2019 Winners & Shortlists

Background.

For the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Rexona Men wanted to target one of the most passionate, football-fanatic audiences – Saudi males. Football is not only a popular sport but also a go-to emotional outlet for Saudi men. To leverage their fandom, Rexona launched a limited-edition series of male deodorant cans specially designed to match jerseys of teams playing in the tournament. Their objective was to boost can sales within the Saudi male profile by tapping on the emotional touchpoints of a true football fan – tension, excitement, joy and sweat.

Describe the creative idea.

To answer this objective, we leveraged their emotional concept (If you don’t care, you don’t sweat) through a simple digital banner that supported fans supporting their teams during the FIFA World Cup.

Describe the strategy.

With smartphones always at hand, fans not only watch the match but also spend a large amount of time second-screening to get updates, predictions, opinions and share their own views and memes around the topic. However, we wanted to rake in the fan interesting without being too intrusive, i.e., amplifying the value of a simple banner ad by infusing it with relevant information fans actually value and pay attention to. Moreover, we also wanted to target fan patriotism by making each banner bespoke to the teams they love. As a result, our banners were developed to give users an option to select the communication they wanted to see based on the teams they support. And to make sure the communication hits effectively, we kept our design minimal and tuned our messages to speak like a fan to a fan.

Describe the execution.

The campaign was launched before the tournament commenced. The target audience was served an ad that invited them to pick and support their favorite team from a carousel of Rexona team cans. They were then given interesting team trivia, and their home-country’s football love. Each ad was concluded with a call-to-action to buy the Rexona cans online. Users who did not interact with the ad were automatically directed to the final tactical message. Once the tournament began, we also pulled in live-API that used real-time match information like time remaining, scores and more to give them perfectly-timed match updates in the same, fan-focused tone. Even if their teams dropped out, fans could continue the experience by selecting another team can. As a result, we used a single ad unit in 4 different sizes. Throughout the campaign we crafted 60 unique messages (2 languages) to serve 480 unique banners totally.

List the results.

During the 2-month campaign, we received an average 6.2% engagement leading to a 0.4% click-through rate. On the business end, our can sales crossed over 1 Million Saudi Riyals and we grew our Male portfolio by 4%. All this with just a single ad unit.