2009 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

The activation was an instant hit with staggering results over the campaign period with an increase in traffic from a few users per day to over 30,000 users using the service daily, and a total of around 99,000 subscribers. The execution generated strong WOM among our target audience with people talking about the phones they were seeing during their regular day to day activities. This helped to reinforce the value of the service in creating more impact about the WBackup, resulting in more people subscribing to the service.

Creative Execution

To create this real world situation, we felt traditional media was not the solution. Instead, we created dummy mobile phones with the same look and feel as real phones. These phones carried the message, “Don’t be a dummy… this could happen to you too. Backup your data on Wataniya’s server using the WBackup service.” Promoters were hired to act like regular people inside malls, ‘accidentally’ leaving behind these dummy mobiles on coffee shop tables, benches, restaurant tables, cinemas and major supermarkets. By forgetting to pick up their phones as they walked away, recreated the scenario in which you might lose your mobile and all the data stored on it. Our target audience would then pick up these dummies, thinking they had found a real mobile, thus becoming exposed to our message, as a wakeup call: ‘this could happen to you too’, including instructions on how to use the WBackup service.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Wataniya Telecommunications – leading Mobile Operator in Kuwait – identified an opportunity for a mobile data backup service in their marketplace but faced a PERCEPTION challenge. Research and empirical evidence suggested that most people only really appreciate how important it is to backup their data memory when it’s too late – at the point when they have already lost it. Our business objective was to convert potential mobile users while they still had data to back up, by recreating this moment of ‘realization’, alerting them to the negative repercussions of failing to update features like their contact lists, pictures and videos, stored messages or calendar tasks on a server like Wataniya’s, while they are still in a position to do so. We wanted to jolt them out of their complacency and to make them feel that this could easily happen to them.