Title	SAMSUNG HEARING HANDS
Brand	SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS TURKEY
Product/Service	SAMSUNG VIDEO BASED CALL CENTER FOR HEARING IMPAIRED
Category	A06. Events & Experiential (incl. stunts)
Entrant Company	LEO BURNETT ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Advertising Agency	LEO BURNETT ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Media Agency	STARCOM MEDIAVEST GROUP Istanbul, TURKEY
Production Company	DINAMO ISTANBUL, TURKEY

Name	Company	Position
Emrah Akay	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Creative Director
Oktar Akın	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Creative Director
Öykü Berberoğlu	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Creative Group Head
Aren Selvioğlu	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Creative Group Head
Sezgin Rızaoğlu	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Copywriter
Deniz Çavdar	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Copywriter
Roda Sezer	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Vice President
Meltem Gençkırlı	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Account Director
Gözde Attila	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Account Supervisor
Sevinç Öktem	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Agency Producer
Erman Karahisarlı	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Agency Producer
İsmail Seval	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Planning Director
Berkant Avcı	LEO BURNETT İSTANBUL	Planner

The Campaign

Samsung is a very highly respected and successful brand in Turkey. Being a giant global technology brand, Samsung wants to use its resources to create a positive change with all its products and services to become a brand woven into the fabric of the societies all over the world. Turkey was no exception. With this objective in mind, Samsung decided to launch a video call center exclusively for the three million deaf people in Turkey, whose needs are largely neglected by the public authorities. To communicate this initiative we arranged an act in order to make people aware of the difficulties of the deaf and lead by example. We organized a surprise for a deaf young man, Muharrem. When he woke up one day he saw that the entire neighborhood was speaking his language. Puzzled, he arrived at a billboard, where he saw our call center specialist Melek (which means Angel in Turkish) announcing a special call center service for deaf people like him. The video of the act was published on Samsung Turkey’s official Facebook and YouTube accounts. Popular media channels including Time, Huffington Post and Guardian, covered the act on TV news, newspaper columns and social media. The advertising equivalent of PR coverage amounted to 3.2 million USD with only an investment of 30.000K USD. Best of all was the reactions of government and popular artists, who announced plans to deliver services for the deaf people.

The Brief

Our objective was to raise awareness for the obstacles of the deaf people in Turkey and ignite a change in people’s behaviors. On top of that, we aimed to receive positive sentiments about the campaign so that the brand would become emotionally closer to Turkish people. To come up with a relevant idea, we worked together with the Society of Deaf People in Turkey and utilized their experience and resources.

Execution

Upon the completion of the infrastructure of the video center, we arranged an act to announce it. With the help of the Society of Deaf People, we decided to pick Muharrem for our surprise stunt. We organized training sessions for the people that would appear in our stunt. After a month of preparation period, the act was staged with the help of Muharrem’s sister. We recorded every step with hidden cameras. Then we posted the video of it on Samsung Turkey’s Facebook page. That was all we needed to do to succeed. The video immediately went viral through different channels without any significant media boost.

After appearing on Samsung Turkey’s official Facebook account, the video was viewed over 4 million times in the first 24 hours. In total the film reached 17 million people and was viewed 8 million times (Facebook, 2015). Campaign got 232 million impressions on Twitter in total. It was viewed 32 million times from 50 different channels on YouTube with a positive sentiment score of 96% (Somera, 2015). During the first week of the launch, important national channels’ prime news covered the campaign. Numerous articles about the campaign have been published on Turkey’s prestigious newspapers. Also, popular columnists wrote about the campaign. Respected and popular media channels including Times, Independent, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed shared the campaign on their websites and social media accounts. Most importantly, after the campaign Grand National Assembly of Turkey decided to review three different projects for deaf citizens.

The Strategy

As well as the deaf people, with this communication Samsung targeted “young-minded” people, who care about social issues, are not indifferent to what happens in the world and expect the same behavior from the brands they choose. They are more inclined to the brands that fulfill their social responsibilities as a corporate citizen. This group has an important role to increase the awareness of the brand’s social responsibility projects. They knew Samsung with its state-of-the-art products but not about its social activities. With the help of the Society of Deaf People, we saw that people were not really aware of the obstacles the deaf people face in their daily lives. Because of that, nobody was really doing anything to make those obstacles go away.The strategy was to create a real act to show people the huge emotional difference that removing the obstacles in a deaf person’s daily life makes.