It’s been almost 80 years since the Holocaust happened. So how do you pick the interest of 13-30 year olds who’ve had enough of hearing about the Holocaust, feel it has nothing to do with them and reconnect them with its memory and its teachings and the importance of remember the history? You use the medium closest to them - Instagram STORIES - to retell the story in a dynamic, relevant and innovative way.
The Story of Eva is such an initiative. Based on the life of Eva Heyman, a 13-year-old Jewish Hungarian girl who wrote a diary documenting the hardships of the Second World War over a period of three months – from the time the Nazis invaded her hometown right up to her deportation to the concentration camps 3 months later where she died.
We transformed her diary into a first time
ever “Instagram stories film” and retold her story on a dedicated Instagram account
in a first-person style, portraying what life under Nazi occupation would have
been like if youngsters then had had a mobile phone. So doing we effectively
created an innovative, original, revolutionary and unique documentary style
that has never been used before to commemorate the Holocaust.
Our aim:
• Raise awareness of the
memory of the Holocaust among youth
• Spur young people to
follow Eva's page on Instagram
• Get young people to
watch the videos uploaded to Eva’s Instagram Stories on Holocaust Remembrance
Day
So two weeks before
Holocaust Remembrance Day (May 1-2) – we teased the public with billboards
calling on them to follow Eva’s page. The only image on the billboard was of a
hand holding up a mobile phone near a barbed wire fence and a Follow@Eva.Stories
CTA. Discussion around the topic flared up immediately as the press caught on
and debated the appropriateness of the medium for such a serious topic.
Next we flooded social media and recruited hundreds of opinion leaders, celebrities and influencers to share and invite their followers to follow Eva’s page – and posted a video trailer on Eva's page two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day. Views shot up instantly as it garnered over 4.5 million views, 3.5 million interactions, 20,000 comments and 360,000 shares. (https://youtu.be/tJecRvcVlZI)
Then on May 1st,
Holocaust Remembrance Day, we went live at exactly 4
PM and over a period of 24 hours we uploaded
220 Instagram stories to Eva’s Instagram page as “stories”. The last story
airing on May 2nd, just as Holocaust Remembrance Day ended.
The Results
A first-of-its-kind
use of Instagram Stories!
We successfully
created a Holocaust memorial for the smartphone generation.
• Reach: Coverage in
89 countries
· Massive press coverage:
items on over 1,000 news&content websites including ALL major global news
channels: CNN, BBC, Washington Post, The New York Times, New York Post’
Reuters, the sun, Daily Mirror, The Gaurdian, El Mundo, and many more…
· Massive public support
inc: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, White House, state of Israel, IDF, Gal
Gadot, Bar Refaeli
· Biggest influencers
activity in the history of Israel
· Google: 200 million search
results and #3 trending topic on Google Trends on that day.
· Wikipedia Fanbased page
was created by users.
· 1.7
million followers to @eva.stories page at Instagram
• Over 330
million views on Instagram Stories
• 10 million
interactions per week
• 10 million visits to
Eva's page
• 40% of the followers
were between the ages of 13-24
• The countries with
the most followers: Israel, USA, Russia, Germany and Brazil
• The peak number of
viewers during the closing scene - 1.4 million people
• 230,000 people sent
Eva last words and their love during the last scene
• On average, 1 million
people viewed each video
We are confident this
initiative successfully reignited the discourse around the Holocaust and will
contribute to perpetuating its learnings for many generations to come.
Because if we are
not learn from history – we are doomed to repeat it.