2019 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for Media?

Tunisie Telecom’s (TT) long battle against being perceived as an old-fashioned brand made winning the strategic youth segment extremely challenging. So to win back TT’s leading position in the telco sector against an aggressive international competition, we brought to life and modernized an iconic Ramadan persona -- Boutbila. Gamifying the rules of its own communication, TT challenged the old-fashioned perception the market’s dynamics have forced on it and won back its position as an innovative, technology driven brand that understands its audience and has what it takes to revamp their world.

Background.

Tunisie Telecom (TT) for years was Tunisia’s telecommunication pioneer. Recently, global competitors (Orange & Ooredoo) with their ever-evolving first to market innovations had repositioned Tunisie Telecom. TT had lost relevance and is now perceived as old fashioned. The telecommunication sector’s 21% growth is driven by data consumption, and youth are the biggest users of data in Tunisia; hence to grow, TT needed to recapture this segment.

Describe the creative idea/insights

Keen on the gamification of their worlds, Tunisian youth were to be surprised by TT gamifying the dullest of their experiences with telco brands: the top up card. We put technology at the heart of our Ramadan strategy leveraging the interest our audience had in innovation bringing to life the most iconic Ramadan persona: the century old Boutbila. Modernizing his image was going to allow us to revamp TT’s repositioning it as one of the most innovative telco brands. With TT being the first telco operator ever to launch an AR game with such a persona and youth being more digital than ever (digital penetration rates exceeding 90%) we gave them a unique experience to shorten their long fasting days as they find refuge in games. With their worlds conquered by entertainment and endless technological wonders our strategy was to surprise youth using a “modernized” version of a well-loved character.

Describe the strategy.

Losing its lead in a market driven by youth's data consumption while only being preferred by 22% of them, TT was solely known for its functional attributes hence charming a challenging target was nearly impossible as youth require their telco brand to be sexy & innovative. To convince youth that the brand was their world companion, we had to surprise them while creatively contextualizing our communication to Ramadan showcasing the youthful breath added to TT. The strategy was to leverage a leading-edge technology to bring to life one of the most iconic Ramadan personas: the century old AR revamped Boutbila. TT’s goal was to maximize youth’s engagement through their most sought telco service: data.

Describe the execution.

To boost our top up cards’ sales, we turned them into the AR Boutbila presence's activators. Youth would download our game from the play store and with their top up cards, get an AR Boutbila to instantly appear. TT overhauled youth’s Boutila experience by bringing the icon to life in style to the 21st century celebrating the most popular Tunisian musical styles: Rap, Rock, Electropop & Traditional music. Living in a digitalized world, youth got to choose their revamped Boutbila style as they competed through their Piano Tile’s game. And with youth being unconditionally obsessed by TV during the month of Ramadan, the idea was to also extend the mobile experience bringing it to TV and popularizing the AR technology to our audience with opinion leaders taking part in real time Boutbila competitions as we augmented TV-reality by inviting Boutbila to one of the most followed late shows in Ramadan.

List the results.

Rejuvenating the old fashioned 40 years old man turning him into an iconic 21st century star, showcased TT's magic of its on and offline communication potion. Tunisie Telecom’s image was successfully revamped through our campaign: • Boutbila was the most downloaded app on the Play Store throughout the campaign • Our game secured an excellent 4.1 rating given on the store • And an unprecedented 15k downloads over a 10 days period • Among the 15k, 10K of the active users doubled their data consumption • And 91.2% of tech savvies and advocates & 50% of early adapters engaged with our game • With Boutbila, we succeeded in bettering our brand’s perception magnifying the efficiency of our campaign.