The Brief

It is said that a picture speaks a thousand words. This is a campaign about how The British Council, the world's largest English-language teaching organization, taught more than a hundred thousand English words to its students with the use of an innovative mobile learning tool and pictures. By observing student behaviours to overcome vocabulary barriers, the organization created a direct opportunity to reach out to the students, in their moment of need, and make life easier for them by sharing the pronunciation and meaning behind an object, whose English name is foreign to them, in an accessible and relevant way.

Creative Execution

Automatic object recognition in images is often tricky. Even if a computer has the help of smart algorithms and human assistants, it may not catch everything in a given scene, much less do it in a considerably quick and efficient manner. By repurposing a piece of technology built primarily for mobile commerce, the British Council created the Visual Dictionary app to aid students and potential students improve their vocabulary. Simply by taking a picture of any object, the app uses visual search technology to tell you what it is. Recognizing nearly 40 million images, the app instantaneously syncs with the Cambridge dictionary to provide the user with the respective meaning and pronunciation. Snap a picture and improve your vocabulary in real-time. It was that easy and direct.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Singapore reports the highest smartphone penetration in the world at 85% and using the camera feature has become second nature – taking photos of food, selfies, and in the case of someone trying to learn English, a picture of an unfamiliar object. The teachers at British Council remarked that more and more of their students were sharing photos of unfamiliar objects taken with their smartphones, to learn the respective English term, pronunciation and spelling. This presented a potential win/win scenario for both the brand and its students.

Results

During the initial test phase with the current batch of students at the British Council, the results were highly encouraging. In just two weeks, a total of 303,753 words were searched on the Visual Dictionary app. This averages out to about 250 new English words taught to a student - a tall order to achieve with just in-class learning. With every student now armed with this innovative, real-time mobile tool, the Visual Dictionary helped overcome one of the language’s biggest hurdle, thanks in large part to identify an existing student behaviour, utilizing data, and the mobility of a real-time experience.