2011 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

Nokia was launching its new phone, the Nokia N8, into the region and wanted to promote it to its target audience: young, early adopters of new and emerging technologies, especially mobiles. We knew that our audience lived their lives on Facebook and our job was to activate, create interest and get them talking about the online.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

One of most popular activities of our young audience was taking pictures with their mobiles, posting them on Facebook and tagging, commenting or liking. But we knew that they couldn’t do anything more besides that. They couldn’t turn their Facebook photos into personal expressions by writing, doodling or adding a personal touch. Our solution was Nokia N8 PikFlik, a state-of-the-art app with photo editing features to change colour, add emoticons, speech bubbles, draw with different brushes and write messages. They could now manipulate pictures and share them with friends on Facebook.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

Nokia N8 flew off the shelves and went out of stock. It created more than 147,000 interactions within just two weeks, and went viral with 3,379 Wall shares and 44 feedbacks per share. 11,369 users installed and it received 5,203 Likes. But most importantly, sales of the phone increased 21% over the previous month. It reached out to people across the region from Saudi Arabia to Sudan and went beyond the scope of the social activation campaign, to countries like Afghanistan and Iran. And with the app still online, it’s taking pic-posting on Facebook to a whole new level.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Social networking was growing in the region, led largely by mobile internet access. Statistics showed that 45% of users in the region accessed the internet using their mobiles and 34% used it for social networking, especially for posting pics. But to edit a pic, they had to use an external application or software, then save the image and upload it to Facebook. The fact that they could now personalise their Facebook pics with Nokia N8 PikFlik created a niche for the Nokia N8, which is primarily an entertainment phone.