2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

Axiom telecom has a trade-in service at their retail stores, which allows customers to walk in, and exchange their old phone for a new one. As this service was not very well known, we had to find a way to get existing customers interested. Especially since, despite the UAE & KSA having the world’s highest mobile phone penetration (#1 and #3), there are a lot of people out there using old, outdated phones. The audience was drawn from axiom’s existing fan base on social media and the strategy to get across to them was to use purely owned social media.

Creative Execution

The idea was based on the insight of using true human behavior (emotional or sentimental attachment to phones) and addressing it with an appropriate response. We took care to ensure we didn't embarrass anyone but just lightly poked fun at their tendency to not let go, using a combination of creative devices – we spoke to the right people and backed it up with a genuine solution, which was axiom’s trade-in service. This worked perfectly with the brand tagline i.e. Seriously Unlike Others.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

The idea was to stage an intervention and poke fun / call out those people who are emotionally attached to their phones and still hold on to them. To achieve this, we used a combination of social media techniques – posts, memes, jokes competitions and a spoof video called ‘The Six Stages of Phone Separation Grief’ to help people get over the experience of parting with the phone they were emotionally attached to. The fun approach to letting go struck a chord with our audience.

Results

The #axiomintervention hashtag struck a chord with axiom’s audience who immediately began using it. Posts and memes were loved, people started coming up with their own jokes based on our theme, and the competitions got over 700 entries in a span of 10 days from enthusiastic participants intent on calling out their loved ones in public. Results in store were not seen immediately, but in the next month, trade-ins went up by 108%. Axiom’s Facebook and Twitter pages also gained more fans and 21.3 million impressions were achieved with only one expense of promoted posts.