets, McCann constructed individual narratives that placed human subjects — not security hardware — at the centre of each story, allowing viewers to see their own circumstances reflected in the work.
Each film in the series operated as a standalone piece of storytelling while contributing to a coherent brand argument. The narrative approach, documented by Ads of the World and confirmed in ADT's own press materials via investor.adt.com, moved the viewer through an emotional arc: from vulnerability to agency, from concern to confidence. This structure is characteristic of campaigns that seek to shift brand perception rather than simply inform. Rather than demonstrating product features, the films asked the audience to identify with the emotional stakes of protection — a technique that demands both strong casting and precise editorial pacing.
The campaign also encompassed an ADT Health execution, which promoted medical-alert accessories and explicitly framed the brand's relevance within healthcare and personal independence, as reported by investor.adt.com and noted in coverage by openpr.com. This strand of the campaign is particularly significant: it extended the protection narrative into a demographic — older adults and people managing health conditions — that conventional home-security advertising rarely addresses directly. Production credits for the "What Do You Want to Protect?" campaign are not publicly documented in available third-party sources. What the five-film slate demonstrates, regardless of individual credits, is a consistent directorial sensibility — warm, observational, and uninterested in technological spectacle — that served the campaign's humanising strategic intent.
No verified performance data for the "What Do You Want to Protect?" campaign is publicly available in third-party sources accessible at the time of this analysis. ADT did not publish quantified results — such as brand-lift scores, recall figures, or conversion metrics — in connection with the August 2019 launch, and no independent measurement body has released audited figures attributable to this specific campaign.
Structural analysis offers a reasonable basis for evaluating effectiveness. The campaign's omnichannel deployment — spanning film, digital, and media touchpoints managed through ADT's newly internalised media operation — created the conditions for sustained brand exposure across the United States. A five-asset film slate allowed the brand to speak to distinct audience segments simultaneously, reducing the risk that any single narrative would fail to land with the full target market. The decision to anchor the campaign in a question rather than a claim gave the work a participatory quality that is structurally more likely to generate consumer reflection and brand recall than declarative advertising.
The ADT Health component further extended the campaign's reach into an underserved audience segment within the United States professional services and healthcare-adjacent landscape, as noted by investor.adt.com and openpr.com. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a case where strategic clarity and creative sincerity are present but where the absence of a formally documented creative breakthrough — or a measurable, independently verified outcome — limits the overall assessment. The work is effective brand repositioning; it is not, on current evidence, a landmark creative achievement.
ADT's 2019 campaign repositioned the brand from a home-security provider to a personalised protection platform. Created by McCann and launched in the United States in August 2019, the omnichannel campaign asked consumers to identify what they personally value most, extending ADT's relevance across people, possessions, passions, independence, and peace of mind.
McCann created the campaign for ADT. McCann Worldgroup was appointed ADT's lead agency following a competitive review concluded in April 2019, approximately four months before the campaign launched. Universal McCann handled the media strategy component of the broader omnichannel effort in the United States market.
ADT officially launched the campaign on August 23, 2019, per investor.adt.com. The announcement marked a declared brand transformation, with the new tagline replacing ADT's previous positioning and framing protection as a personalised, emotionally grounded concept rather than a hardware-led security service.
The campaign included an ADT Health execution promoting medical-alert accessories, as reported by investor.adt.com, which framed security within personal health and independence. This extended ADT's brand relevance into healthcare-adjacent territory and addressed older adults and people managing health conditions — audiences rarely targeted by conventional home-security advertising in the United States.
ADT's campaign received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects strong strategic intent and a coherent narrative structure across five film assets, balanced against the absence of publicly verified performance metrics and a lack of formally documented creative credits for the United States campaign.
Where Ring and SimpliSafe competed on accessible DIY technology and digital-native convenience, ADT and McCann chose to compete on emotional meaning. The 'What Do You Want to Protect?' campaign foregrounded human values over product features, positioning ADT as the brand that understands what protection means personally rather than technically.
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