2015 Winners & Shortlists

THE VOICE OF SEPHORA

BrandSEPHORA MIDDLE EAST
Product/ServiceBEAUTY BRAND & RETAILER
EntrantOMD Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
CategoryBrand or product integration in to an existing programme or platform
Media Agency OMD Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Entrant Company OMD Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Media Agency 2 FUSE Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

The Campaign

In the GCC, the Islamic culture has high influence on broadcast official regulations. Nudity, 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. In the incidence of co-creating content with TV stations, the stations do not allow presence of brand representatives during production 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

In a market where the consumers are twice as likely to consume beauty products vs. global, Sephora’s low spontaneous awareness figures of 38% & 24% in its key markets of UAE and KSA were far off from competition. Sephora’s challenge was to elevate its spontaneous brand awareness as a beauty retailer as well as a beauty brand, through bringing across its unique DNA pillars: disruptive spirit, freedom to experience, fun place to learn & amazing beauty selection, to strengthen bonds with its target. We partnered with the Voice program, as a mutual partnership that could propel Sephora’s reach and complement the beauty of the region’s vocal talent with the Sephora beauty experience. Sephora accompanied contestants across their journey to stardom by embedding its key brand pillars along the way. Sephora customized a makeup room allowing contestants to apply final touchups needed to boost their confidence prior to every performance during the battle stages & the lives. It involved fans by asking them to vote for their favorite contestants’ look & turned them into tutorials viewed over 15,000 times. Sephora furthered the Fan/contestant experience through encouraging fans to comment on the contestant’s performance during the previous night’s episode whilst seated in Sephora’s store on the iconic red chair used by judges; this was filmed & broadcast online to be viewed by 512,000 fans. Finally, Sephora wrapped-up the contestant’s journey in a dedicated photo-shoot aired during the final episode.

The Voice of Sephora's activation embedded elements of the brand within the show's existing ecosystem both online & offline, & at the same time enhanced the fan's engagement by creating disruptive experiences & content tied into the concept of the show. Audiences were directed towards those experiences by leveraging MBC's own assets as well as Sephora's social media platforms, within their online campaigns, & their instore premises.

As a result of the activation, spontaneous brand awareness doubled in KSA from 24% to 46%, & in UAE from 38% to reach 85% 91% of viewers in the UAE and 78% in KSA positively associated Sephora with its key DNA pillars Brand love improved in UAE from 55% to 86%, in KSA it increased from 48% to 57%.

Credits

Name Company Role
Eriq Bequin OMD Md Omd Strategies
Maya Bou Ajram OMD Director Planning
Cirine Mazloum OMD Manager Planning
Bassem Dib OMD Director Trading
Nisrine Ghazal OMD Fuse Gm Fuse
Yara Abdallah OMD Fuse Associate Director
Ines Sebiane OMD Fuse Branded Content Specialist
Muhammed Ali Jamadar OMD Social Media Manager
Zahra Hassan Al Safwani OMG MENA Senior Social Media Executive