2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

Touch, Lebanon’s leading mobile operator, promises a new world of innovation. On a brand level, touch wanted to reinforce its leadership in the market and its promise of creating a new world of innovation. On a tactical level, it wanted to position itself to both touch users and the competition as the mobile operator that takes action and finds pioneering solutions. The Lebanese often need to adapt to the trends and technologies that come from more developed countries. Be it the social media platforms they use everyday or even in the hardware. In this case, we’re talking about keyboards.

Creative Execution

When keyboards were first designed, they took into account English speakers. The Lebanese had to adapt to the qwerty keyboard. Since their language has letters that don’t exist in Latin, they recreated them out of numbers. This is called Latin Arabic. Today, it is the most used chat language in Lebanon. But it comes with compromise. The numbers that they use are on the second page of the keyboard. So each time they want to write, they go back and forth on the English keyboard. Losing 2sec/number fetched. 1min/30words. If they are heavy chatters,it goes up to almost 30min/everyday.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

Touch created leb keys, a mobile app that carries a 3rd party keyboard. A Latin Arabic mobile Keyboard. The Keyboard was created by identifying the letters that the Lebanese don’t use when chatting in Latin Arabic (Q,P,X,V) and replacing them with the numbers they do use (3,2,7,5). The app was then placed on google play and the app store. Once downloaded, users install the keyboard and it becomes part of their phone’s preset keyboard menu, ready to use for anything they want to write on social media or text.

Results

That’s how touch turned a complicated chat into a seamless one. Leb keys also saves the Lebanese Millions of hours lost fetching numbers. It gives them a sense of up-to-date-ness. They as Lebanese, have a keyboard they can call their own, on which they can express their emotions in the language they chat in. touch subtly branded the keyboard and positioned it as ‘brought to you by touch’. It then made the keyboard available to all Lebanese, touch users or not, penetrating its competitor’s territory and its user’s mobile devices. The best part is, leb keys is here to stay.