Every big app had already released a Dark Mode feature and WhatsApp, the most trusted messaging platform, was late to the game. On top of that, it was the #1 request from our users across the world. To announce it, we couldn’t just do a how-to video, as tech brands commonly do. We needed an iconic entertainment piece highlighting how much our users were waiting to say hello to our Dark Mode feature.

We launched “Hello Darkness,” a campaign featuring the highly relatable awkward moments we experience as we’re hit by our phone’s light, in the middle of the dark. So awkward, that even looking at these moments is painful. A film where light becomes the enemy, and the need for darkness is dramatized. For our film, we worked with music legendPaul Simon to feature a version of “The Sound of Silence” that was kept in the dark for over 50 years, until WhatsApp’s Dark Mode came out.

The strategy for the campaign relied on finding the most relatable moments and pain points that the dark mode feature would come to solve. Dramatizing those moments in a humorous way was the key to connect with people who would relate and see themselves in the film, and in turn would be more encouraged to update their WhatsApp to get the new DarkMode feature that would solve the problem for them.

Since WhatsApp has a global customer base, we captured portraits of people from all sorts of backgrounds, using slow motion to capitalize on the universal struggle people from all walks of life, all over the world, go through as they’re blinded by the light in a dark space. The song elevates and dramatizes the moments even more, with the somber version of “Sounds of Silence” that contrasted the scenes where light was the enemy, with the need to welcome that darkness the lyrics speak of.

With 75x more comments, and 60x more shares, with over 3MM views in just nine hours, Dark Mode became the most engaging WhatsApp campaign to date.