2013 Winners & Shortlists

Results and Effectiveness

We grew from 53 to around 400,000 active fans on Facebook, with engagement rate peaks of 39% and over 6,000 participations in the competitions. The show hit over 5.5 million views… and counting. The Sprite brand that had 2% annual sales growth in KSA jumped to an incredible 15% during the first half of the campaign! With our targeted display campaign we not only drove almost 200,000 visits to our Facebook page within 2 weeks but we reached an average interaction rate of 4.33% with Yahoo homepage takeover and view-through rate on YouTube of 27% which is 10% above average.

Creative Execution

We wanted to give young Saudis space and freedom to self-express, so we launched a 5-minute video series taking an honest spin on life. The videos were broadcasted on our website, YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter account. The viewers were regularly engaging with our episodes, and sharing our daily posts on Facebook and Twitter.To increase viral effects and encourage Saudi youth to generate comments, we introduced customized competitions with every video. The tailored questions were designed to encourage viewers to express themselves around a certain topic, or simply have fun interacting with the video. With our partner UM Mena, we utilized performance based buys (CPC) via targeted display activity on YouTube, Google Display Network, and Yahoo, including homepage takeovers and YouTube in-stream TrueView. To make the message loud and clear, we collaborated with “Sa7i”, a Saudi YouTube channel, who gave us the insights we needed to choose our topics.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Sprite has been virtually non-existent in the Middle East for three years. We were tasked to bring it back to life, along with its core value message of being a refreshingly honest brand that doesn’t promote bullshit. Our strategy was to encourage young Saudis to adopt this kind of mindset in their lifestyle. The audience was not familiar with the brand, and has never been exposed to this bold tone of voice, especially in Saudi Arabia, where every kind of content is constantly filtered. Our young target audience spends a daily average of 15 hours on the internet. They feel more comfortable expressing themselves online, where restrictions are decreased. It was only fitting that we create a digital, interactive platform for Saudi self-expression, inspiring them to be like Sprite – true to themselves.