2011 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

To engage with the local audience in Egypt, Microsoft had pursued many different activities. One of them was establishing the local Egyptian edition of its website MSN. However, most people in the region still preferred other sites for local content. Awareness about all of Microsoft’s products was low in general. Our challenge was to make Egyptian people relate to the range of products Microsoft offered, and start building a relationship with its audience, in the age group of 15-35.

Creative Execution

People are more comfortable expressing themselves in their own language and style rather than a foreign one. The fact that our audience now had a localized form of expression made them identify with Microsoft’s products much more. This is exactly what our emoticons achieved. The universal visual language had a unique Egyptian personality that featured (and in turn connected) with people from all walks of life – young and old, modern and traditional, city dwellers and village people, a real cross section of Egyptian culture. We had made the Microsoft brand more relatable to them.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

To outsiders, Egypt is full of stereotypes like pyramids and pharaohs. But modern day Egyptian people are a dramatic and colourful bunch – uniquely different from other Arab cultures. So we localized Egyptian conversations first. We created 10 emoticons for MSN Messenger chat that looked, talked and behaved just like local Egyptians of today. Egyptians could now express themselves through over emotive gestures, digitally as well. This pack of 10 emoticons was named ‘Ana Masri’ or ‘I Am Egyptian’ to further reinforce the unity that Egyptians have amongst each other despite their diversity.

Results

Seeded through e-mails and web banners, this was one of the most successful digital campaigns for Microsoft in Egypt. The Ana Masri pack was downloaded 119,296 times – not just by Egyptians but Arabs across the region who’ve grown up on Egyptian movies, TV shows, music and football. All this was achieved with no media expense as we used our client’s own medium – their website MSN. Increased visits to MSN Egypt through our campaign led to higher downloads for other Microsoft products such as Internet Explorer (13,894 downloads) Bing (59,682 default settings) and Windows Live Essentials (24,617 downloads).