2012 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

By going against the tide through our simple creative and disruptive executions, our campaign broke through the clutter and was easily understood Resulting in an 86% Return on Investment.

Creative Execution

To avoid falling into the same trap, we went back to our strongest equity for inspiration, our red line. We created icons out of our red line, to illustrate the different travel destinations that consumers could win as a result of using their SABB credit card. In this way, our icons could easily be identified and understood through the clutter, and instantly recognized as an offer from SABB. While visually, we had created a different look and feel, we faced a further challenge with the medium we wanted to use. Newspapers are a key medium in Saudi and are usually flooded with advertising, more so this summer with the increased purchasing occasions. We realized we needed to be just as iconic in our execution. We disrupted regular newspaper pages, with island ads, of our plane leading to strips on the next page that featured our destinations.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

The high season to promote and use credit cards in Saudi is summer; this summer was exceptional due to the occurrence of the holy month of Ramadan along with many other activities which was expected to lead to high spending and usage of cards. Our objective was to drive acquisition and increase usage with a challenge to break through the immense clutter created by offers from banks and retail that all looked and sounded the same. Differentiating SABB cards was imperative, especially given that our promotion alone would not break through the clutter. We needed to approach our creative execution differently to be able to break through. It became clear that the clutter all had one thing in common: cliché imagery of families and objects to buy.