“The Hangover,” a comedy hit of summer 2009, inspired Nokia and the creative team from agency JWT, Manila, to develop a nice campaign dubbed “Gener8” supporting the launch of the Nokia N8 phone in the Philippines. They introduced a new invented character Pier Roxas, who found himself in a Southeast Asian city, remembering nothing about the previous eight days of his life. Consumers were invited to reconstitute the chain of events using a bunch of clues.
The campaign was launched in late September on TV and Internet with 30-second teaser on Facebook and 1-minute video featuring link to media channels (the website, FB, Twitter and YouTube). Visitors to these hubs were invited to help recover the man’s memory by crafting stories that might had happened with him during these eight days and calling the number specified in the spots. The starting points were a deep bruise on Pier’s face, a missing wallet, lipstick on his collar, a parking ticket, an unfamiliar key, a Smart Gold SIM card and a Nokia N8 with an empty contact list. Not much, but it didn’t take creative minds long to come up with their versions of what’d happened. The character helped the contestants by uploading so-called blog-videos, in which documented how he was solving the mysterious puzzle.
On November 5, nearly 1,000 short-film scripts were shortlisted to eight—now, they are being converted from the text into video formats by the finalists, each equipped with a Nokia N8 phone (which comes as a prize for each of them) to make HD-quality spots. This week, on November 27, the finished works will be unveiled, and on December 15, a panel of three judges, Lilit Reyes, an award-winning scriptwriter, feature film directors Paul Soriano and Pepe Diokno will choose the grand winner to be awarded with a $1,130 cash prize (PHP 50,000).
“We set out to create an idea that people would want to spend more time with,” commented Dave Ferrer, exec creative director of JWT, Manila. “So invested were the people with Pier Roxas that they spent hours interacting with him on the internet and via mobile, plus hours more formulating stories about what happened to him. People researched his background and created blogs to talk more about him and the Nokia N8.”