2018 Winners & Shortlists

THE NETWORK VS AGENT ONE

BrandETISALAT UAE
Product/ServiceTHE NETWORK
EntrantCAVIAR CREATIVE Kuwait City, KUWAIT
CategoryOnline: Fiction & Non-Fiction
Idea Creation CAVIAR CREATIVE Kuwait City, KUWAIT

The Campaign

We began by thinking what benefits of having coverage everywhere can we capitalise on, all of which are obvious and discussed ad nauseam. We felt we should flip the messaging and not look at why you want coverage; we began to think what would you do if you did not want coverage, maybe to escape for a while, to disconnect from the world. We realised it would be a difficult mission trying to find an area where you would not have a signal; this is where the idea became clear. A mission as difficult as this needs a special kind of person to tackle it. It required a secret agent, a Johnny English type of agent. He's going all over the UAE trying to find an area with no Etisalat coverage to receive his top-secret mission to his mobile by via satellite.

Creative Execution

Due to Rowan's shooting schedule on Johnny English 3, we shot all his scenes in London at the legendary Elstree studios (home of many James Bond films) on blue screen, on July 28th, including all the exclusive content for Snapchat, YouTube, and other channels. Once the weather improved in the UAE, we filmed the rest of the scenes over a 3 day period in September across all 7 emirates and at sea.. Post took another 2.5 months across multiple countries; simultaneously we developed the original score for the film. The trailer and main film where released in cinemas, online and on TV (main film), and exclusive content on YouTube and SnapChat.

The trailer generated a lot of buzz, with local media talking about it and government officials wondering how they missed a Rowan Atkinson and Paul WS Anderson film being shot in the UAE. The main film has received over 5 million views online in 11 days (Feb 8th- Feb 19), and over 6000 shares on FaceBook alone. It spread organically outside the MENA region, with a wide variety of publications covering everything from Film industry, cars, and advertising wrote about the campaign, with online articles coming from England, Spain, Russia, and all the way to Japan.

We aimed to go beyond a typical tactical ad addressing an overly tackled subject; we sought to create a film that focuses on entertaining viewers through good storytelling. We created a movie theme campaign to capture the public's attention and used the message as a vehicle to entertain. We launched a trailer promoting the latest Rowan Atkinson film taking place in the UAE, which generated a lot of buzz from media government officials who genuinely believed Rowan Atkinson had filmed a movie in the Dubai without their knowledge.

Action and comedy are two genres that work well in the UAE, so we created an action film that doesn't take itself too seriously to drive the film's message across. With the recent announcement of Jonny English 3 being released later in 2018, we knew we had our leading man in Rowan Atkinson. Someone who can cross the generational gap of our target audience. We strove to create a mini-movie that can stand on its own as a piece of entertainment. To push the movie concept we even created a trailer focusing on Rowan Atkinson. We placed the trailer in cinemas and online, through "anonymous" sources, to build the pending movie release idea. The main film was released online, in cinemas, and on TV. Once you viewed the film online, you would then begin to see the exclusive content made for YouTube and Snapchat to continue the story.

Credits

Name Company Role
Haitham Al Hajji Caviar Creative Chief Creative Officer
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