Would You Look Through Somebody Else’s Phone?

This is late.

The campaign was launched at the end of 2008, but did an exceptional job of building personal relationships with people and getting them engaged with the brand through 3 personas. Titled “Somebody Else’s Phone”, the campaign invited viewers to explore the lives of three characters through their Nokia 7610 mobile phone: Anna in London, Jade in Shanghai and Luca in Los Angeles, and somehow slipped under the radar and didn’t manage to get the credit I feel it deserves.

Here’s me resurfacing this as a case study of how storytelling and tapping on voyeuristic tendencies work in advertising.

“Imagine finding a phone that belongs to somebody else;

filled with personal text messages, contacts, diary entries, photos, voicemails and private video clips.
It’s like having a window into somebody’s entire life. Would you be tempted to look through it?”

The Supernova campaign held over a span of six weeks, following the characters’ evolving storylines across three time zones. A 24/7 feed of content was available in ten different languages. For more personal conversations with the characters, viewers were
able to connect with the Facebook profiles of Anna Randall, Jade Yu and Luca Marques in Los Angeles. You could even discover the characters’ phone numbers and call or text them directly.

Each of them also had his or her own personal website (Jadesphone.com / Lucasphone.com / Annasphone.com , currently all defunct), where users could explore the contents within their “phones”, such as text messages, photos, videos and voicemails.

The three have distinctly different personalities and live in different parts of the world – Luca in LA, Jade in Shanghai and Anna in London; and because they live in different time zones and receive messages at different times of the day, things are always popping up on the site.