2015 Winners & Shortlists

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. As for user generated content, brands filter themselves through their community management teams the content that pour into their platforms.

Results

Bario, a non-alcoholic beer introduced to the Saudi market, was suffering from the perception of being a loner’s drink due to its introvert positioning. The worst nightmare for a beer! Our challenge was to reintroduce Bario back to the social circles of young 18 to 29 Saudi men so they would count it in whenever they were to gather. Balot is a card game that can only be played between adversary teams, and young Saudis are avid Balot players who regularly gather among friends to play it. So to reintroduce Bario to their online social circles we gave them an online Bario Balot Challenge. The Bario Balot challenge resided on a microsite purposely built for it and could only be played by fans teaming together. We promoted the game on social media and launched it with a trailer video on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and digital banners. The trailer revolved around the provocative story of 4 Balot masters that teams needed to beat in 4 different phases. Simultaneously, the mechanics of the game were explained within the story of the trailer and across all platforms. Adversary teams had to play against each other to get the highest score and earn their ticket to the grand finale for a chance to win a Bario Lounge for their social gatherings. Mohanad Kattan, a Saudi radio personality and a Balot champion helped us promote the game on Twitter, while we seized Twitter conversations using the #Balot, to engage and drive young Saudis talking about the game, to the game.

We created a microsite to host the campaign, and leveraged Bario's social media channels along with media support to maximize reach and drive traffic towards the campaign.

The Bario Balot Challenge had an average engagement rate of 0.22%, which is higher than Facebook benchmark of 0.16% average engagement rate (SocialBakers, 2012). The Challenge’s trailer amassed over 800,000 views on YouTube (YouTube Analytics, 2014) and traffic to the Bario Challenge was well over 70,000 Saudi visitors (Google Analytics, 2014) The campaign’s cumulative reach was over 12.85 million and research showed 42% rise in spontaneous awareness, while the online game increased the ‘Good for Socializing’, ‘Uplifts my Mood’ and ‘Brand I Love’ indexes by 6, 5 and 7 points respectively.