2017 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Through history Dubai has embraced different cultures and civilisations. The foundation of our concept is that the city thrives from cultures coming together. We want to identify how people share connections to this fascinating city and how they’re interconnected to each other. The #DiscoverTheConnection concept was born. Its call to action: “You are Dubai, you are the present that will create the future, share your story and discover the connection.” Each submission was tagged with keywords to create a user generated cloud platform. These keywords were linked when used together in a submission. If another submission shared the same keywords, they then linked together with videos to demonstrate how people share the same thoughts and feelings about Dubai. In just 10 days, over 2,500 videos were submitted and went live on our microsite together with a social media campaign that successfully reached diverse audiences.

Creative Execution

Creating the entire media strategy and coordinating with all stakeholders for the roll-out. Design, development and content creation for a new microsite including employee interviews, interview roadshows across Dubai and a crowd-sourced activation. In tandem we developed, designed and created copy for the main website. During the pre-launch phase we produced over 20 teaser creatives. The campaign included planning and execution of 4 videos with the Expo 2020 High Committee in addition to 7 animations and 20 unique posts. We produced digital signage that was used across Downtown Dubai. Our overall media campaign included predictive marketing, YouTube masthead, GDN, third party platforms, mobile and social ads, geolocation and over 50 animated banners. A team of 9 photography and branded content experts covered the event with professional footage and 360 filming. The new website went live on the same day. Non-stop post-event community management resulted in 02.% negative sentiment.

The results in numbers: 2 days of trending organically on Twitter 80 million impressions for #DiscoverTheConnection and #Expo2020 5,000 new emails collected through registrations to attend event 1,000 crowd-sourced media (videos, pictures, quotes) during the one-week #DiscoverTheConnection teaser phase 700,000 sessions on the website 130,000 interactions on the owned channels 4,620,000 video views on Facebook in a month 1,840,189 views on YouTube 6,000 logo mentions on non-owned channels including artistic submissions

This campaign was dedicated to identifying our connections. Our connections to the past and present, to one another and to Dubai. We engaged with the public and called on them to share their stories, turning their real experiences and emotions into our content. Creatively telling the story of Expo 2020 Dubai by showcasing content that demonstrates its theme: Connecting Minds, Creating the Future.

Execute a complete shift in Expo 2020 Dubai’s digital and social identity from the old to the new logo including the development of an interim website and social media content. The process of determining a new logo was initially through crowd sourcing however just weeks before the new logo was to be announced HH Sheikh Mohammad found a rare artifact in an archeological site in Dubai. The gold ring HH found, inspired the new logo and inspired our #DiscoverTheConnection teaser campaign. We created a microsite that asked people to share the story of how they’re connected to Dubai. We received over 2,500 video submissions in just 10 days in addition to a citywide video roadshow. The final element was the reveal event which we covered live and simultaneously launched the new Expo 2020 Dubai website.