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In November 2023, Ukraine celebrated the 10th anniversary of the start of the Revolution of Dignity – an event that significantly influenced the country’s development trajectory.

However, even after 10 years and a full-scale invasion there is still a barrier of misunderstanding between Ukrainians and Europeans. On one hand, most EU citizens agree with the statement that “Ukraine should join the EU when ready.” At the same time, russian propaganda portrays Ukraine as an incapable state and works to sow division within the EU.

A step towards overcoming this barrier of mutual understanding was to be a joint symbolic communication campaign that through the example of the Revolution of Dignity would demonstrate that Ukrainians feel and share European values. Given the tendency to avoid news about Ukraine in Germany, especially negative ones, the campaign aimed to facilitate the publication of quality materials that would reveal context and convey embedded messages.

Since Europeans do not completely believe that they are similar with Ukrainians, perhaps it is worth communicating our common values through the universal language of humanity. It sounds “right” and is understood in various social contexts worldwide. And that language is music.

During the Revolution of Dignity music united, supported, and inspired. Blue and yellow piano “Ukraine” not only served as a musical instrument but also became a physical and symbolic barrier between forces and peaceful protesters. Considering the deep symbolism of the piano the Publicis Ukraine and MSL Ukraine team proposed to create a cultural event alongside another symbolic monument, but for Germans, the iconic Brandenburg Gate.

The culmination of the event was the performance of the EU anthem “Ode to Joy,” in a four-hand rendition as a poignant symbol of Ukraine’s inevitable accession to the European family.

The campaign generated over 50 publications in leading German media, including online, print, and 11 features on major TV channels. The total non-unique publication coverage exceeded 486,100,000, with unique coverage reaching 40,500,000 — all without any media investments. Additionally, the event served as a platform for conveying important messages by official figures.

In 2022 Visa, like other responsible brands, reevaluated its priorities, focusing efforts and resources on support. The company created a non-commercial platform that served as a forum for the coordinated efforts of Visa’s social initiatives and its partners, arising in response to numerous simultaneous needs.

The establishment of the Brands Who Care enabled the consolidation of media channels, businesses, foundations, and those needing assistance for effective aid and support. Visa directed its communication investments to support the platform, emphasizing timely messages on areas requiring immediate assistance. The campaign was created by the Saatchi & Saatchi Ukraine team.

To achieve maximum visibility, the initiatives were presented as Brands who care, rather than directly under the Visa name, which facilitated more effective interaction with the audience. The project garnered significant reach, with over 50,000,000 contacts.

Since the launch of the first collaborations, over 20 initiatives have been organized, and over 80 million hryvnias have been raised. Brands who care community continue to thrive and evolve as a community of socially responsible brands.

The celebration of Kyivstar’s 25th anniversary was supposed to be the highlight of 2022. However, due to the war, traditional approaches to business and media planning no longer worked.

In the realities of full-scale war, Kyivstar reduced its media budgets by 30%. Consumer behavior changed, but the positioning of the brand “Human Connection” became even more relevant. The campaign for a new tariff for the 25th anniversary with the option of donations for the army was launched as a special crisis solution in wartime to save the lives of Ukrainian defenders and literally restore human connections in the de-occupied cities. The key challenge was optimizing the media support of the campaign.

The basis of the planning was Big Data from previous campaigns. Based on this, we created a new approach to planning, using econometric attribution modeling of users’ actual actions. Our data-driven strategy led to a significant shift in the TV and digital media split from 70/30 to a more effective 35/65. We managed to identify the most influential communication methods, thus increasing the amount of direct communication (SMS, push notifications, etc.) and additionally the share of display components in digital tools due to its economic efficiency and higher conversion rates in donation activations.

For continuous tracking of results and accuracy, we created live dashboards.

Results:

x2.5 Activation of the superpower “Helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine”

+20 p.p. Contribution to the restoration of Ukraine

+4 p.p. Brand connection

+4 p.p. Market leadership in mobile communications

Kyivstar gain first place in the fragmented market of the fixed Internet and become “visible” for the non-beneficial algorithms of the search algorithm. Instead of classic SEO-approaches the brand left the template and optimized the landing page for each city and town, where there is a physical possibility of Kyivstar to provide the fixed Internet.

Experimental “local” tactics in SEO increased the visibility of Kyivstar’s fixed Internet in the first positions of organic search results by 3.5 times. Brand №1 has now caught up with itself in the search.

This case received Bronze Award in E-Commerce category at Effie Awards Ukraine.

This is a showcase of how Lenovo, a hi-tech electronics brand, thinks not only about the functional features of its products, but also takes care of both product usage conditions and client’s comfort.

Creating of Lenovo Meowbook – laptop for cats – added more emotions into the user-brand relationships as well as highlighting such a problem as ‘device damaging from cat’s fur’ which became communicative innovation in this category.

Virus orientation, originality, and non-standard merging of high technologies and additional customer care allowed Lenovo to be organically discussed in media and got 9.5 million impressions.

In the category of chocolate bars, where the brand is chosen emotionally and standing near the shelf, we work with a young audience of 16-24 years old. This generation least of all trusts advertising and selects the brands that it really loves, considers cool and relevant in its philosophy.

Our task was to find a massive territory for communication on which the brand would look organically. And we have chosen for ourselves the cybersport, which is polarized among young people and is actively developing. But what we needed was involving emotional communication. Therefore, we became the first sponsor of the bars of the Kyiv tournament on the mega-popular game in Ukraine – Dota 2.

Thanks to the native integration into the tournament itself, as well as large-scale support with the announcement, we were able to not only reach and engage the audience but also achieve our goals.

We faced a challenge to break into the everyday life of people with a new product Kabanosy – long, thin sausages made from natural meat, positioned in between the meat-sausage and snack category. Until 2019 the product was unknown to both Ukrainian customers and distributors. Retail shops didn’t understand in which division the product should be sold, customers were puzzled whether to make sandwiches or eat Kabanosy with beer.

New product inspired us for a new approach for mixing media channels. We turned the classical media mix upside down and developed “DigiVision”, where digital plays a leading role in generating reach and TV is playing a secondary role. Non-standard and effective usage of media allowed Kabanosy to become a leader of the category of Snack and Meat products with minimal investment and significantly grew monthly sales.

Pandemic is a hard time for people: we are flooded by bad news and sad thoughts. We all need a source of calmness and harmony during these times.

Therefore we created a new philosophy “Take it smoothie”, which helps to deal with bad moods and tough problems.

We used only social networks to promote our campaign and created bright content, interesting copy, and super cool Insta-masks.