2016 Winners & Shortlists

The Brief

We wanted to do more than ensure demand increase in subscriptions and build brand-affinity. We wanted to address the modern generational/cultural problem affecting our Arab-American audience, where parents make many efforts to connect with their children over their Arab-heritage while their children feel disconnected from a culture that they don’t know well. To bridge the two generations, we created a piece-of-entertainment, an Arabic rap-battle, ‘I SAY ARABI’ between an old cliché Arab father and his American offspring. Online films, pre-rolls, radio broadcast, email-shots and POSM were rolled out in key markets to make sure our platform reached the homes of our target.

Creative Execution

As a broadcaster DISH provides a wide-array of entertainment to subscribers, hence creating a benefit-driven ad wouldn’t have caught the attention of existing/potential customers. We created our own piece of entertainment to bridge the cultural/generational gaps from which Arab-Americans suffer. The ‘I SAY ARABI’ music-clip went viral on YouTube/Facebook reaching audiences in the US and Arab-world. People became media vehicles high-jacking and sharing the clip with community. To drive traffic, we created pre-rolls, online-videos, and email-shots with strong calls-to-action that put in-situation the same insight branded ‘Arabi Deal’. To further support our campaign, a content calendar was developed with a series of social-media posts for key-conversation pillars to engage our users with content that is relevant to their daily lives. We redesigned the DISH landing-page to make it more user-friendly and created website banners to enhance the brand image and highlight the various value deals that DISH has to offer.

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

The film went viral, reaching 4.3 M views, which is uncommon for an Arabic piece of content. The ‘I SAY ARABI’ video gathered: 56k likes 14k comments and 64k shares. Social-media KPIs were surpassed with 72% and 461% fan increase on Facebook and YouTube respectively. DISH’s website visits resulted in a 75% and 44% increase in Arabic landing page visitors and daily landing page visits respectively. Path-to-purchase resulted in a 200% increase in average daily calls from Dish’s Arabic website and a 74% increase in daily searches. We exceeded client expectations with a 16% lift from projections on launch day.

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

DISH is an American based company in the U.S.A that provides satellite TV and carries over 50 of the most demanded Arabic channels. The brief was to rebuild affinity with its Arabic client base and consequently increase subscriptions. Our main audiences are first generation Arab-Americans who most of them are parents. They are integrated in the US yet still strongly hold on to their Arab identities, however they struggle to connect with their offspring over their heritage. We created an online piece of entertainment; an Arabic rap battle entitled ‘I SAY ARABI’ between an old cliché Arab father and his all-American offspring. We also created direct email shots as well as direct mailers and POSM branding rolled out in several key markets.