AN EVENING WITH PROFESSOR STEPHEN HAWKING

TitleAN EVENING WITH PROFESSOR STEPHEN HAWKING
BrandAHRT MEDIA ASIA
Product / ServiceTHE HUMAGRAM
CategoryB09. Celebrity Endorsement
EntrantFLEISHMANHILLARD Hong Kong, HONG KONG
Idea Creation FLEISHMANHILLARD Hong Kong, HONG KONG
PR FLEISHMANHILLARD Hong Kong, HONG KONG
Production AHRT MEDIA Hong Kong, HONG KONG
Production 2 BLUECURRENT GROUP HONG KONG Hong Kong, HONG KONG

Credits

Name Company Position
Kitty Lee FleishmanHillard Senior Vice President
Kay Ngai FleishmanHillard Account Manager
Elizabeth Fung FleishmanHillard Senior Account Manager
Elizabeth Fung FleishmanHillard Senior Account Manager
Alice Wan FleishmanHillard Account Executive
Anita Chan BlueCurrent Group Art Director

The Campaign

Our concept was to create the ultimate holographic experience with an endorser who appeals to but is not easily accessible to the vast majority of people in Asia Pacific. A famous personality based outside of Asia Pacific who has a well-respected point of view and embodies the pinnacle of human intelligence. He was the perfect ‘celebrity’ to showcase a technology that overcomes the laws of physics that crosses time and space. He is one of the greatest scientists of our time… Professor Stephen Hawking. Professor Hawking is not able to travel easily for appearances and speeches, but on one Friday evening, we showed how holographic technology enabled him to transcend time and space to present ‘live’ to an audience in Asia Pacific for the first time in over 10 years.

Execution

On the evening of 24 March, we ‘holoported’ Professor Stephen Hawking live to the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park all the way from Cambridge University in the UK to meet an audience of over 700 media, influencers and corporate executives. Through a 90-minute event, with an interactive question and answer session, Professor Hawking took the audience on a journey through his life in physics and explained what the universe looked like under the No Boundary Proposal. Professor Hawking’s speech was thoughtfully drafted to ensure that the content was engaging even without the supporting visual effects. To maximize attendance and create noise, we offered free ticket access to selected partners and guests. Through Chambers of Commerce, co-working spaces and direct outreach to corporations, we extended these free invitations to multiple sectors of society. A microsite, Hawkinginhk.com, an eDM and promotional posters were also developed to facilitate this outreach.

Although the event was held on a Friday evening at a Science Park in the New Territories event achieved an 85% turnout rate and received positive feedback from the audience, calling it a “really good experience” and “pretty interesting, especially the hologram”. Through Xinhua News Agency and Agence France Presse the media campaign resulted in coverage by over 120 media across the entire world: China, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, India, Singapore, Philippines, Pakistan, as well as the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Italy, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, the US, and Canada. In the week following the event, the online reach of the news was as high as 24,777,700 and the technology benefits featured highly in the coverage. Of the 30 potential business leads generated, one of these has already been converted to a project worth US$50k and conversations from other business leads potentially worth hundreds of thousands of USD are ongoing.

The Situation

Celebrity Endorsements and Live Events have long been a mainstay of PR campaigns to generate earned media and online influence for a product or service. But this was a live event with a difference and a very different kind of celebrity, using technology to showcase technology, and delivering a genuinely ‘wow’ experience that not only generated global media coverage, but ultimately tangible business results too.

The Strategy

Experiential was at the core of our strategy. For media we provided a behind-the-scenes tour, Humagram footage production trial and feature interviews with executives, to deliver an informative and impressive first-hand experience. To maximize the reach of the occasion and achieve cost efficiencies, we opened up the experiential event for free, and set it in Hong Kong – the regional business and media hub of Asia Pacific. This allowed us to reach a diverse pool of target corporate customers and convey our message to the wider audiences in Asia Pacific through regional and local media. And of course, our ultimate strategic coup was to have one of the most respected minds of our time, not only present the technology but showcase it by his very presence in the room.

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