2018 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

We created content that wasn’t just viewed on a digital medium, but made for digital. We used smartphones to bring people together and created the first branded content you literally can’t watch alone! In order to watch Pepsi Ramadan’s content, consumers would have to gather up and align their phones side by side– creating a video that you can only see fully across three frames. In other words, you’d have to find two friends, physically place your phones vertically side by side, and press play at once. The video featured the region’s most popular comedy actor and multi-generational fixture, Sameer Ghanem, who musically narrated the story of 3 friends struggling to spend time together because they’re too distracted with their phones. To further hammer on the message, Ghanem ends the tale by telling viewers to leave their phones and spend time with one another.

Creative Execution

Our execution was digitally-led, and limited to Facebook & YouTube, since these were the two main mediums to view videos on social media. Our main focus was on Facebook, and pushed viewership through carousel ads. Moreover, our only use of TV was with a 10” bumper teasing consumers with a hint that you can’t watch this year’s ad alone. Moreover, we only had the last two weeks of Ramadan to make an impact, adding to the fact that we were focused on creating a one-of-a-kind act that would create buzz & act as a stunt, rather than just another Ramadan ad that fought to resonate among the thousands of pieces of content.

Each video impression didn’t just count as a view, but for a time people actually got together! And so the calculation was different – we couldn’t look at each the results of each video in isolation, so we took the average video views, and that measured as our benchmark for the average number of times people got in a lama (gathering). That translated into a staggering 270,000 gatherings in just 10 days! In reality, that number is significantly higher but unmeasurable – in the majority of the ‘lamat’, groups between 3-7 people would gather up to watch. Almost all of the UGC (user generated content) shared proved that the groups were almost always more than three people. Additionally, in just 10 days we received 20M engagements, which was 70% higher compared to the best performing campaign for Pepsi in the past 6 months, and +17% higher vs. Ramadan 2016.

Social media/smart phone addiction among Egyptian youth is particularly obvious during Ramadan. Dubbed, “the most social” month of the year, Ramadan is the only time of year where families eat together every day, and attend/host social gatherings every night. But, there’s always that one common factor across all households – the detached youth. Instead of joining in on conversation, and spending time with the people around them, they’re stuck to their phones, scrolling through Instagram, tweeting mindlessly and streaming on YouTube. In fact, during Ramadan social media usage sees a +30% spike. Moreover, it is only during the holy month that we see a bombardment of content & entertainment. Putting all this into perspective, the truth of the matter is, the smartphone is the biggest hurdle coming between youth & the 'lama'. With that said, we turned technology from being the barrier of the ‘lama’ (gathering) to the facilitator.