2014 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

There are over a million blue-collar workers in UAE, building its dreams and those of its people, brick by brick, nail by nail, while silently holding their own dreams of giving their children a quality education and hence, a better life. But we discovered that even though some workers hammer in over 200,000 nails/month, their monthly salaries (as low as 200-300 USD) might never be enough. SmartLife Foundation (an NGO for UAE’s blue-collar workers) wanted to help. So, we created SAPNA (Dream) - a canvas on a wooden wall that was placed on a prominent street, during the Dubai Shopping Festival. We invited people to buy a nail for a minimum of 10 AED (~$2.7) and hammer it onto designated markers on the wall, enabling them to feel a fraction of the workers’ efforts and give back. Each nail brought their dreams closer to life.

Success of the Campaign

For an absolute $0 cost (production, location, media, volunteers - pro bono), the SAPNA wall became the first crowd-sourced nail art piece for charity, attracting over 55 different nationalities, popular Arab celebrities, popular local influencers from UAE and Dubai Shopping Festival entertainers. Everyone participated in doing a little labour themselves. #sapnadubai became a popular trending topic across social platforms and people's shared photographs which gave us over a 100,000 free social ads combined with the unexpected coverage across TV, Print and Radio, have generated an earned (free) media value of over $400,000 and rising. And in just 9 days, all 17,793 nails were bought, giving 20 blue-collar workers’ children a quality education all the way up to graduation; something their parents had only dreamt about. Because of this success, the SAPNA wall will travel across the region building more dreams, one nail at a time.

Describe how the campaign/entry was launched and executed across each channel in the order of implementation.

During the week prior to launch, we created a Facebook event to invite people. We also shared the blue-collar workers' emotional stories as digital films to SmartLife's B2B partners. On launch day, we set up the SAPNA wall on a prominent street in Dubai, during the Dubai Shopping Festival - a festive time that attracts huge crowds. We created #sapnadubai to increase WOM And shared the hashtag with people at the wall to tag along with the photographs they had taken that they would share on their social media profiles. The SAPNA wall continued to become more famous as it was unexpectedly featured on leading Radio (Virgin Radio, Radio Mirchi), Print (Khaleej Times' City Times) and TV (Dubai One) channels. As the wall filled up the dream came to life, with all the nails forming the image of a child being gifted a graduation hat.