2011 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

During the Football World Cup, the advertising scene is cluttered with typical promotions by official sponsors and every other brand alike. Our challenge was to make Bahrain’s leading telecommunications company Batelco, the face of the World Cup in Bahrain and to be perceived as an official sponsor.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

Our insight was that in football, for every moment worth celebrating, come moments worth debating. We did what a telecom company does best -getting people to talk. We created ‘Debate the Game’ - the platform for fans to discuss, analyse and argue about the game. With Batelco’s backdrop, two mikes and two chairs,our Debate booth travelled on matchdays across Bahrain to where fans were. We live-streamed Debates on Batelco’s website. Debate videos were uploaded daily on Batelco Facebook and Youtube. At venues, World Cup offers were distributed. At Bahrain’s cinemas screening live matches, we streamed live debates.

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

During the World Cup: - Postpaid mobile package subscribers increased 69%. - Number of broadband subscribers increased 16%. - Customer base of BlackBerry subscribers increased 16%.   Media followed the debate the game booth and promoted the campaign nationally, generating free media publicity worth over USD 125,000. Community tents across Bahrain invited us to host live debates.   Online, debate videos generated over 50,568 multi-layered interactions from 22 countries. An average of 32,000 daily post views and over 900,000 wall impressions.  For Bahrain’s football fans, Batelco became the face of the World Cup.And there was no debating that.

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

People discuss, dissect and debate the game of Football over phone conversations, SMS, BlackBerry, Chat and Social media. This provided a clear opportunity for Batelco, a telecommunications company to be the medium to Debate the Game. The Debate the Game Event was a platform which enabled us to engage people in an entertaining way, without losing the flavour of the season or the brand values of a telecom company. Streaming our debates live and posting them online took our events to a larger audience and helped generate comments, wall posts, tags, uploads, downloads and thousands of multi-layered interactions.