Placing Nokia at the heart of the world’s hottest tech debate

Nokia is a brand that billions of people are familiar with. But after a series of significant business transformations, many of its audiences were unsure of what the brand stood for, or even what business it was in. Nokia needed to raise its profile as a thought leader, drive understanding of its purpose and create fertile ground for the reentry of its brand into the consumer market — all without access to the traditional change mechanisms of advertising, new product launches and identity change. Nokia turned to one agency to tackle that challenge: Lippincott.

At the same time that people were considering their perspective on WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, there was a prominent open letter warning of the dangers of artificial intelligence; the European Union was considering the “Right to be Forgotten” privacy and security question; and there was a steady, almost daily drumbeat of financial and e-commerce security breaches.

Nokia’s newly adopted purpose — to enable the human possibilities of technology — was founded on the belief that the wave of technological change sweeping the world had challenges as well as possibilities. So, we conceived a solution to the challenge that brought what was happening in society, politics and media together with this new purpose. We created a global debate about the possibilities and concerns of the relationship between technology and people, and we placed Nokia at the heart of it with the #maketechhuman campaign.

We partnered with WIRED, and over the course of a year the debate became multi-platform. An online hub was created for articles and interviews alongside a series of events in the United States, China, India, Finland and Brazil. The debate featured podcasts from Monica Lewinsky on cyberbullying and privacy; the United States Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith; and two Reddit AMAs (Ask Me Anythings) with Sir Timothy Berners-Lee and Professor Stephen Hawking. We also created a showcase for community-nominated influencers who have used technology to impact humanity.

The campaign drove over 1.5 billion press and social media impressions and 1.5 million digital engagements. Stephen Hawking’s Reddit AMA was the second most popular ever, with 58 percent of its social media impressions citing Nokia’s brand. A WIRED readership survey found that 87 percent of the people aware of the campaign had engaged in the debate through discussions, articles, podcasts and sharing content, and 31 percent had improved their opinion of Nokia because of it. And perhaps the strongest measure of the campaign’s impact was the 33 percent increase in those familiar with the debate viewing Nokia as a thought leader in technology.