THE CHALLENGE

Despite everything we see on the news, it’s hard for people to feel compelled to help refugees and really understand what they go through. So, our client The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) needed our help to find a way to connect with the audience and find a way to move them. We needed to find a way put them in the shoes of a refugee, in order to drive awareness in hopes of raising more support and contribution for the cause.

THE STRATEGY

Our imaginations are powerful, and we decided we needed to make people use theirs to fully understand what it means to be a refugee. Nowadays, our visual sense is over-stimulated, and we are less responsive to the images we see, so to add more impact we used audio as part of our activation to generate higher concentration.

We partnered with UNHCR, to develop an immersive audio story about a 13-year-old girl named Nadima who has been forced to separate from her family in South Sudan as she escapes from war and persecution.

THE EXECUTION

To truly understand and empathize with what it means to be a refugee, we partnered with UNHCR to create an audio story of a 13-year-old girl refugee named Nadima. By wearing blindfolds and noise cancelling headphones, the audience were fully immersed in Nadima’s life story, listening to all the noises and thoughts that were around her as a refugee trying to survive the war.

The brain processes visual information as priority, and by being deprived of it the audience audio senses can be heightened. This allowed them to focus on the sounds of Nadima's life and immerse themselves in the experience with their imaginations completely guiding them.

To draw people to the event, we placed movie posters around the city to grab attention and spread the word. People were then able to come to the location of the event where they can listen to the audio story and learn more from UNHCR volunteers about refugees and what UNHCR does to help, as well as how they can help as an individual.

THE OUTCOME

Overall, the activation and event made a huge impact in the streets of Hong Kong and reached more than 34,000 people. Of these people, 92% were fully engaged and engulfed by the sounds of Nadima’s life as they listened to the full audio story. While we partnered with 6 influencers and 9 news media outlets to spread the word of the campaign, our social reach was not limited to them, and we garnered 490,000 impressions across the social platform plus an added 13 million PR impressions. The results proved our achievement of footfall, brand awareness, and a shift in the level of empathy of our audience.