2012 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

This campaign was the first of its kind to run in Oman and it created a huge buzz with our target audience. People tweeted about it, talked about it on Omani forums. Some people even wrote emails to the magazines/newspapers saying that they should always write in txt speak. Unfortunately, due to commercial sensitivities we are unable to provide accurate sales results, but sales of Hayyak pre-paid cards increased substantially while the campaign was running.

Creative Execution

The creative solution was to create fake covers for newspapers and magazines where the headlines, captions and even ads were written solely in text speak. This was continued on the inner covers, where readers could catch up on sports news and even read their horoscope in text format. To keep the theme going, copy was punctuated by emoticons, just like it is when people send an SMS to a friend. Finally, on the back page of all publications was a full page ad the encouraged readers to "Ctch d txtn fvrrr!!!" by subscribing to the new SMS bundles.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

As the market leader, Omanmobile decided to capture greater market share by launching SMS bundle packages. The target audience was predominantly 15-25 years old, who send 30+ SMS each day. This audience is notoriously difficult to reach, and is very cynical towards advertising. We knew from research, that our audience use text speak more than formal writing, so to launch the new text packages we decided to give them a surprise and talk to them in their own language...