Gett highlights Gaza hostages' hobbies in awareness campaign

Tel Aviv-based Gett, the ride-sharing taxi and delivery app, recently conducted an unusual and creative campaign designed to increase awareness of the plight of the hostages being held captive in Gaza.

One of the most iconic and best-known features of the Gett mobile app is the ‘driver’s hobby’ section, which lists the favorite pastimes of Gett drivers that appear on the screens of passengers’ smartphones and is intended as an icebreaker between drivers and riders. Daniel Corcos, Vice-President of Marketing at Gett, explains that the company initiated the idea of listing the hobbies of the hostages being held captive in Gaza as a way to increase awareness of their predicament. “We presented the idea to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum,” he says, “and they contacted the hostages’ families to obtain the information.”

The Forum gathered the information about the hobbies of the hostages, with the consent of the families, and Gett designed a random rotation so that the app would display the hobbies of different hostages when riders used the service.

Positive reception from users

Corcos says that Gett received a great deal of positive feedback from passengers, who found the listing of the hobbies of the hostages to be quite meaningful. Initially, the program ran for several weeks, On January 18, the one-year birthday of Kfir Bibas, the feature reappeared, displaying the hobbies of Kfir who was nine months old when he was kidnapped. “Kfir’s hobbies displayed in the app,” says Corcos emotionally, “were smiling and crawling. It was chilling for us and, I think, for anyone else who saw it.” The feature again was reinstated on April 7, the six-month anniversary marking the beginning of the war.

Displaying the hobbies of the hostages in the app served as a way to bring the reality of their desperate straits to people going about their day. “You see how a person who is living their life and wants to get from point A to point B would suddenly encounter it and share it on social networks.”

The Gett team realizes that the app can influence passengers and reach many people as a type of mobile marketplace. It has developed other promotions in the past, such as the ability to send pop-up donations from the app and utilizes the app to provide appropriate messages to its users. “On Israel Independence Day,” says Corcos, “instead of just wishing our customers Happy Independence Day, we wrote ‘Happy Independence Day to the love of our hearts.” The company’s charitable campaigns, as well as the listing of the hostages’ hobbies, have been presented in both Hebrew and English.

Gett was developed and established in Israel and is also available in the United Kingdom. In addition to transporting passengers, the company also offers door-to-door, on-demand delivery of packages, as well as a business service for companies and organizations.