SWITCH OFF! - THE DINNER TEST

TitleSWITCH OFF! - THE DINNER TEST
BrandHUNGARIAN TELEKOM
Product/ServiceTELECOMMUNICATION BRAND
Category A03. Online: Fiction & Non-Fiction
Entrant ISOBAR Budapest, HUNGARY
Idea Creation ISOBAR Budapest, HUNGARY
Production FOCUS FOX STUDIO Budapest, HUNGARY
Credits
Name Company Position
Vera Langer Isobar Budapest Creative Group Head
Balázs Tompa Isobar Budapest Creative Director
István Bene Isobar Budapest Art Director
Szonja Németh Isobar Budapest Group Account Director
Kata Bányász Isobar Budapest Agency Producer
Péter Herz Fox Production Director
Renáta Varga Isobar Budapest Senior Strategist
Árpád Kaspár Isobar Budapest Junior Account Manager
Balázs Rényi Isobar Budapest Head of Social
Dóra Suhai Isobar Budapest Art Director

The Campaign

Hungarian Telekom believes that „Your mobile bridges the distance if you are far, but keeps you apart when you are close”. Let’s draw people’s attention to responsible usage of smartphones on Valentine’s Day. So we created an online experiment candid camera video. We spotted couples using their mobiles while having a romantic dinner and we asked the waiter to continuously disturb them with irrelevant notifications (imitating the way a mobile phone acts).

Creative Execution

We spotted couples using their mobiles while having a romantic dinner, and we asked the waiter to continuously disturb them with irrelevant notifications (imitating the way a mobile phone acts). First, the couples just found the waiter weird, later they were quite irritated, and at the end, almost all of them sent the waiter away and asked him to leave them alone during the dinner. And this was the point we wanted to achieve – to dramatize our message: switch off your mobile phone when you spend some quality time with your loved ones. We recorded the happenings with a candid camera and published the film in Telekom’s and an influencer’s social channels (YouTube, Facebook, Influencer: Tibor Kasza).

Results: In 3 days the video went viral, gained 2 million+ views and became the most watched video in Hungary on Valentine’s Day. It has reached 70% of the Hungarian Facebook users by being shared more than 25.000 times just in these few days. This campaign of socially spread online video gained almost 50% of the popularity of a traditional TV campaign with minimal media investment. Thus, we achieved nearly 10x the ROI of a traditional TV campaign.

Hungarian Telekom wanted to spread a responsible message about mobile usage. But it is not easy to 'preach' about it in a relevant way. That's why we chose the power of humor. We created a surprising and funny candid camera video and dramatized how irrelevant and useless pieces of information can disturb our quality time - if we let them. We launched the entertaining online video on Valentine's Day and people all across the country loved the way how it approached this topic. The comments flooded telling 'Telekom you nailed it' and so on.

Strategy: As a company, you need to have a strong brand to be protected from the constant actions of competitors, so we made a video digitally broadcasted on Valentine's Day which was able to build the brand with its emotional power.