2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Our task was to develop a global campaign for Al Jazeera so it ran across the world in markets where there weren’t any major regulations or restrictions that hindered it being shared.

Results

News networks in recent years have resorted to sensationalism, opinionated news anchors and selling the news as entertainment to keep ratings up. So more and more people are looking for alternative news sources, covering news that really matters. Al Jazeera is a news network that prides itself on doing just that. So we created a global campaign called Hear The Human Story. We travelled the world to capture real human stories, and gave six people from Rwanda, India, Spain, Jordan and the Philippines a platform to share their incredible stories in our online films. Deliberately filmed in an elegant cinematic style, each film encapsulated not only the story but the beautiful backdrop of each country.

Packaging human stories as branded content allowed us to create a bigger impact in countries around the world, by enabling us to share incredible human stories that other news networks often ignore. By creating beautiful online films, we were able to reach far more people in a much more entertaining way than your average news story.

These human stories resonated with people across the world. With 237 million global media impressions, an 8% rise in channel viewership and 16% rise in online engagement, the campaign did more than just position a brand, it injected humanity back into the news and gave a voice to those that other networks often choose to ignore.