2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Branded entertainment is growing slowly but surely in Lebanon. Traditional media is still leading the way in this part of the world and while social media is growing, slowly taking over the print medium, branded entertainment still has a long way to go. Realizing there is a gap in this field, some new companies as well as existing agencies are trying to exploit this opportunity and have started specializing and promoting branded entertainment and content but there’s a long way to go.

Results

In Lebanon, the government doesn’t take responsibility in providing blood to hospitals. Therefore, if a patient in need can’t provide blood in return, he won’t have access to any hospital blood reserves, leaving him with no other choice than desperately asking his relatives and friends for urgent contribution. DSC’s mission is to create a database of potential blood donors, to answer the largest possible number of demands. The challenge was to recruit from a generally individualistic audience 10,000 new donors with zero budget. Based on the insight that ‘asking for blood contributions feels like begging’ and on the fact that street beggars are found at every major intersection in Beirut, we organized a stunt of undercover volunteers knocking on cars windows to beg… for blood. We filmed the stunt with hidden cameras and posted it online. "A new breed of beggars" was to remind people of what Lebanese families go through when a loved one is in need of blood, highlighting the absurdity of having to beg for it to save a life. The campaign line “Hess aa dammak” (literally means “feel on your blood”) is a popular Lebanese expression commonly used to address someone who doesn’t seem to care in order to provoke his reaction. The somewhat harsh tonality of the campaign’s line was deliberately selected to to shake the status quo and move people. From the start, we decided to bank on the viral potential of our campaign, which was originally devised with this objective in mind. Thus, the initial and exclusive medium we opted for was DSC’s social media assets - mainly Facebook and YouTube – knowing that people in need of blood traditionally consult such platforms to try their luck with friends or even total strangers.

Based on the insight that ‘asking for blood, feels like begging’ we organized a stunt of undercover volunteers knocking on cars windows at a major crowded intersection in Beirut to beg for… blood. We filmed the stunt with hidden cameras and posted it online. Once the video appeared on YouTube and Facebook, It went viral overnight and spread even further when our film appeared in prominent websites and TV stations

As soon as it was posted on DSC’s social media assets, “A new breed of beggars” went viral overnight, with a significant organic growth of over 15,000 views in just 2 days. At that point, the stunt seemed to have a life of its own. It quickly started spreading like wildfire after being picked up by social websites and independent bloggers, in addition to the significant interest shown by mass media, namely major newspapers and TV stations. As a testament of its effectiveness, its organic growth continued on a solid pace to generate over 45,000 views in the 2 following weeks. Most of all, DSC’s phone didn’t stop ringing and donor subscriptions went up by 250% during the activation period, which goes to show what you can do with a small piece of paper and a lot of good will.