2016 Winners & Shortlists

Brief Explanation

Teens in Saudi have strong support for their football clubs and stand behind them facing their archrival clubs. Our campaign highlighted old football rivals (Sami al Jaber and Majed Abdullah) of Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal clubs coming together to communicate an inclusive message to fans supporting the message that football brings people together. The objective of the campaign was to create awareness around a video with a rivalry story and to have the audience participate in the conversation against extreme football rivalry.

Results and Effectiveness

Targeting fans of Al-Hilal and Al-Nassr along with football personalities, timing posts prior to the game, and high content relevancy helped maximize engagement rates. By 15th of August the results were: • 4.8 million views and 15,000 interactions on YouTube o 25% of the engagements were from sharing • Most shared and viewed video on YouTube between 10th & 12th Aug for ages 13-24 • 52 million Twitter impressions, with 7% overall engagement rate, the highest engagement for Coca-Cola on Twitter to date • Over 1 million video views on Facebook, with 18% overall engagement rate, which is above benchmark

Creative Execution

The campaign was centered around an important match between Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal on 12th August 2015. We started on 9th August with Twitter buildup posts with Sami and Majed in the afternoon and the actual video was uploaded at midnight. The next day video links were placed on Twitter and the video was released to fans of Al-Hilal and Al-Nassr. The day after we used influencers to post; Waleed al Farraj and Mustafa Al Agha were the first to post the video, after which other influencers did the same, along with the two football clubs. On Game Day, Makkah newspaper, SA-Tube and Unlimit News posted about the video, which by then had reached more than 4 million views.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Coca-Cola’s KSA TG passionately plays and watches football. Their commitment is extraordinary, especially to the two largest Saudi clubs: Al-Nassr and Al-Hilal. KSA has the highest YouTube content consumption per capita globally and teens are very active in social media, making these ideal platforms. The strategic pillars of the campaign mirrored stages of preparing for watching an actual football match; anticipation, seeing and sharing, and talking. A teaser stage created anticipation prior to sharing the video. Stage two made the video discoverable and shareable, after which we aimed at making the story a trigger for the target audience to converse.