17th of November is a very important holiday for Czechs and Slovaks, because it is the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day. The day when thousands of students went to the streets to protest against the Russian occupancy of the one-party government of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, starting a non-violent nation-wide protests, the "Velvet Revolution".
However, a staggering amount of young people don't know or don't care about this date and with O2 we've tried to reach its awareness into the public with previous year's campaign, creating a digital iron curtain. On the next year we had decided to continue in this effort with O2 again.
We let the young live through the Velvet Revolution as a first-hand experience, as if it happened in the year 2017. We've launched a Facebook livestream from the past that has started at the exact same time as the protests started in the 1989 and ran it for 3 hours, broadcasting authentic archive videos from the protests, full of shouts for freedom. The video was supported by Insta-stories that looked exactly the way they would look like if the revolution was happening today.
Watch the campaign recap in this case study.
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82%earned media
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13%increase of fairness brand attribute — the most relevant attribute in telco market
The 2016/2017 campaign activities have won 2 shortlists in Cannes Lions creative festival, and gold and silver trophies in Euro Effie 2018, making it the most successful campaign in Slovak history.
Fun fact: the person narrating the case study is an Englishman originally from Latvia and he offered to narrate the study for us because topic is especially personal for him, since it reminded him of why he had to leave his home country when he was young.
