2018 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

“Saudi Welcomes the World”, the messaging platform of Hajj 2017, highlights the organizational excellence that Saudi Arabia provides and the emotional spiritual get together and its collective message of peace and compassion. For the first time, we invited people from around the globe, regardless of religion, to join the journey through story-telling and story-making, bringing the core of Hajj to the digital world. For the first time, people were able to discover the humans of Hajj, their stories, their emotions and their message to the world through technology, art, filmmaking, documentaries and photography, promoting real, raw and live footage as well as usergenerated content. The organizational excellence of Saudi Arabia accompanied the campaign to portray the behind the scenes logistics that bring together the pilgrims from all around the world, and make these stories possible.

Creative Execution

A team of copywriters and graphics was deployed 24/7 to create rapid content and disseminate it across the channels. In a period of 20 days, they created 51 docum-films, 10 infographics and over 100 posts in 3 languages. 5 webmasters worked on a 24/7 schedule to source UGC content and publish on SaudiWelcomesTheWorld.com in addition to archiving all assets sourced from the on- ground team. The on-ground team (10 people) crafted the final production film. A digital advertising team was deployed 24/7 to promote live around the world based on timing (Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia, Africa). 6 data analysts and journalists monitored live conversations in a proprietary and customized digital control room to supply PR and the content team with contextual timely needs for rapid content creation. A redundancy environment was set-up/monitored 24/7 with a team of 5 IT on rotation to secure website and performance.

The social media channel content reached more than 104 million impressions, and the hashtag #saudiwelcomestheworld received more than 40 billion impressions. Our people-oriented portal witnessed over a million visitors in one week (1,100,669 visits) and a press portal received over 62,000 visitors. The finale movie got more than one million views in less than 3 days and a total of 1,896,844 views till date. Our monitoring tools and 41 reports recorded a positive overall shift in perception globally of 14% from the 25th of August till the 4th of September.

While this campaign only ran online, it utilized all digital channels to their utmost efficiency as an integrated approach complemented with PR.

To story-tell is to provide contextual and emotional facts. To story-make is to empower storytellers. We had 3 objectives: Communicate, story-tell (targeting public, pilgrims, press) and story-make (pilgrims). 1) We communicated the organizational excellence of KSA through a digital press platform to download Hajj assets/announcements. Social media indirectly countered negative perceptions (through a 24/7 proprietary customized listening tool) 2) Pilgrims (present/past) were encouraged to share their stories/art through a UGC campaign. Geographic targeting (Mecca), SMSs and promoted trends were guaranteed reach. 3) SaudiWelcomesTheWorld.com was a live timeline, aggregating the stories and allowing pilgrims to upload their experiences. Algorithmically smart with support from a manual team, it compiled 3rd party articles, assets, UGC and owned content under one platform. An Instagram account (@SaudiWelcomesTheWorld) helped portray the People of Hajj. Content: UGC art, factual (infographs), documentaries with pilgrims, empowering pilgrims to share their journey (Go Pro), a film we crafted in Mecca.