You’re probably familiar with the situation – you’re at work, in the middle of your day and suddenly your battery dies on you – right when you need it most. Exactly when that new client you’ve been chasing for weeks said he’d get back to you. Within seconds you go into full blown crisis mode, scourging the office corridors in search of a charger to save your life (and possibly your career).
But let’s face it, running out of juice for your cell phone hardly qualifies as a crisis. A syndrome of our modern day lifestyle, the word ‘crisis’ has come to embody our increasing dependence on our mobile devices for just about everything. As a result, the word ‘crisis’ has probably become one of the most acutely misappropriated words of our times - a fact you’ll discover when you watch our Samsung Galaxy Note9 new commercial.
Tell us about your role in the creation of this work.
Our Leo Burnett team works in a close partnership with our client’s marketing team who asked us to promote the new Samsung Galaxy Note9. After briefing us on the cell phone’s new features – we decided to focus on its most salient feature which also happens to be the one most important to consumers: the phones battery life while mocking consumers’ mobile dependency. So, collaborating with Shlomi Shaban a world renowned composer and pianist, our agency creative teams set out to create a great piece of content that would put a smile on consumers faces as they identified with the content.
Give us an overview of the campaign, what is it about?
To promote the Galaxy Note9’s trusty battery life, we developed a musical ad that explores the nature of crisis while poking fun at the mobile dependency our generation has developed.
As such our ad opens on a situation we are all familiar with: a panic stricken man running through the halls of the office all because his cell phone has seemingly run out of juice. Of course, with no charger in sight, crisis hits full on with defcon levels reaching new highs. Then enters a pianist and a group of backup singers who humorously begin putting things back into their right perspective.
The viewer is then taken on a journey through real crisis situations like getting locked in a sauna, missing a flight (to the hero’s own wedding) or choking on a bit of salad, and not-so-real crises like files downloading slowly –rehabilitating and recalibrating the viewer’s interpretation of what a crisis is, with the moral of the story being to 'keep the crisis for the real crisis'.
The theatrical almost one-and-a-half-minute long ad signs off by outlining the benefits of the new Samsung Galaxy Note, chiefly an all-day battery, a Bluetooth S-Pen and ‘super powerful performance’.
Tell us about the details creative brief, what did it ask?
The brief was for us to create a local ad for the launch of the Galaxy Note9 – a mission which in and of itself is quite exceptional considering this is a global brand and oftentimes brand like these prefer simply importing an existing ad and adapting it to the local market or even running it as is. We were fortunate to be given the liberty to create a theatrical feature which we felt rested on a solid insight and would find resonance with our consumers.
Which insight led to the creation of this piece of work?
MOBILE DEPENDENCY- is a syndrome of our modern day lifestyle. Running out of battery has become synonym with the world crisis. Indeed how could we go a minute, let alone an hour without being connected and reachable on our cell phone by the whole wide world?
As such the word crisis has probably become one of the most acutely misappropriated words of our times, as it has come to embody our increasing dependence on our mobile devices for just about everything. This is the fact we decided to highlight in our new Samsung Galaxy Note9 commercial.
Can you share with us any alternative ideas (if any) for this campaign? Why was this idea chosen?
Actually one of the ideas we had was to cooperate with YouTube and Facebook and create 100 different videos that would play based on the amount of battery left on a person’s phone. While the client loved the idea, we ultimately decided to go with the ‘Crisis’ idea as producing this idea was a lot more complicated and we did not have the necessary time needed to produce it.
How did the client initially react to this idea?
The client loved the idea mainly because it resonated true. Because going round the room and thinking back of personal experiences, no one could not honestly say they hadn’t felt stressed at being stranded without battery. The humorous and flawless execution of the campaign of course also helped- as often times the pitfall of a creative brief that rests on a widely accepted insight is that while it sounds right in theory, in practice the delivery of the idea and execution is bland. We don’t think it was the case here.
What was the greatest challenge that you and your team faced during development?
As we said before, we believe the most challenging part of the work was creating a piece of content with great production value. Creating a minute and a half long musical with great storytelling and theatrical worth is really hard. So working with a great creative team and people like Shlomi Shaban who is a world renowned composer and Tal Zagreba - a Cannes Lion winning super talented Director – is really important and really helped raise the bar on the execution and get the idea off the paper.
Where do you see this campaign going in the future?
While the commercial does hint towards future possible extensions with a possible sequel to this ad focusing on expressions like ‘I have an emergency’, we don’t believe we will actually go and produce those as the point is clear.
We believe however that the true value of this ad, is seeing how well this campaign has done not just in terms of sales (they are doing very well thank you) but seeing people use our catch phrase ‘keep the crisis for the real crisis’ and truly put things back into their right perspective.