2010 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

Nothing short of extraordinary. With an unusual media selection and no media spend we managed to engage with a huge mass of people who had never before looked at MSN as theirs. The campaign spread virally. First day of release saw 1500 hits on the website. Within two months out of the 628,070 visits, 241,000 actually downloaded and used the emoticons. Numbers are growing every day as the site is still live. We are now in the process of creating country-specific emotions for the region as the first round was such a big success. MSN has finally come to Arabia!

Creative Execution

What this region doesn’t have is a familiar way of expressing when it comes to chat. Whether it’s language or in the use of standard smileys, known as emoticons. We decided to localize this particular experience. We created a set of 10 free emoticons with local expressions. Richly animated, these icons used popular greetings that people across the region could easily identify with. By offering them a localized medium of expression through language and emoticons, we made our audience feel connected to the brand. We advertised these on existing MSN web banners, space and chat windows in English, Arabic and French to get maximum attention and push for immediate download. The timing of their release coincided with Ramadan & Eid – the biggest holiday season of the year in the region, and the one time everyone wants to call or connect with each other.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

To engage with the local audience in the Middle East, MSN had pursued many different tactics. One of them was establishing the local version of its website, MSN Arabia. However, most people in the region still preferred other sites and services such as Maktoob, Google and Yahoo for local content. Usage of MSN was low in general, so we had to find a way to localize their experience. Our insight was that MSN chat was the most popular service used by our target audience in the age group of 15-35. So we decided to use our client’s own digital media, MSN Messenger – innovatively. We made this our first entry point of localizing MSN in general.