2017 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

A message that would capture the audience’s attention was needed, This is when the hashtag #?????? (#Talleg-ha) was born, which in Arabic can mean, depending on context, either to divorce, or to unshackle/break free - the latter being more esoteric. For instance, playing on relationship between the smoker and the substance, and the level of commitment involved in said relationship, which if played well, and good intentions can be comparable to marriage. Our challenge was to push the hashtag aggressively across the kingdom and mainly on social platforms with vocal audiences that would help generate the reactions needed to amplify our message.

Creative Execution

We had to create country level reach in 24 hours, so we secured presence across all major ATL high reach channels, Large OOH, TV, RADIO and Digital. For OOH, the creative constituted solely the hashtag as blunt message with one of the letter forming a cigarette. For Radio, shows spoke about the campaign and played around the controversial hashtag. TV featured a man being encouraged by his peers, family, even wife to divorce someone the viewers couldn’t identify. However, at the end of the TVC, it becomes clear that all the encouragement was geared to help rid the guy of the bad habit. So to speak, to divorce her (the cigarette). The video was spread on digital as well and in addition to that banners featuring the hashtag ran on high reach platforms and social networks where by users were invited to participate in the conversation on the Twitter hashtag.

The controversy of the hashtag drove enough attention and interaction that it trended and it was picked up by tens of thousands of people, including high profile public figures, social influencers, organizations, news outlets etc. In one day the campaign delivered 78 million impressions (more than double the KPI) including earned impressions that we measured using listening tool. In terms of engagement the campaign delivered three times the industry average and seven times the average engagement rate of brand initiated hashtag, engagement rates were measured using social analytics. Also in one day we the campaign reached around 10 Million individuals, the video used delivered 3 Million views across multiple video friendly platforms. Overall over a period of one week the hashtag received 47,000 mentions.

We took a big risk when launching this campaign, the motto/hashtag #Tallegha meaning "Divorce her" is very provocative, especially for a country like Saudi Arabia, where divorce is a Taboo subject. We were afraid the whole campaign would backfire. But we were rewarded for the risk we took, as the disruptive element behind the hashtag actually created a huge buzz, and got people, organizations, businesses to actually engage in the conversation against tobacco. We feel this campaigns deserve to be as a credit for this risk taken and the related impact it created.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

The campaign audience was mass and mainly the community on Twitter, knowing how in KSA the platform serves its users to voice out their concerns about various topics including those of national interest. The strong outspoken and opinionated characteristic of its user base led us to utilize Twitter as one of the main drivers to spread our campaign. We did however needed to create mass awareness across mass media vehicles that we know will eventually pour into social media.