Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

Could technology that has been destroying the environment benefit the environment? We wanted our consumers to experience daily changes in line with the 5G brand slogan, “Change daily life.” We wanted to talk about the fact that technology can help change problems. At the core of 5G services are VR which virtualizes things that are not there in reality. It was the starting point of our idea, “create something meaningful that is not there in reality.” We wanted to solve environmental problems for future generations of children.

Background

[Challenge of last place] In Korea telecommunication companies are fiercely competing for 5G services. With the lowest market share and budget, we have been challenged to create new ideas that stand out compared to our competitors. [Change Your Daily Life with 5G] It is the slogan of our 5G brand. When competitors communicated fantasizing about the future, we wanted to make a meaningful change to customers' daily lives with 5G. [Environment is a Boring Subject] We decided to provide meaningful experience with 5G VR service. VR created new things that were unreal. We talked about environmental problems through an extinct animal park that was not existent in reality. However, there was a problem that Koreans were not very interested in environmental issues. Our challenge was to find new ideas that drew attention and let consumers experience environmental issues in more interesting way.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

[Add meaning to VR] VR makes things that does not exist in reality. We wanted to create something that was meaningful to using the service, so we decided to create a virtual endangered animal park. [Pikachu is an Endangered Species?] Do you know what Pokémon character Pikachu, sloth from the movie Zootopia, and Spix’s Macaw parrot from the animated film Rio, has in common? The real animals of these famous cartoon characters are either extinct or endangered. We used this as a key creative strategy. We created a virtual endangered animal park in VR and did storytelling using the animals from the cartoon characters. The 3D cartoon characters talked about how they lost their homes and became an endangered species due to environmental destruction. Children who saw the content through VR, television, and YouTube ads sympathized these animals and felt more concerned about the environment issues as their own.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

For the differentiated experience of the 5G brand, we set up two strategies. Let's make VR content that nobody has ever seen before, and find a way to talk about difficult environmental issues in more interesting way. So we focused on cartoon characters. Cute animals are popular as cartoon characters. We found that most of the animal characters are endangered species. Pikachu's real models, American Pika, Zootopia's sloth and Rio's main character Spix’s Macaw Parrot, were all endangered. This interesting fact was used in creative. We created virtual Lost Animal Park in VR and created real animal characters from cartoons in 3D. The animals would tell stories about how they lost their homes and are dying because of environmental destruction. The campaign's VR content, which had a huge impact on children, was consequently used as an environmental education material for students under the permission of the city government.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

The real animals of the cartoon characters were made in 3D VR and AR content over 6 months period. The voice actors who dubbed the cartoons in Korea dubbed our Lost Animal Park content. Consumers were very surprised that cartoon characters like Pikachu were in fact endangered animals and empathized about the environmental issues. We created an experience zone at offline shopping mall for children and also expanded our channels online by releasing TVC and YouTube commercials using the content of the Lost Animal Park. In addition, we published the Lost Animal Park content into a pop-up book so that even children without 5G mobile service can have the opportunity to experience. Also in order for children to practice saving the environmental at home we created a mobile environmental conservation program so that the campaign does not end up as a single event.

List the results (30% of vote)

[Korea's First 5G VR Environmental Education Textbook] When our competitors told similar stories, our goal was to give consumers meaningful experiences and create marketing issues through differentiated 5G content. In that sense, we have achieved the results of brand experience marketing that has never been achieved in Korea. The advertising content became a material for children's environmental education. School teachers who saw the advertisement wanted to show this content to children. Through a review by the school and the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the content was selected as children's environmental education material and session was held in an actual classroom. It was the first time that advertising materials were used for students' education in Korea. Educational institutions that disliked commerciality have recognized the educational value of our 'Lost Animal Park' content. This led to successful marketing, with all of the nation's public broadcasters, KBS, EBS, SBS, etc. reporting on our campaign.

Please tell us how the brand purpose inspired the work

In Korea, where the world's first commercialization of 5G has begun, fierce 5G marketing competition among telecommunication companies is in progress. Competitors focused on communication that instilled expectations, saying that 5G changes the future world to a flashy one. We wanted to do marketing differently from our competitors. The 5G brand slogan was “5G changes everyday life”. We wanted to change customer's daily life meaningfully, not in the distant future, unlike other competitors. The topic we chose was 'environmental problems,' which was a global concern. But environmental problems weren't as interesting as they were meant to be. The challenge we had to solve was how to make the environment interesting. So we had to find ideas to communicate environmental issues in a fun way by using VR and AR, the core services of 5G.