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In re Holocaust Victims Assets
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In this historic $1.25 billion settlement with Swiss Banks, Hilsoft Notifications was responsible for target audience analyses, notice planning including the media plan design, implementation of all of the international media plan and notice placements, and placement of all of the hundreds of Jewish publications in the U.S. and around the world. After interviewing Holocaust survivors to better understand readership hurdles, and traveling to numerous parts of the world where Jewish class members could be targets of anti-Semitic repercussions from notice appearances, Hilsoft determined how to best communicate this sensitive information.
The program consisted of 371 appearances in Mainstream newspapers and publications and 622 appearances in Jewish publications, placed in 40 countries and 26 languages. Notices were viewed or read at least 655 million times over the course of the program. The notice and media plan served as the model for numerous subsequent Holocaust restitution programs. The plan was cost-efficient and provided adequate and effective notice without unreasonably depleting the Settlement funds available for distribution to the Settlement Classes. The savings achieved in paid media through negotiated cost reductions and voluntary contributions by publishers was in excess of $2 million dollars. Additional "free" placements of the full Court-approved paid media notice, plus the value of free premium positions within the publications, resulted in a value to the Settlement Fund of approximately $500,000, and an additional 4,257,300 exposures to the notice.
At the conclusion of the notice program, Hilsoft Notifications provided the only overall analysis of the effectiveness of the notice campaign, documenting and quantifying how effectively all of the efforts reached the Jewish and other class members. The notice campaign, which has been called the most complex and comprehensive in litigation history, had to reach those targeted for persecution by the Nazi regime based on their being Jewish, Romani, Jehovah's Witness, homosexual, or physically or mentally disabled or handicapped, as well as heirs of victims.
The Court relied on Hilsoft Notifications to study and critique objections to the settlement. Judge Korman wrote on page 51 in the first release of his settlement approval order:
Chief Judge Korman, In re Holocaust Victims Assets Litigation, July 26, 2000, 96 Civ. 4849 (E.D. NY):
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"This proposal is far from concrete, and, with the exception of calling for expenditures to hire a number of additional personnel to work on notice to the disabled, appears merely to restate DRA’s initial ground for objection that disability organizations should be specifically targeted for notice. Targeting notice to disability groups, however, would not necessarily reach most, or even any, disabled victims, and less so their heirs. As succinctly stated in the sworn report of one of the notice administrators in this case:
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'The nature of the class description provides no reason to believe that current mentally or physically disabled populations in general bear any connection to those that were mentally or physically disabled during the class period. Therefore, any special notice activity directed to any of these current day communities or organizations beyond which was done, would carry little expected benefit. (i.e., one could gather a group of people at random and have just as much success finding a survivor or heir of a Holocaust era mentally or physically disabled person, as one would by targeting today’s mentally or physically disabled populations, organizations, or in publications written for them.)' |
