2018 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

SUV advertising in the region is pretty standard. Insert photoshopped images of SUVs riding dunes and big, bold typography. We didn’t want to play the same game. Patrol Super Safari has genuine credibility and heritage, so rather than try to out-shout the competition, we decided to put the car and the campaign in hands of an audience who aspire to live a life more adventurous. For the first time ever in the region, we ran a live adventure where the audience could control what happened next with the film’s protagonist, a local influencer, and his trusty sidekick for limitless adventure, the Nissan Patrol Super Safari. We know audiences are weary of paid content, now more so than ever, so to avoid setting off the bullshit alarm, the whole idea relied on giving them the chance to control the adventure and co-create the story.

Creative Execution

We spent a day each with Max of Arabia and Sherif Fayed, collaborating on the kinds of adventures their audience would most enjoy. During each day, the influencers created three Instagram polls, allowing for followers to choose between a variety of adventures, from rock climbing to Super Safari sandboarding. During each adventure, they also created live stories and posts. And our own videographer collected assets to allow for the deployment of a full digital campaign, including teasers, highlight films, social posts and banners that we pushed across all our social platforms as well as the influencers'. The live posts drove organic engagement and built hype while the additional campaign assets allowed us to drive reach and conversions after the event, by re-targeting and broadcasting multiple recap films across multiple platforms via programmatic.

Awareness - 20.8 million impressions in two weeks (2/3 of the campaign completed), with a total of 3.9m views Engagement - 2.65 million interactions with an engagement rate of 12.74% compared to the Instagram benchmark of 5% (in comparison to 2.2% and 5.2% for our last sustenance and launch campaign respectively) - 52% of viewers watched the entire film, with 50% being the YouTube benchmark for excellence (in comparison to 36% and 34% for our last sustenance and launch campaign respectively) - Total time spent viewing the films equates to 3.86 years Business Impact - Unique visits to product landing page went up 96.7% (Year on Year: January 2018 vs 2017) - 41.5% increase in sales (Year on Year – January 2018 vs 2017) even with the introduction of VAT, which, in the same period, saw segment (SUV-F) sales decline by 35.3% and the Total Industry Volume by 23.7%

Our audience doesn’t see a sun lounger as an escape. They aren’t obsessed with luxury weekends away at the latest 5* resort. For them, escape is about spontaneity and about getting different and diverse experiences to add to one’s life adventures. Our strategic platform was therefore Limitless Adventure: this defined the intersection between what our audience wants and the ability of the Patrol Super Safari to fulfill it. It was also broad enough to bring in a new Arab Expat audience, whilst retaining the essence of the car for our Local National audience. 80% of conversation regarding adventurous living takes place on Instagram, so we used one of the platform's most immersive formats as the focal point of our campaign: polls on stories. To this, we added two of the biggest adventure influencers in the region, and captured content from two adventure-packed days.