2015 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

For Emirates’ Cadet Recruitment Program it’s extremely difficult to enrol young Emiratis leaving university due to the intensive nature of the field. Our challenge was to show that the Program is a viable option for all Emiratis, male and female, with the opportunity to work for a highly reputable brand that has led their country’s success story. Being the summer holidays, a strategy was devised to target them during their leisure time. It had to grab their attention and inspire enrollment. A special-execution was created for the best environment in which to surprise our audience into action – the cinema.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

We imagined our captive cinema audience – watching adverts, anticipating their film and perhaps not giving their full attention to the screen. But where's one place you really do pay attention? 35,000 feet. The ad mirrored a pilot making an interruptive screen announcement just as they would in air. Airing before the film, the disruptive advert broadcast to our audience that Emirates’ Cadet Program was recruiting. The communication style ensured the ad’s message was specifically directed towards young Emiratis. The ideal scheduling time was the summer, post exams, when our audience would be the most receptive to career influencing communications.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

The ad used the best that the cinema space could offer: an alert, attentive, young, Emirati audience and the perfect situation for the unexpected. The announcement was not only intensely listened to because of its surprise and location, but instigated our audience into action. The cinema execution yielded a 34% reach of our total target audience on-ground. Online we achieved a reach of 46%, with almost 654,000 unique visitors to the Cadet Recruitment webpage, 10,160 interactions and a CTR of 0.76% which was higher than the industry benchmark of 0.08% - 0.1%.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Cinema was identified as the optimal media to create high impact in an unrivalled ad viewing environment and drawing in a high footfall from our audience during our campaign period. During implementation we faced several hurdles, primarily that the ad’s format could not be played during paid advertisements. We negotiated with the cinema media vendors to air it during their pre-film branding commercial and VOX Cinemas were happy to accept this execution. This was to our benefit, being our cinema of choice, as they receive the most Emirati customers, have a wide cinema network, and we had their full support.