Celebrity Name: Shaquille O’Neal
Brand Name: Turkcell
Deal Type: Campaign Appearance
Announced: April 10, 2026
Impact: Positions Turkcell’s 5G as a high‑energy, globally visible launch, leveraging Shaq’s humor and star power to make technical features feel fun and accessible
- Turkcell, Türkiye’s leading mobile operator and technology company, is entering the 5G era with an ambitious new campaign featuring basketball icon Shaquille O’Neal.
- The campaign is built around a comedic hair transplant premise, Shaq accidentally tells airport reporters he is in Türkiye for a hair transplant, and the story spirals into a series of visually spectacular and humorous scenes.
- The production involved a crew of 180 people, nearly 60 vehicles, a 35-day pre-production process, and a post-production phase spanning nearly 70 days, making it one of the most technically ambitious telecom campaigns in recent memory.
- This is Shaquille O’Neal’s first known partnership with Turkcell, marking the brand’s first use of a global sports icon to anchor its 5G narrative.
Shaquille O’Neal is the new face of Turkcell in a cinematic 5G launch campaign that is already turning heads.
The campaign opens with O’Neal being told to keep his role in the Turkcell commercial under wraps, but when reporters at the airport ask why he has come to Türkiye, he spots hair-transplant tourists around him and blurts out: “To get a hair transplant.”
That one impulsive answer sets off a wildly entertaining chain of events, with O’Neal appearing in unexpected settings, from dancing in a village with long black hair to braving the cold atop a mountain peak, using comedy and strong visuals to dramatize the speed and capacity that Turkcell 5G delivers in all conditions.
Rather than a typical tech ad, the campaign presents 5G through a creative narrative that blends humour, cultural texture and visual scale.
Produced by Norr Film, nine custom wigs were produced for O’Neal, four of them made in the US in a process that took 12 days, and four separate costumes were tailored for him stateside as well.
The campaign is Shaq’s first with Turkcell. On the brand side, Turkcell had previously worked with Turkish actor Kerem Bürsin for a series of global conceptual commercials throughout 2024, marking a clear step up in international star power with this move.
For Shaq, it adds to a string of recent partnerships: tm:rw announced O’Neal as investor, partner, and global ambassador and he partnered with Shaq-A-Licious on a candy campaign with Hershey.
Takeaways
Turkcell’s decision to anchor its 5G launch with a globally recognised personality like Shaq, rather than leaning purely on technical messaging, signals a growing trend among telecom brands: storytelling is the new spec sheet.
With this campaign, Turkcell signals that its move into the 5G era is backed not only by strong technology and network readiness, but also by the creative ambition and storytelling scale expected of a market leader.
For Shaq, the deal is another reminder that his endorsement instincts remain razor-sharp. He has built one of the most powerful endorsement portfolios in sports history, reportedly earning over $95 million per year off the court, guided by a single rule: he has to believe in the product.
A 5G campaign built on speed, reach, and big personality? That sounds exactly on-brand for the Big Aristotle.
Is the “comedy-first” approach to tech advertising more effective than spec-heavy campaigns for convincing everyday consumers to care about 5G? Could this campaign inspire other telecom brands globally to look for larger-than-life sports personalities to make 5G feel culturally relevant?
