2011 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

2,872 unique oat recipes were uploaded making Akbar Kitab the largest Oat-based recipe book in the World, 44% higher than targeted. 70,000 unique visitors to the site, spent an average of 5 minutes interacting with the content. Post campaign and half of women now agree Quaker Oats are ‘for everyday consumption, whilst 42% agree the brand is ‘modern and up-to-date’. Finally, 55,000 cases of Quaker Oats sold during the campaign, five times greater than initial targets.

Creative Execution

Through research we found that the sales outside of Ramadan were being generated by a group of ‘female food fanatics’ who enjoyed impressing peers with their recipes. This led us to create the ‘World’s Largest Oats Recipe Book’ – an opportunity for foodies to share their oat recipes and then inspire others. To promote ‘Akbar Kitab’ (Big Book) and drive recipe uploaders to the site we joined forces with ‘Fatafeat’ – the number one Arabic food network in the Middle-East. An as incentive we offered Gold to the best recipes uploaded, across a number of categories. Once the number of recipes increased, we then spread the books content online and ran daily recipe features within Fatafeat shows. Campaign support was given by TV advertising, email/SMS blasts, social-networks, live cookery shows, educational events, POS and sales promotions.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Quaker Oats are an exceptionally versatile foodstuff that can be used to prepare a multitude of dishes. However, in KSA the brand is almost exclusively used to add flavor or texture to soup, during the Holy Month of Ramadan –very functional usage. Our problem was that whilst Quaker was top-of-mind during the 30 days of Ramadan (85% of annual sales), the brand rapidly lost relevance and saliency afterwards. The challenge was to breakthrough this inertia and encourage Saudi women to use Quaker regularly throughout the year, not just during Ramadan.