2019 Winners & Shortlists

Background.

Defective products threaten the health and safety of consumers. Numbers show that in Saudi Arabia, only 20% respond to product recall announcements while 80% continue to ignore them endangering themselves and others. The only way to solve this issue is for consumers to respond to product recalls by simply returning the product or having it fixed free of charge. The objective was to raise awareness about the issue the percentage of responses to recalls.

Describe the creative idea.

Post a "Defective Tweet" filled with linguistic errors from the official account of The Saudi Ministry of Commerce and Investment to its 1.85 million followers. After the audience starts interacting with the unusual tweet and giving it attention the Ministry recalled the tweet officially like it does to defective products highlighting that this harmless tweet got more attention than actual dangerous product recall announcements and posts.

Describe the strategy.

We went to twitter, where Saudis engage in heated discussions over society’s problems often involving governmental organizations and drawing huge attention on the public scene. We wanted to use this situation to make consumers engage with an important problem they are ignoring, defective products.

Describe the execution.

Using the official account of the Ministry we released the most controversial element of our campaign that got the 1.85 million followers of the Ministry talking. “The Defective Tweet”. A tweet that contained many linguistic and grammatical errors. The audience noticed the tweet and began engaging with it immediately in all sorts of ways like mocking it or assuming the account was hacked. After a few hours, we officially recalled the tweet highlighting that it is just a harmless tweet yet it got more attention than dangerous defective products in your households which you ignore and then released the remaining elements of the campaign.

List the results.

The campaign gained media coverage appearing in MBC, Rotana shows and news websites, generated 15,700,000 impressions for the campaign’s hashtag, a reach of 90,000,000 and More than 22,000,000 impressions for the Ministry’s tweets managing to successfully engage with consumers and influencers. The percentage in recall responses grew by 100% reaching a 40% response rate.