On April 21st 2016 Samsung won the Tribeca Film Festival branded content award with an amazing 5-minute short, beating out other excellent brand productions.

The story is about a young man suffering from achromatopsia, a rare condition that makes people totally color blind. But Neil Harbisson did not surrender to it: he just convinced doctors to implant an antenna in the back of his head allowing him to hear colors. 

In the film, which you can easily find on Vimeo, Neil can be seen talking with people and exploring places in New York City, with the antenna hovering on his head and bent to hear the colors he can perceive on people’s faces, cars, buildings, neon lights, natural landscapes.

“I am a cyborg – Neil explains – and ‘cyborg’ comes from the union of cybernetics and organism, and that’s how I feel”. To him the antenna is now a body part: it has color sensors and a chip in the back of his head which picks up the light frequencies and transpose them into sound waves.

Being very visible, the antenna helps Neil start conversations with people about their perception of reality. Neil can now discover unexpected connections between things and objects of which previously he was unaware (for instance, between the color of the sky and that of someone’s eyes).

The story is even more fascinating as Neil’s discoveries lead him to view everything differently. “People say cities are grey… cities are not grey, there is no grey in cities… there’s always some hue, there’s always color”.

Not by chance, some places strike him because of the incredible sound waves he gets: “Time Square is one of the most exciting places in the world… it’s just music everywhere you look at, there’s maybe twenty different electronic concerts going on at the same time”.

In short, it’s a compelling video you really may want to watch. But the narrative also succeeds in highlighting a surprising technology. Although Samsung’s signature only appears at the end, technology is the great Helper of the story and the benefit it can bring to the human condition is unmistakable.

Thus, with this film Samsung is proving very skilful in the use of Branded Content, providing meaningful entertainment with a publisher’s flair and without extolling its products in any discernible way.

Still, after Neil’s pioneering adventure, one can only hope that in the future Samsung, or other technology wizards, will come up with less conspicuous cyborg-inspired devices.