Like teens throughout the world, Russian adolescents “live” through their mobiles, spending hours on entertainment that doesn’t exactly broaden their minds. They don’t read books; they’re not cool. What is cool is rap.
Russian telco, Beeline, wanted kids to get back to reading. It asked BBDO agency, Contrapunto, to help. So the agency created a rap music video.
Contrapunto explained, “To bring youngsters’ attention back to books we decided to use what they are really interested in. Rap, the most popular music genre in Russia, has been connected to literature from the outset. Once arriving in Russia, rap — traditionally a street genre from American ghettos — was given a literary spin and took on the role of distilling our cultural evolution and heritage. It has always been more bookish and less gangsta. Favouring metaphors and references to the works of great writers over explicit language.”
Russian rap music is full of references to famous books. The agency created one using as many as possible.
The video was shot by the director of the most famous Russian rap videos, Lado Kvataniya. It features a group of street artists, ZUKCLUB, whose artwork in the video later materialised on the streets.
The agency then used augmented reality technology to merge the street art with the project landing page, and used machine learning to scan the library of world literature, noting links between passages and Russian rap tracks of the past 20 years.
Hundreds of gigabytes of text data turned into 400 matches which were visualised on the project landing page, where teens could explore the quotes and references from books that inspired the musicians and see how it’s all intertwined – encouraged by the offer of more data.
The campaign continued with outdoor activities, digital projects and a massive social media flashmob, all of which kept the audiences’ interest for more than 2 months. The Project’s hashtag became viral and was used by teens to display their reading on Instagram.
In the first month of the campaign, the video gained more than 5 million views on YouTube and 14 million on other social media platforms. On release day it reached the top 5 on YouTube, becoming the hottest topic nationwide. As a follow-up, it was turned into a flashmob on Instagram, with more than 1000 UGC posts that transformed the feed into a virtual bookshelf and the project’s landing achieved more than a million visitors, with every third visitor sharing the page.
More than a million pages were read in the online library provided by Beeline. According to the brand survey, 43% of teens who heard about the project stated that they now read more.
Credits:
Creative Agency: Contrapunto
Creative Director: Kristina Denina
Senior Art Director: Alexey Pavlov
Copywriter: Alina Zaripova
Art Director: Egor Kosolapov
Producer: Anna Chernaya
Strategy Director: Anastasia Chulyukova
Client Service Director: Victoria Kanina
Senior Account Manager: Iulia Bodnaryuk
Client: Beeline
Marketing Communications and Brand Management Director: Julia Koneva
Head of Department of Advertising Campaigns Development: Natalya Krivchyanskaya
Senior Manager of Advertising Campaigns Development Department: Irina Morozova
Producer: Dmitriy Lashkin
Head of Department of Integrated Communications: Oksana Trofimova
Senior Manager of Integrated Communications Department: Elena Aristarkhova
Celebrity Marketing Agency: The Marketing Arm
General Director: Anna Sokolova
Celebrity Director: Tatyana Khmelnitskaya
Celebrity Manager: Elizaveta Dikusar
Production Agency: «Hype production»
Director: Lado Kvataniya
Cameraman: Andrey Krauzov
Producer: Andrey Samsonov
Artists: Sergey Ovseykin, Nikita Parunin & Roman Kozlov (ZUKCLUB)
