2014 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

The internet in Egypt today is used for a few pretty important things; social media to topple governments; e-commerce to buy stuff, to name a few. But entertainment, not so much, and selling your unwanted items even less so. Part of our vision was to show that the internet can be used for more. To show content on the web can be as good as what is seen in the cinema or on TV, and importantly that a brand can tell a compelling and beautiful story. Branded entertainment has only taken centre stage on Egyptian TV, in the form of TV shows, product placements and sponsorships. A number of the big brands (soft drinks and telecom) have taken the lead in paving the way for online branded entertainment, although they amount to a few – and hence regulation is to our knowledge is non-existent.

Results

Challenge Get early-adopters of dubizzle to relate to it beyond something that’s just useful. Objective Build a deeper connection that makes early adopters fall in love with the brand. This in turn should go on to create positive word-of-mouth that a dubizzle lifestyle will lead to a richer and more fulfilled life. Strategy Utilise the Egyptian love for entertainment to reach their hearts, but challenge them by packaging it in a format that they’re not used to. Instead of putting the product in entertainment (product placement), let’s put the entertainment in the product through a custom built content platform on dubizzle. Don’t sell ‘selling’, but the vision of using whatever tools make sense to be able to live a richer and more fulfilled life. Execution The 3ala Fein? web-series, where characters from the existing dubizzle TV spots came to life from parody caricatures of Egyptian culture to real people that anyone could relate to. The story of their struggles as they go about their daily lives, to find whatever they yearn. Love, excitement or simply a change. Hosted on custom-built platform within dubizzle, the episodes were fed from Youtube to maximise social reach, and a competition that linked with a hefty facebook content plan ensured we hit viral tipping point. To seed the content; traffic was generated through mega-branding on billboards, taxis and alongside blockbuster trailers in movie theatres for awareness; and heavily optimised online campaigns were geared up to direct-clicks to the content. Production We used the Black Magic Cinema Camera and a passionate crew to write, shoot, edit and launch five episodes of cinema quality film for a mere $50,000USD (production only). At times we almost lost laptops and limbs to extreme conditions, but got though it – making the best use of the things we had.

We needed to make people believe that the content we were making was worth of their time. So we made a commitment to put the adverts for it along-side the most popular entertainment in Egypt. Billboards alongside TV network ads drove people directly to the series, and HD trailers ran full glory in the biggest cinemas in Cairo, alongside blockbuster movies. As the content ran online we launched a substantial display, search, social activity, as well as dedicated real estate and features on the main product website in the form of a fully functional content platform.

The 3ala Fein web-series reached a wide audience and generated much positive anticipation with our fans on social. These are the numerical highlights of the campaign: ·19 million impressions with 1.5 million video views across Youtube and social channels ·5,000 searches for 3ala Fein on Youtube ·80% positive sentiment on the storyline and quality of production across social channels ·Over 120,000 likes, 10,000 comments and 3,000 shares on social channels ·1.6 million visits to et7arrak portal and 3ala Fein pages ·10.5% increase in Net Promoter Score But more importantly this campaign helped us spread dubizzle’s brand message to “make a change” and portrayed dubizzle in the eyes of the Egyptian people as not just a classifieds site, but as a platform that can help make people’s lives more fulfilled.