2013 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

By inviting the public and SME’s to release their business ideas, we’ve positively connected budding entrepreneurs with du and demonstrated how to kick-start business ambitions. Through an 8 part TV series, we provided viewers with business entertainment that was both compelling and inspiring. This in turn has led to positive shifts in brand metrics - providing clear evidence we’ve established du as a one-stop shop and positioned the brand as the business partner of choice. Finally, from a business perspective, The Entrepreneur generated over AED7m in media & PR exposure and contributed to a 3% uplift in new SME customers.

Creative Execution

As a primetime business-reality show, The Entrepreneur followed the country’s brightest entrepreneurial minds battle it out on national TV for a 2mAED investment to kick-start their business ambitions – one of the largest prize funds in the Middle-East! 100 initial entrepreneurs were put through their paces by four of the UAE’s most influential business brains - Abdul Baset Al-Janahi, Muna Al-Gurg, Nisreen Shocair and Yogesh Mehta. This renowned panel of experts challenged their pitching skills, business acumen, handling of pressure and ability to think big before whittling them down to three finalists. In the final episodes, our finalists competed in three grueling tasks designed to test their financial, marketing and management skills until Loulou Khazen’s life changed forever when her business idea ‘Nabbesh’ was selected as the winner. The series was supported using numerous touch-points including; PR, digital, partnerships, email, print, editorial, outdoor, social media, events and radio.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

With 250,000 SME’s contributing over a third of total telecom spend in the UAE, the small business market represents a great growth opportunity to du. In fact, a massive 60% of the UAE’s GDP is generated by SME’s. However, as a young company that is synonymous with offering consumer products/services, the challenge was to further increase awareness and association of the brands small business solutions. The challenge then was to establish du as a ‘one-stop-shop’ and position the brand as the business partner of choice for SME’s. Many people have ideas but many never see the light of day because of a lack of business know-how, funding or even motivation to make it happen. We needed to reverse this trend by demonstrating how easy it is to kick-start a business ambition. Therefore, our idea was to inspire and motivate people to release their business ideas by creating ‘The Entrepreneur’.