2018 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

The idea had three elements: firstly, we wanted to create compelling recipe videos (good content) that we put up on social media. Secondly we wanted to engage with our audience, whether that be by responding to comments on social media and creating a dialogue, or by inspiring them through influencers they admired. Finally we wanted to encourage them to share back with us, by promoting a Wheel Challenge on Instagram where we asked fans to send us images of the recipes they cooked.

Creative Execution

For a busy and open-minded generation, we made over forty fried recipes that were creative, international and simple to make. We broadcast these recipes through short, high resolution videos that all end in Al Arabi’s famous jingle. Every recipe had a creative story that explored the origins of foods, cities around the world and different cultures. We shared our recipes through influencers we knew our young women would relate to, such as Noha Nabil, Manal Alem, Chef Binkasem and Noral Alali on Snapchat and Instagram. We encouraged our fans to engage with us by sharing photos of the dishes they created using a Wheel Challenge on Instagram, which got over 5,000 entries. This involved spinning a virtual wheel which chose for you the recipe you’d go on to cook. We also created a ‘Fan of the Month’ award every month to celebrate and reward our fans.

The oil went flying off the shelves. 2017 was the highest year in sales for Alarabi Oil in over eight years. We got over 8 million video views on our social media platforms, and over 1 million engagements on Facebook and Instagram. On these platforms, our combined followers increased from 16K to 75K in just six months.

Our campaign reached out directly to our audience, using social media platforms only such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Rather than broadcasting a message out, we wanted to engage and create a relationship with our fans through social engagement, calls to action such as asking them to submit images of dishes they created, and via influencers they admired. This created a digital community of fans around our brand that we could engage with directly.

For the first time ever, we decided to ditch all traditional channels and talk to young women directly, only through social media. The strategy was wholly digital and involved using different social platforms for different results. For instance, since Instagram is visual-heavy we posted many recipe images on there, as well as a few videos. Facebook was used mainly to promote videos, and we used Snapchat as a fast and friendly way for our Influencers to spread the word to their followers.