2017 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

The idea was to use bespoke, powerful, meaningful content as a change agent for a brand on a mission. By launching an emotional conversation about the state of of disability welfare in the UAE, the Together Limitless campaign has ignited the passion of all stakeholders to help our community dissolve obstacles that people with disabilities face.

Creative Execution

Our aim was to engage people with disabilities within the bank’s internal community, while also promoting awareness and talking value across the bank’s digital platforms. In the first of a series of vignette’s we introduced the world to Niloofar. Nilofar Saleem is a Processor at Emirates NBD working in the Group Operations Department. She has very typical life, living with her mother Hanifa and brother Nadim. Always with a big smile on her face, she loves cooking her favourite dish biryani, singing, dancing, and painting. Her favourite past time is writing. Having down syndrome hasn’t stopped Nilofar from living her life to the fullest. For a long time, she had been the breadwinner of the family, even assisting with her brother’s school fees who also has down syndrome. By sharing Niloofar’s story with the world, we hoped to take the first step towards a ‘Together Limitless’ future.

We directly impacted over 13,000 people through the platform and generated a social return of investment of AED 1:5.25 which is one of the highest reported in the region, Nilofar’s story has been viewed on YouTube 850,000 times. Most importantly, the video has drawn much needed attention to this issue and Emirates NBD has since inaugurated 42 new partners into it’s Together Limitless movement as well s placing 15 people with cognitive disabilities in the workforce. Changing the perception of all of these companies, including government institutions, has turned a bank’s CSR program into a country-wide movement to put and end to the stigma attached to disabilities in the UAE. By empowering businesses and the community to educate, challenge hiring pratices and build an intellectual and on ground infrastructure to redefine disabilities in the UAE, Emirates NBDs efforts have launched a whole new world of possibilities for the disabled community.

We create humanly relevant ideas to ignite businesses. And there is nothing more human than the power of stories. We learn best –and change– from hearing stories that strike a chord within us. Many people with disabilities who have succeeded in overcoming the perceptional barrier, have understood this and used it to help raise awareness, lift the taboos, motivate, empower, and make the world a better and less judgmental place.

Changing perceptions and redefining something takes a lot of work. It also takes a lot of time. With the healthy combination of both, we wanted to help Emirates NBD to create a real difference for people with disabilities in the UAE, and hence the UAE community as a whole. Our strategy was to start a conversation. To Educate. To challenge hiring practices. Change the intellectual infrastructure so that we can get people and businesses to start thinking and acting more effectively, empowering them to be the change they want to see. Action speaks louder than words. To highlight Emirates NBD’s commitment making the UAE more inclusive, developing social capital and thus creating a sustainbale community, we would launch a conversation using custom content from within the bank’s branches.