2017 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Nobody can resist talking about great deals. Visa’s impossible deals wanted to amplify this fact by giving people excessive discounts on highly sought after goods. For example, a luxury car worth AED181,000 (around $50,000) was offered for only AED25,000 (under $7,000). These deals were irresistible enough to sell themselves and we wanted our ads to be equally irresistible and unskippable.

Creative Execution

Visa’s deals would be impossible to resist but it was also impossible to get people to sit through an ad long enough for us to tell them that. They just wanted to hit the skip button and get to their cute animal videos. So, we made a cute kitten video so they didn’t have to.    In exchange for letting a deep, soothing voice talk them into signing up for Visa’s impossible deals, Visa gave them 60 seconds of kitty cuteness, which they didn’t seem to mind nor skip. The 65-second film ran on YouTube as a skippable pre-roll ad prior to the start of the Dubai Shopping Festival on December 20th, 2016 and until the end of the festival on January 28th, 2017.

• 46 secs was the average duration out of 1 minute that the video was viewed. 70% was the average view through rate. The Benchmark for that globally is 55%. • 1.54M million minutes of time the video was viewed  • Nearly 2MM views (globally) • 2,000 shares from Visa Middle East youtube page • 50,000 call to action clicks (to sign up via the website) • Final signups hit 140,000 (40% up on previous year)

Pre-roll ads are mostly seen as interruptions to the content that people want to watch on YouTube. So instead of advertising with a full length ad, we cut away to some kitten video footage barely a few seconds into our message and then invited people to skip. The majority didn’t skip and continued watching the kittens whilst we subtly continued to encourage them to sign up for Visa’s promo.

The Dubai Shopping Festival is one of the biggest events in the world and also one of the prime times for brands and retailers to advertise their great deals and promos all over the city. Everywhere you go, there are shopping deals shouting at you online, on the radio and in the cinemas. Visa also had amazing deals and offers exclusively for cardholders who signed up for them but to cut through the clutter, we took a more subtle approach. Instead of making an ad to push the deals like everyone else, we made a non-ad because we knew Visa’s deals were so good that they would sell themselves.