2015 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

PEPSI SYNOPSIS Political turmoil in Egypt across the past years caused unprecedented political divide not only between parties but also between ordinary people. So Pepsi took this challenge upon itself to bring the people back together, but how can a bottle of soda share a message everyone would embrace? We know that if there was one thing we all agreed upon, it was that we all miss the days when we were united as one. As a result, we created a music video where we brought together the six most iconic Egyptian celebrity groups, but what makes their reunion extraordinary is that they haven't been seen together for over 20 years, either because of seemingly unfix-able personal fall-outs or just quitting the industry as a whole. The idea was unheard of as Egyptian celebrities are usually known to be too proud to settle their differences, let alone in front of millions. The fact that we managed to reunite these six celebrity groups after their long years of differences was inconceivable for the population and it set the benchmark for the rest of the country to follow suit.

Creative Execution

We used a memorable 20-year-old commercial jingle and rerecorded, remixed and re-mastered it with a musical duet from that era. It was sung by Hisham Abbas and Hamid el Shaiery, who appeared together for the first time in almost two decades . The lyrics of the song called on all of Egyptians to come together once again, by illustrating all the excuses we use and all the things that had pushed us away from another; in turn showing every Egyptian that each one of them are to blame, not the times of today. The effect of the song was tremendous. The video was viewed over 15 million times on YouTube and was the most requested song on Egyptian radio. But that’s not how we measured our success, it was actually the fact that it had over 93 million impressions online and over 1 billion Twitter impressions, all showing that people were reminiscing on the joyful unity they once had, rather than speaking of all their differences as they had been for years.