2017 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Since cold weather is a hot topic during the European winter, we hijacked European weather forecasts across 5 countries by getting their most popular meteorologists to broadcast weather updates from Dubai – a cheeky invite to a sunny and pleasant destination.

Creative Execution

At the point where Europe’s winter was at its worst, we flew down their top 5 weather ladies and broadcasted their regular forecast from a beachfront location in Dubai. The weather ladies were recruited from our 5 key markets – UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Russia.

- Dubai broke its own record by welcoming 14.9m overnight visitors in 2016 - More than 8.3M views - More than 67K interactions with the campaign content over social media

During the winter, people in Europe keep an eye on the weather constantly. It becomes a part of their day-to-day lives. And who would they trust when it comes to weather more than the weather ladies they are so used to seeing? We picked the most famous weather ladies in our key target markets – UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Russia – and used their voice to entrench our message within this familiar territory.

It is easy to challenge the perception of Dubai as a destination with limited offering. For that you just need to highlight all the things that you can do in this city. But isn’t that something that every holiday destination in the world does? We needed an insight that could work as a hook to get people interested. Through our research, we found something that sounded obvious but truly revealing: among our target audience, checking the weather is one of the most popular online activities done during the winter. 90.7% of people do it often (per data collected from Global Web Index). An activity more popular than visiting/using social networks (90%), watching videos online (83.8%) or even more popular than visiting a travel/vacation website (77.8%). This is where the opportunity was: making our audience feel envious about our sunny winter weather.