Thriving for a Healthier Future
Simplifying the lives of consumers since 1955, with human-centric technologies and innovative solutions, as Turkish brand Beko, we are the leader of the freestanding white goods market in Europe, and the overall white goods market in the UK and Poland. Being a proud member of the Arçelik family which has sworn commitment to the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals, we needed to do our part.
Caring for a sustainable future was every human’s duty. But contributing to making an impact, creating awareness, and drawing attention of people was every brand’s bounden duty. As Beko, we had already been focusing on empowering next generations to live healthier lives and had already started our journey to discover new technologies and materials for more sustainable products. With technologies that are more sustainable for the environment, to waste reuse and biomaterials, we had been striving to reduce our footprint in nature, one step at a time.
Now, the time had come to share our enthusiasm, to present our solutions and to invite consumers to join us in our journey.
Our ambition was to draw attention to a problem that concerns all humanity, and we had a passion to create a “Beko Sustainability Community” in +100 markets. Thus, we aimed to make the biggest global launch of our parent company Arçelik, airing in 101 countries in 6 continents. We targeted people between 18-54 age globally, adding sustainability conscious people to our general home appliance potential audience.
All Living Things Are Inextricably Connected to One Another
It’s year 2021 and the whole world have been going through major changes. We are now living in times where we pay the price of perceiving nature as a savage force to tame, resulting in catastrophic climate imbalances. We know we must change our behaviour, but first we need to change our perceptions.
Only by recognizing that we are not “part of” but “one with” nature that we can go from loneliness, individualism, and despair to conscious sustainable existence. We are all connected. From the roots of a tree to a pebble flowing down a river, all creatures and things depend on one another for survival. Therefore, we wanted to create a communication that would demonstrate that technology and human progress should serve our connectedness as humans with the whole universe.
A Daring Move to Differentiate:
World’s First Ad Powered by Artificial Intelligence Motion Pictures
This would be our first big sustainability campaign without promoting any product or technology. Especially since the narratives of sustainability are exhausted in the world of brand communications, we needed a very refreshing and daring touch as differentiator. Thus, we chose to associate our campaign with AI Motion Pictures, where connectivity and fluidity is inherent in generative visuals.
Our “Connections” film is an experiment in the use of artificial intelligence to draw parallels between the human body and nature. Throughout the film, we see human features transition into and out of various elements found in nature. The idea behind these transitions is to show how similar the human body is to the body of nature and how all living things are inextricably connected to one another.
The video employs AI to create a feeling of ‘connectedness’. “Connections” is one the first films that is half live action and half generated by machine learning. For the AI part, per sequence, dataset of 20.000+ images of different but similar contents were created. For some datasets, like this flower sequence the team gathered many different types of centered flowers and shot them at the studio as well as datasets from different sources. In the end, over half a million images were taken from the production teams’ footage were processed, while around half a million images were hand collected from different sources, resulting in over a million images which needed to be processed to produce this one-minute movie.
Connecting People From 101 Different Countries
For a campaign that took its inspiration from “connectedness”, social media was key in our effort to create a global sustainability community. To be able to reach people from 101 different countries, we built our whole media strategy on Social Media platforms e.g., Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. Therefore, we were also able to present the poignant copy of our advert with subtitles translated to 56 different languages!
Thus, social media platforms were not just effective media channels but a perfect match for the DNA of our campaign.
