2018 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Saudi football fans are loud and proud, especially when rival teams square off. Our research revealed that during a football match, social media usage increased tremendously. We dug a bit deeper, we identified that football fans were using the pre and post game times to taunt and tease their rivals, even if it was family or friends. These were the perfect opportunities where we could steal attention and intensify our fans’ passion with their innermost trusted circle of friends and family. We also knew that Snapchat was the perfect medium to connect with them due to its fast adoption rate in the country, (Ranked No.1 in the world with Riyadh and Jeddah being amongst the top 5 cities globally with higher-than-normal figures*) Armed with our insights, we deployed a unique digital activation that placed the Mobily brand at the forefront of the fan’s rivalry.

Creative Execution

On March 10th, during El Clasico El Asfar, we launched 3 time-coded, uniquely branded filters that featured our two Mobily sponsored teams. Fans would log on to Snapchat, choose their team’s filter and begin the taunts. Each filter was released at a certain time, encouraging our users to share their feelings with their innermost circle of influence. The first filter was released on game day, hours before the game began, asking fans to pledge allegiance to their team. The second filter asked them to describe their anticipation before kick off. The final filter was launched minutes after the first kick off, asking them to predict the score and continue the trash talking. So, while everyone else was fighting for our fans’ attention on traditional media, we were busy stealing it on Snapchat. In the end, Al Ittihad won the game, but Mobily scored a hat trick with its branded-filters.

This Snapchat brand-filter campaign did extremely well and is one of the best performing filters globally on Snapchat. 1. Snapchat’s benchmark impressions for previous geo-filters activations were 15.6M. We exceeded those impressions with an amazing 118M+. 2. Our Branded filters were viewed on average a 100x by Snapcat user’s contacts. 3. On a brand level, we had an increase of likability by 7.5% and a total increase of social engagement by 34% 4. We also scored over 65% on Brand appeal, whilst brand recall exceeded our KPIs by scoring over than 25%. 5. But our most impressive result of all was that we managed to effectively connect and be part of the Saudi football fever for as little as $100K.

If you live in Saudi Arabia, two things consume your life – Snapchat and Football. Major Telcos spend millions of dollars on stadium sponsorships, TV rights and on-ground activations to keep their names top of mind, but not many were truly leveraging the power of the Kingdom’s fastest growing social platform. Mobily couldn’t compete with the deep pockets of their competitors so, when two of Mobily’s sponsored teams surprisingly made it to the Prince’s Cup Final, they decided to even the playing field with a digital activation that not only stole the show but also it cost less than $100K.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Our demographics were passionate Saudi fans, aged 14-40 who are always connected on social media. They loved football and their teams blindly. We knew that 83% of Saudi’s that speak about sport-related content, use Snapchat at least once a week to do so** So, when our competitors were trying to win our audience’s attention with sponsorships, stadium advertising and TV spots, we planned to steal it before, during and after the game on Snapchat. In order to do this, we were going to have to create a highly engaging, Mobily-branded filter that our fans could seamlessly use to trash talk and show-off their team’s colours with pride. We would ultimately ‘arm them’ on Snapchat with cool, shareable content to taunt, tease and challenge each other on their favourite platform, throughout the entire game.