Title	RE:SHAKESPEARE
Brand	SAMSUNG & THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY
Product/Service	RE:SHAKESPEARE
Category	B02. Mobile Apps
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

RE:Shakespeare is a free Android app from the Royal Shakespeare Company & Samsung. It helps students explore Shakespeare’s work through performance - standing up, speaking out loud – the way he always 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 engaging new ways.

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.

At launch, the RE:Shakespeare app was distributed, via the company’s education outreach programme, reaching 1,200 schools, 2,000 teachers and over 530,000 young people creating word of mouth buzz. It has also been made available to anyone interested in Shakespeare’s work free-of-charge via the Google Play Store. Wider 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 the their lines, they experience Shakespeare in the way he intended - and all via Samsung technology.

We knew that over 70% of young people aged 11-17 have access to a mobile device at home and that, in UK schools over 75% of primary and secondary classes now use them as learning tools. Research also revealed that they motivate disengaged pupils –especially boys and disadvantaged pupils who struggle with literacy. From our co-partners, the RSC, we further learned that young people respond best to Shakespeare when they experience kinaesthetic learning – learning through doing and feeling. We brought these insights together to create an immersive app that allowed students to experience Shakespeare through performance. By engaging directly and physically with the words and rhythms of the text, complex thoughts and language start to make sense to young people, unlocking imaginations and inviting instinctive and personal responses to his work - all facilitated on their mobile devices using Android technology.