Gallipoli is a sensitive mile stone in the history of both nations. The creative idea is to bring life to the lost souls of Gallipoli. Since 5% of Turkish soldiers were literate and Anzac soldiers’ letters were delivered in about three months because of the distance to their homeland, they had no means of communication. And so we wanted to answer their unanswered letters from today and commemorate the 18 March Gallipoli Victory.

First we released a short video to let people know about the project, the struggles those soldiers were going through and the ways they could contribute to the project.

Then, we launched our website canakkaleyemektuplar.com on the 101th anniversary of Çanakkale Victory, March 18 2016 (and also on 2017) and got our hashtag #IAmWritingtoGallipoli to Promoted Trending Topic on Twitter.

After, we invited people from Facebook via our promoted posts to letterstogallipoli.com on the Anzac Day April 25 for reply letters fo Anzacs. On both our websites we collected user generated content that is the answers to the unanswered letters of soldiers from the users of both nations.

That content wasn’t left on the online platform but the letters people wrote became a forest, in a running marathon organized in Gallipoli, in the hands of peace volunteers.

• Under normal conditions, the annual average share of voice was 32% and it was up to 73% during the project period.

• That day, 75% of those who talked about the project are people who have never talked about Turkcell before.

• The numbers are the grand total of both 2016 and 2017:

o Web Site Traffic: 650 K

o Total number of letters received: 8.5 K

o Total views of the video: 9 M Times

o Total Hashtag usage: 255 K

• And every single (Approved) letter became a tree in our Forest of Peace in (Çanakkale) Gallipoli.

As the largest local player in the market for global brands,

We wanted to increase the value of the brand image by changing the perspective of Turks to Turkcell in a positive direction.

We have won the sympathy and trust of the Turkish people by choosing the greatest value belonging to Turkey as our occasion.

Our strategy was to use the shared memory of two nations and create a meaningful memorial to the lost souls of Gallipoli on it’s anniversary.

The project we came up with, both connected the nations and generations since our vision is ‘connecting people to life’ we believe that life is lived as long as there is sharing and dialog in it. “

We wanted to emphasize the importance of communicating and telling the feelings of being deprived of communication from the real stories written on letters by asking for answers from the users, after 100 years to the letters of the soldiers from the two different nationalities deprived of communication.

As a leading company in the field of communication and so it operates by the objective ‘connecting people to life’, we believe that life is lived as long as there is sharing and dialog in it.

Since we are the sponsor brand of the Gallipoli Marathon, we planned to have a communication project that overlaps with this brand vision on this occasion.

The communication problem during the war of Gallipoli caused by long distances in Anzac fronts and less than 5% literacy level in the Turkish fronts was highlighted. Since The War of Gallipoli is a subject that the whole nation embrace; we aimed to create a communication bridge both between today and the past and also between two nations using a historically important occasion.