Title	SAY IT WITH SKY
Brand	SKY GERMANY
Product/Service	SKY
Category	D03. Use of Real-time Data
Entrant	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY Munich, GERMANY
Idea Creation	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY Munich, GERMANY
Additional Company	HMMH MULTIMEDIAHAUS Bremen, GERMANY
Additional Company 2	TRO Düsseldorf, GERMANY
Additional Company 3	DESIGNSTUBE Hamburg, GERMANY
Additional Company 4	HASTINGS MUSIC Hamburg, GERMANY
Additional Company 5	UPLJFT Hamburg, GERMANY

Name	Company	Position
Alexander Schill	SERVICEPLAN GROUP	Global Chief Creative Officer
Matthias Harbeck	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Creative Managing Partner Germany
Till Hohmann	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Managing Creative Director
Florian Strauss	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Managing Director
Sandra Loibl	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Executive Creative Director
Franz Roeppischer	SERVICEPLAN GROUP	Creative Innovation Director
Lorenz Langgartner	SERVICEPLAN GROUP	Creative Innovation Director
Sebastian Wolf	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Senior Copywriter
Franziska Stroehle	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Art Director
Julius Emde	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Art Director
Julius Emde	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Junior Art Director
Florian Lanzinger	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Creative Intern
Julia Girschikofsky	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Creative Intern
Max Sellers	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Junior Copywriter
Hendrik Sommerfeld	Designstube.com	Editor
Lisa Rossmueller	SERVICEPLAN GERMANY	Account Manager
Andreas Precht	hmmh	Future Commerce Evangelist
Heino Niemann	hmmh	Head of Systemadministration
Cornelius Bruemmer	hmmh	Software Architect
Gerrit Menzel	Gerrit Menzel	Solution Architect
Niklas Brandt	hmmh	Software Engineer
Florian Weiner	hmmh	Digital Manager

Why is this work relevant for Direct?

“Say it with Sky” aimed for two kinds of direct response. At the first level, we wanted people to engage and share our content. On the second level, we wanted people to subscribe to our service. We achieved these goals by directly helping people out with our content. We gave them the opportunity to use it to play around with and create something 100% personal with it. Something people would want to share directly – one-to-one – with their significant other.

Background

Sky TV (officially named Sky Deutschland AG) is the most important direct broadcast satellite Pay TV platform in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, offering a collection of basic and premium digital subscription television channels of different categories via satellite and cable television. As of 2017, Sky TV has more than 5 million subscribers. Yet, in the entertainment area Sky is under strong pressure from streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. That’s why Sky had to find a way to position itself as innovative, entertaining and likeable.

Describe the creative idea

If you struggle saying “I love you”, say it with Sky. How? By using our very own content: thousands of hours of dialogue from our most romantic movies. Type your message, get some suggestions for more creative messages, and then create a supercut-film. This clip delivers your exact personal message with film snippets that have matching lines of dialogue. Send this clip to your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day and enjoy the reaction. By encouraging people to “Say It With Sky” we turned the day of love, into big love for Sky.

Describe the strategy

Being in love is great. But many people struggle saying ‘I love you’. Therefore, we thought it would be a good idea to help these people out. Why us? Because if anybody knows how to say “I love you”, it’s Sky with the help of the most romantic films of all time. And we, Germany’s most important pay TV channel, have them all. For Valentine’s Day we wanted to explore the possibilities digital technology had to offer, with regards to innovative ways to express one’s feelings. With this in the forefront, we quickly came to the conclusion that to ‘piggy back’ off of the ever fluid meme generators would and could be a certain route to success for the overall marketing campaign. This was primarily drawn from the fact that ‘memes’ are the most shared form of social media.

Describe the execution

We had to translate a person’s individual message into the exact same lines of film dialogue and edit it into a unique film-clip. Sounds easy? It wasn’t. We developed a special AI semantic tool. With a speech-to-text feature it listened to all of the romantic movies on Sky and this way extracted all their dialogue and turned it into text. On the “Say It With Sky” website the user could write their love message. The entered text would serve as a search request. The AI tool identified in real-time the best scenes based on length and audibility and even made suggestions for more creative messages. It then edited the scenes into a clip that delivered exactly the entered message. Branded love messages. directly shareable with your sweetheart. On the microsite, people were directly prompted to subscribe to Sky in order to watch the used romantic movies in full length.

List the results

The campaign overall curated more than 125,000 personalised love messages from 845 romantic movies on Sky – and even led to a marriage proposal. The personalized clips were heavily shared across social media on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and the campaign was picked up by traditional media, generating a media value of 3.7 Million. On the back of this, subscriptions to Sky increased by 156%. So you could say that we turned the day of love into big love for Sky.

Describe the use of data, or how the data enhanced the campaign output

We created an artificial intelligence tool that was programmed to recognise certain phrases, words and lines extracted from 845 romantic movies on Sky. It would even recognise and register the timecodes of these phrases and words to identify the precise time the entered text is used in the film. Responding in real-time to the entered texts, the messages would also be edited together in less than three seconds after the user pressed the ‘Create film’ icon. This direct response to data was pivotal in the programme’s ability to be shared.