2009 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

Waffar.com’s call center was flooded with calls from new clients wanting to post their promotions on the site, and some people even called in to thank Waffar.com for the pound. According to Waffar.com, visits to the site for the month of January’09 rose by 26%. Brand awareness, measured from direct traffic (no referrals) and search-by-name words rose by 18%.

Creative Execution

Our creative solution was inserting a real Egyptian one pound note in magazines. We knew we couldn’t place this pound in all the magazines in Egypt; so we decided to approach only one magazine with a reasonable distribution, and personally select who the ad went to. 2000 copies with real one pound notes were sent to select subscribers as well as to over 100 targeted companies. At the time of print, no other communication channels were used; however this year Waffar.com plans to invest more in online and radio communications.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Waffar translates to 'save' in Arabic. We were asked by Waffar.com, an online promotions portal based in Cairo, to remind people of their existence; that by logging onto the site, real savings can be made. Our target is anyone looking for a bargain. In Egypt, that’s almost everyone, and due to the minute marketing budget given to us, we needed something effective that would generate results and get people talking. Waffar.com launched in 2004 and was one of the first specialized B2C websites in Egypt. Due to a very catchy radio campaign, visits to the site in 2005 averaged 70,000 a month. Since then Waffar.com have laid low in terms of marketing and thus visits to the site have suffered substantially. The insight here was that, Egyptians love a good bargain. Our idea was to give the Egyptian people something involving and of value to them.