2016 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

In Saudi VW scores low on awareness, consideration and suffers from negative perception. It was no surprise that after six months (with an annual sales target of 1700 cars) there was 1200 vehicles left in stock. VW decided to launch a liquidation offer on all 2014 models. How could we create demand for these 1200 vehicles? In Saudi a German label is normally associated with quality and VW was offering a discount on all their cars. From there came our idea: A German car for every Saudi. Sounds straightforward? Not when you consider that the equivalent short Arabic phrase can be understood as a German woman for every Saudi. We launched a teaser campaign that kept it open to interpretation and very quickly, it captured the imagination: consumers turned it into a hashtag It didn't take long for it to explode: people started toying with our message, then celebrities joined in. Soon women were asking for a German man for every Saudi girl. We encouraged bloggers and YouTube creators including well-known YouTube comedy shows with millions of subscribers, to fuel the conversation further and they fanned the flames. So much so that we had to pull the plug on the teaser and move swiftly to the revealer campaign, where the cars’ features were brought into our play on words VW received 1696 test drive requests and all 1200 cars were sold. The campaign created a twitter frenzy with people turning our teaser “a German (woman) for every Saudi” into a hashtag, and we had comedians and celebrities contributing to the buzz, putting VW at the heart of a nationwide conversation