2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

In the Middle East, developing content that is powerful enough to inspire behavioural change is uncommon for most brands. We often see companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars behind Branded Content that often appears self-serving with no lasting benefit. Despite the abundance of Arab influencers - strategic, engaging or ethical influencer programs are rare. Bloggers often paid to collaborate with brands, leading to staged content that is not authentic. With the Coca-Cola #OpenUp Campaign, we wanted to work with leading influencers to co-create stories that not only integrated the brand’s core values into our content seamlessly, but stories that featured real-life tensions and issues faced by Arabs - which no other brand in the region was addressing. We performed in-depth exploration of influencers and found two people that fit perfectly. Following our initial highly-personalized outreach, we attained their trust in our ability to tell their stories authentically. As a result, they were willing to partner with us without payment (typical charge is $100,000 minimum). In exchange, these influencers not only physically let us into their homes and willingly promoted the campaign on their own Social channels, but more importantly, they allowed Coca-Cola candid access to their personal family lives.

Results

Our objectives were two-fold: 1) To enable Coca-Cola to genuinely connect with its audiences, driving positive brand preference. 2) To inspire our audiences to “Open Up” to their family members in order to have stronger, more meaningful connections with them. We found two leading Arab influencers who were struggling with their own inability to OpenUp. Instagram sensation “Ascia AKF” from Kuwait and MENA Top Chef “Badr Fayez” from Saudi Arabia. We interviewed them up-close and personal, digging deep beyond the outer layers of their celebrity persona to uncover internal family struggles of their own. We helped them resolve these issues for the first time, surprising millions of their online followers and proving that it is possible to overcome our tensions – by speaking to each other openly. We turned their candid stories into Films we shared across Social Media, inspiring our audience to have the same courage to Open Up via our campaign hashtag #OpenUp

As Arabs, expectations dominate our everyday lives. From our career choices, to the people we marry, to our formal behavior at home. We face many pressures, creating extreme tension that we keep bottled up, afraid to express our feelings openly as it’s considered taboo. During the month of Ramadan, when we try to change for the better, we decided to go the root of our tension when other brands were concealing it: our inability to tell each other how we really feel. Through Online Films, we invited our audience to #OpenUp and have a real connection with their families.

Our message hit home. On the first day of Ascia posting her video to Instagram - she received more than 22,000 Post Likes and 3,000 comments. In just one week - the videos received more than 1 million views, with over 580,000 likes, comments, shares, retweets. By the last week of Ramadan, the campaign touched the hearts of more than 25 million people across the region, with over 11 million Social Media impressions alone. The influencers were even featured in MENA’s most prominent magazine - Haya. The most exciting result however, was the 42% increase in Brand Love during the month of Ramadan – Coca-Cola’s most important global metric. The highest increase ever achieved by Coca-Cola in MENA. Demonstrating that our audience appreciated finally being understood. We never set out to change the Arab world, we just wanted to pave the way for stronger, more meaningful connections with the people we love.