OVERVIEW
Christmas is the hardest time to be apart from those you love, and that absence is never more keenly felt than when we gather around the Christmas table. Three Mobile and Samsung both share a brand purpose, using technology to connect people so we put that promise to work.
We used their combined technologies to bring families stuck on two sides of the world to have Christmas dinner around one table. We designed, built and opened a truly unique restaurant, with one half in Dublin and the other half in Sydney, Australia... 17,209km away. Every table was connected by Three’s high-speed data network, and Samsung’s peerless displays. Making the impossible Christmas Dinner, possible.
DETAIL
Creating a seamless dining experience in two cities on literally opposite sides of the earth, in different time zones, on behalf of two different brands brought some unique challenges. A special menu even had to be commissioned to take into account the 11hour time difference, creating a Christmas dinner/breakfast.
We scouted locations and got to work. We built identical restaurants in every detail each with semicircular tables; one half in Dublin and the other in Sydney forming several connected round tables. The tech setup was meticulously designed to blend cameras and microphones unobtrusively in the environment and ensuring the screens portrayed a near zero-latency, high fidelity visual of the rest of the party half a world away.
Every element of the rooms had to be designed as a perfect mirror of its counterpart half a world away. Identical twin waiters completed the illusion of a single waiter magically teleporting from one location to the other.
The restaurant was open in the weeks before Christmas and was booked out for 3 months within minutes. A film of the event was viewed by 8.5m people (nearly twice the population of Ireland) and both brands recorded an uplift in brand sentiment and brand health. 70% of viewers felt an increase in Three's network strength, while overall brand health increased 1.5% while the experience was open.
The activation was so successful we repeated our experiment the following year, this time uniting families in Ireland with their loved ones trapped in New York by Trump's crack-down on illegal immigrants.
ROLE
Creative Technologist
AWARDS
The FWA – FOTD
ICAD – 1 x Silver Bell, 1 x Bronze Bell
APMC – 1 x Gold Star, 1 x Silver Star, 1 x Bronze Star
TEAM
Executive Creative Director: Rory Hamilton
Creative Director: Kris Clarkin
Senior Art Director: Jake O'Driscoll
Senior Copywriter: Avril Delaney
Created by Boys+Girls, in collaboration with Unit9.