Title	RE:SHAKESPEARE
Brand	SAMSUNG & THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY
Product/Service	RE:SHAKESPEARE
Category	C02. Use of Mobile
Entrant	CHEIL UK London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	CHEIL UK London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production	UNIT9 London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Malcolm Poynton	Cheil Worldwide	Global Chief Creative Officer
Tom Evans	Cheil Worldwide	Executive Creative Director
Mark Fretten	Cheil Worldwide	Creative Director
Rob Perham	Cheil Worldwide	Creative Director
Andy Day	Cheil Worldwide	Design Director
Oliver Wright	Cheil Worldwide	Executive Producer
Chris Chalk	Cheil Worldwide	Chief Strategy Officer
Laura Cortes	Unit 9 London	Creative Director, UX
Marc d Souza	Unit 9 London	Executive Producer
Pierre Trochu	Unit 9 London	Project Manager

The Campaign

We partnered Samsung with the Royal Shakespeare Company – one of Britain’s most reputable cultural institutions - to create RE:Shakespeare, a free android app, distributed as part of the RSC’s Education Outreach Programme. RE:Shakespeare helps students explore Shakespeare’s work through performance - standing up, speaking out loud – the way his plays were intended it to be experienced. As they work through a series of immersive 360 and interactive challenges, hosted by celebrity influencers and performance experts, they’re transformed from passive readers to active performers, discovering his stories, characters and language in exciting new ways. As they engage directly and physically with the words and rhythms of the text, Shakespeare’s complex thoughts and language start to make sense, inviting an instinctive and personal direct response.

Creative Execution

The RE:Shakespeare app helps children encounter Shakespeare in fun new ways, using active problem-solving methods and gamification – all via the language and technology we know they love. Developed to make full use of android features, the UX is designed around three primary modules – Play, Practice and Perform – each with its own unique interaction design, encouraging a certain type of learning response. Students work through challenges from celebrity influencers & RSC experts, experiencing a visual form of interactive storytelling that’s both quick and intuitive. PLAY introduces Shakespeare through games, hosted by actor David Tennant, rapper Akala and Shlomo the beatboxer. PRACTICE explores Shakespeare’s intent, guided by RSC experts and featuring a world-first 360 performance on the RSC stage. Finally PERFORM allows interactive on-screen performance, helping bring Shakespeare’s text to life for a new generation.

Results

At launch, the RE:Shakespeare app was distributed, via a bespoke RSC digital channel to RSC practitioners across the UK as part of the company’s education outreach programme. From here, it reached 1,200 schools, 2,000 teachers and over 530,000 young people creating word of mouth buzz. PR activity created 68 pieces of targeted coverage with a total reach of 707,594,733 and a media value of £1,173,316. Highlights included 20 pieces of national coverage including features in The Times, The Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday. Online, cultural influencers from The Guardian to Fast Company have praised its intent and it has been described on one prominent Shakespeare blog as “…not just-a must-have but a “drop-whatever-it-is-that-you’re-doing-and-get-down-to-Google-Play-and-download-it-now” must have.” And every time a student picks up the app and delivers their performance, they are responding in the way that Shakespeare always intended – and experiencing it all through Samsung technology.

Direct Response comes in many shapes and forms. But when you are talking to an audience that no longer listens to traditional advertising, about a school subject they find boring and old-fashioned, with a brand that lacks the social cache of some of its rivals, that communication has to take a completely new shape and form to elicit any kind of direct response. This is the challenge that the RE:Shakespeare app from Samsung and the Royal Shakespeare Company meets in an engaging new way - and via a channel that delivers it to the heart of the target audience.

We knew that over 70% of young people aged 11-17 have access to a mobile device at home and in school; that 75% of primary and secondary schools in the UK now use them as learning tools. And that they motivate disengaged pupils –especially boys and disadvantaged pupils who struggle with literacy. We also learned, from the RSC, that young people respond best to Shakespeare when they experience kinaesthetic learning – learning through doing and feeling. We brought these two insights together to create an immersive app that allowed students to experience Shakespeare through performance – and delivered that experience directly into the hands of our 11-17 year-old audience via Samsung technology.