2017 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Saudis are known for being a nocturnal society. So when we wanted to promote STC’s full customer service app ‘MySTC’, we thought of taking over the night through contextual & timely messages - that popped up at night and disappeared during the day - to remind our customers that they can fulfill their requests on MySTC just when our customers thought that we stopped operating. So if someone was cruising at night, we used LEDs & billboards with a message: No one is open at this hour; but we are. MySTC, your store around the clock. If someone is on Facebook, our message was: Friend’s all asleep? We are here for you. Through a barrage of nighttime messages on several channels, that were cheaper to execute as it avoided primetime hours, we used the night to save the day at a minimal cost & with immense success

Creative Execution

We launched our campaign on various channels with contextual messages to fit each channel. For instance on social networks, we used: ‘Late night stalking? We don’t mind you follow us. Your store around the clock’ for Instagram, ‘Friend’s all asleep? We are here for you’ for Facebook, ‘Late night browsing? Check us out. Your store around the clock’ for web browsing. For those enjoying a late night ride, we communicated ‘No one is open at this hour; but we are. Your store around the clock’. The same was used for TV bumpers. In order to maximize the reach, we released our TV bumpers & digital executions on the most watched TV channels & the most popular social networks in Saudi. And to keep our cost low, we only communicated after 11pm when media price was lower than communicating during primetime hours, starting mid-December 2015 till mid-July 2016

The campaign was a hit among Saudis with positive social media feedback and buzz along with excellent business results. Customer satisfaction went up by 23% which is 153% our objective. STC’s In-Store footfall went down for the first time ever by 9%, a staggering 180% more than our objective. While service center calls had a drop of around 14% which is almost 140% more than what we aimed to achieve. Additionally, we reached a total of more than 1,100,000 app downloads during the campaign period with an average of 4 star rating out of 5 on Google Play store and 4+ rating on Apple iTunes store.

Saudis usually stay up late browsing the internet, checking social networks or driving around. Since MySTC is an app that replaces the need to visit our branches especially after midnight when we close, we saw an opportunity to communicate MySTC only at night as a valuable tool for continued customer service especially when our face-to-face customer services are not available. Hence we utilized various media channels to launch the nocturnal campaign known as ‘The Campaign that never saw the light’. Additionally, night time communication is cheaper than prime time communication which gave us the opportunity to increase our frequency.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Thanks to their notorious behavior of staying up late at night, Saudis gave us the idea of promoting MySTC – a full customer service app – during the night when the app served as an alternative for closed branches. And since their nocturnal behavior mostly ranged around car cruising, watching TV & browsing the internet, we decided to hit them with contextual messages related to their specific activities. For instance, messages like ‘Stayed up past your bed time? We always do! Your store around the clock’ appeared on YouTube. While other executions optimized OOH, digital and TV to send witty & lighthearted contextual messages according to channel & nighttime behavior. Knowing that Saudis love playful communication we only used lighthearted and witty executions to help fuel the message and create an amplified impact resulting in massive app downloads, higher usage and less pressure on traditional service centers