Ukrposhta and Saatchi & Saatchi Bring Eurovision to Deaf Audiences in Ukraine
Ukrposhta's Delivering Emotions is a May 2017 public-interest film, created by Saatchi & Saatchi Ukraine, in which Ukraine's Eurovision Song Contest entry is performed entirely in international sign language to make the globally watched competition accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences across Ukraine and beyond.
Eurovision is one of the most emotionally charged broadcast events on the European calendar. According to the European Broadcasting Union, the contest draws hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide each year. Yet for deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences, that communal emotional experience has historically been unavailable in any meaningful sense. Ukrposhta, Ukraine's national postal operator, and Saatchi & Saatchi Ukraine identified that gap and chose to close it, at least in part, through a single, carefully crafted film. The campaign sits within the Public Interest category and was distributed as a film asset, released in Ukraine in May 2017 to coincide with the Eurovision Song Contest being hosted in Kyiv that year.
The timing was deliberate and resonant. In 2017, Ukraine hosted Eurovision for the first time since 2005, as reported by Simple Wikipedia, making the contest a moment of rare national cultural prominence. Ukrposhta had itself just undergone a significant transformation: the organisation rebranded on April 12, 2017, replacing its historic winged-envelope logo with a postal horn redesigned as a geolocation pin, according to Ukrposhta Ua. Saatchi & Saatchi developed Ukrposhta's new brand concept as part of that repositioning, reportedly without charge. Delivering Emotions followed within weeks as the public-facing creative expression of that renewed identity — one built around connection, reach, and the idea that a national postal service exists to carry meaning between people. Clapboard's editorial score for the campaign is 73 out of 100.
Ukrposhta occupies a structurally unique position in Ukrainian public life. As Ukraine's national postal operator, it functions as both a commercial logistics provider and a public institution, responsible for connecting communities across a geographically large and linguistically diverse country. That dual identity made a public-interest campaign a natural strategic vehicle — one that could communicate institutional values without the transactional register of conventional advertising.
The strategic insight behind Delivering Emotions is precise. Eurovision, as reported by the European Broadcasting Union, is among the most widely watched non-sporting broadcast events in the world, yet its emotional core — performance, music, national identity — is structurally inaccessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. In Ukraine, where the contest was being hosted in 2017, that exclusion carried additional social weight. Saatchi & Saatchi Ukraine framed the campaign not as a corporate gesture but as a social experiment and public initiative: what would happen if the idea were simply acted upon, with a team of concerned individuals coming together to make it real? According to the campaign's own documentation, the concept moved rapidly from presentation stage to production precisely because it generated immediate public resonance.
The broader postal market context reinforces the strategic logic. According to the Universal Postal Union, domestic parcel volumes globally increased approximately 8.6% in 2017, reaching approximately 13.74 billion items, reflecting a sector in active modernisation. Ukrposhta was repositioning itself within that shifting landscape, moving from a legacy operator to a contemporary service brand. Competitors in the Ukrainian logistics and delivery space — including private international operators such as Nova Poshta and DHL, which had expanded their Ukrainian networks considerably by 2017 — were defining themselves through speed and technology. Ukrposhta's response was to compete on human meaning rather than operational metrics, a differentiation that Delivering Emotions embodied directly.
Delivering Emotions was directed by Vladimir Zhuravkin, with cinematography by director of photography Sergey Morgunov. The film was produced by 23/32 Films and completed in post-production by Wizard Post. The creative team at Saatchi & Saatchi Ukraine was led by creative director Kosta Schneider, with art direction by Eugene Zvenigorodskiy and Illya Bondar, and copywriting by Sergey Beloshitsky, Dmytro Mamontov, and Olexandra Kochubey. Managing director Tatiana Slivko, head of production Julia Sokolova, senior account manager Elena Tarasiuk, and account executive Katerina Grishko rounded out the core team.
The film's creative approach draws on a documentary and social-experiment register rather than a conventional advertising grammar. The decision to render Ukraine's Eurovision entry entirely in international sign language is both the concept and the execution — there is no separation between the idea and its form. International sign language, sometimes referred to as Gestuno, is a contact sign system used at international events to bridge communication across national sign-language communities, making it the precise linguistic tool for a contest that is itself defined by cross-border participation.
The production's craft choices reflect that conceptual clarity. The film does not frame sign language performance as a spectacle or as an object of curiosity for hearing viewers; it presents it as a full and sufficient emotional experience in its own right. That tonal decision — to treat accessibility not as accommodation but as full creative participation — is what separates Delivering Emotions from more formulaic public-service executions. The documentary register grounds the social experiment premise: this is something that happened, with real people, generating real public response, rather than a staged demonstration of corporate concern. The single-film format concentrates that intent, allowing the work to function as both cultural commentary and brand statement for Ukrposhta simultaneously.
Delivering Emotions generated documented public resonance at the time of its release in Ukraine in May 2017. According to the campaign's own account, the concept produced an immediate public outcry upon presentation and moved rapidly from idea to production as a result of collective civic engagement — an outcome that itself constitutes a measurable form of social impact, even absent formal viewership metrics.
No independently verified audience figures or media reach statistics for Delivering Emotions are publicly available through named third-party sources. However, the structural conditions of the campaign's release — Eurovision 2017 being hosted in Kyiv, Ukrposhta's concurrent national rebrand as documented by ukrposhta.ua, and the novelty of a Ukrainian public institution producing sign-language accessible film content at scale — created an environment in which organic distribution through Ukrainian media and social channels was a credible outcome. The campaign was submitted to international creative award programmes, and its presence in archives such as Iqads Ro confirms it received regional industry attention.
Assessed on structural effectiveness, Delivering Emotions performs strongly across several dimensions. It connects a specific, verifiable audience need — sign-language access to Eurovision — to a brand whose core purpose is connection and reach. It exploits a precise cultural moment, Eurovision 2017 in Ukraine, that amplified its relevance without requiring paid media scale. And it advances Ukrposhta's broader 2017 repositioning from legacy institution to contemporary public-service brand, as documented by ukrposhta.ua. Clapboard scores the campaign 73 out of 100, reflecting its conceptual precision, cultural timing, and craft, against the limitation of a single-asset format and the absence of a documented distribution strategy.
Delivering Emotions is a public-interest film created for Ukrposhta by Saatchi & Saatchi Ukraine in May 2017. It renders Ukraine's Eurovision Song Contest entry entirely in international sign language, making the competition's emotional experience accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences in Ukraine and beyond. The campaign coincided with Ukrposhta's national rebrand.
Saatchi & Saatchi Ukraine identified that Eurovision's emotional experience was structurally inaccessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Ukrposhta, repositioning itself as a human-connection brand in 2017, provided the platform. The idea generated immediate public resonance and moved from concept to production through collective civic engagement, according to the campaign's own documentation.
Vladimir Zhuravkin directed Delivering Emotions, with Sergey Morgunov as director of photography. The film was produced by 23/32 Films and post-produced by Wizard Post. Creative direction was led by Kosta Schneider at Saatchi & Saatchi Ukraine, with art direction by Eugene Zvenigorodskiy and Illya Bondar.
Ukraine hosted Eurovision 2017 in Kyiv, making it a moment of exceptional national cultural prominence. Delivering Emotions used that context directly, performing Ukraine's Eurovision entry in international sign language. The campaign launched in May 2017 to coincide with the contest, as reported in the campaign's documentation and confirmed by simple.wikipedia.org.
Clapboard scores Delivering Emotions 73 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's conceptual precision, cultural timing around Eurovision Ukraine 2017, and documentary craft, while accounting for its single-asset format and the absence of a publicly documented paid distribution strategy for the Ukrainian market.
Ukrposhta rebranded on April 12, 2017, replacing its winged-envelope logo with a redesigned postal horn, according to ukrposhta.ua. Saatchi & Saatchi developed that brand concept, reportedly without charge. Delivering Emotions, released weeks later in May 2017, served as the public-interest creative expression of Ukrposhta's repositioning around human connection and reach.
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