2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

In the GCC, the Islamic culture has high influence on broadcast official regulations. Too much “skin”, promotion of smoking, alcohol and controversial content related to religion and or culture are all banned. TV stations have a filter on the quality of production for liquid content, brands can abide by regulations and still TV stations reserve the right to reject the content. Finally, in the incidence of co-creating content with TV stations, the stations do not allow presence of brand representatives during the shoot so brands run the risk of agreeing on guidelines and not seeing the final product before it airs. For online, no official regulation bodies exist, yet telecoms and global platforms such as Google are filtering extreme content that crosses the line of religion and culture. This allows clients to be a bit more daring when compared to TV and the only barrier here is consumer tolerance.

Results

Ramadan is a month of fasting and spiritual rejuvenation, yet, on a sociocultural level, it is a time for family bonding and gatherings around Iftars and iconic TV shows that only run during Ramadan. However, those TV shows were jeopardizing the very essence of Ramadan: family togetherness. In fact, broadcasters predominantly produce these shows for adults, and consequently children took the backseat in those gatherings due to the absence TV programs dedicated to them. This shortage of children program offerings meant there was an opportunity for McDonald’s to bridge the gap between adults and children by giving them food for storytelling and conversations and at the same time drive salience with GCC Families. To achieve this, we revived the long gone ancient Ramadan tradition of “Al Hakawati”, a storyteller who used to narrate legends, fables, tales and adventures during the long Ramadan festive nights. We created 15 stories, which were each told in 2 episodes. The stories were inspired from Ramadan values and morals that young children could apply. Every plot was left open ended and continued the next day, by the storyteller, with the purpose of leaving families the space to converse over the moral of the story. The episodes were produced on a stage and made use of 3 dimensional elements, artistic shadows and silhouettes to trigger the imagination of children. They were aired on the number one GCC channel MBC1 and were hosted on McDonald’s Arabia YouTube Channel. The videos were promoted online targeting cartoon videos on desktop and mobile. We also re-targeted users who watched the first episode of each story. A display campaign was also launched on MBC 3 and MBC.net to drive traffic and increase viewership of the content on Shahid.net. Moreover, Hakawati sessions took place in various malls in KSa & UAE.

The content was promoted on YouTube, Accuen Network (in-stream) and on Mobile targeting people based on Interest and Topics (Cartoon Videos, Animations, Games, Specific singers like Justin Bieber, Selina Gomez, One direction). Also, we maximized our reach on the first episodes of each story and utilized re-marketing for the 2nd Episodes to get across users who have watched the 1st episodes of the stories.

Hakawati was the 6th most watched program during Ramadan serving over 910,000 “Hakawati” story minutes, which is equivalent to 635 days of non-stop togetherness among parents and children.