2011 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

SACO, the largest hardware store in Saudi Arabia has a wide range of products. Their client base had been traditionally made up of an older demographic and so their objective was to raise awareness and promote their products and printed catalogues to attract young homeowners in Saudi. Young Saudi homeowners, and particularly young couples about to be married, face much pressure and expectations from society to deliver a certain standard of household furnishings. We wanted to leverage this insight to strike relevance with the target audience while also providing a context which was very relevant to the purchase of SACO products.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

We came up with a digital activation to engage young couples and create interest in SACO products based around a character named Musaed who in order to satisfy his prospective bride’s father, had to purchase a number of items from the SACO catalogue. We uploaded an amusing dramatisation of his story on YouTube, which asked the public to help him piece together fragments of torn up product pictures from the catalogue by using SACO’s online catalogue and visiting SACO’s Facebook page. We complemented the video with online banners to channel traffic to the Facebook page to help him and win.

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

Not only did we make a hardware store relevant and put into the consideration set of young homeowners and young couples, but in the first month our Facebook page fans increased from 200 to 4,700. We also received over 3,000 comments on SACO's Facebook page asking for more promotions and competitions and 1,700 views of our YouTube video. A link to the SACO website also triggered 22,000 views of the online catalogue.

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

To be as relevant as possible to young couples, we decided to create our story around the pressures of getting married, and the expectations of future in-laws, something our target audience was very familiar with. Not only was the story something they could relate to, but we were also able to place SACO’s products in a context that highlighted the need for them that was pertinent to the target group. Our target demographic also spend most of their time online, so we used only online channels to communicate our promotion and encourage them to participate.