2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

WHERE IN THE WORLD

BrandSAUDI COMMISSION FOR TOURISM AND NATIONAL HERITAGE
Product/ServiceTOURISM
EntrantDDB DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
CategoryTravel, Leisure, Retail, Restaurants & Fast Food Chains
Idea Creation DDB DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Media Placement PHD Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Production BIG KAHUNA FILMS Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Additional Company TOUCHLINE Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Why is this work relevant for Direct?

Saudi Arabia is a country which never really had a relationship with our current target – tourists. Through our “Where in the world” campaign, we created response-driven content. First, we asked a question in our teaser phase, prompting the world to guess and answer. This was followed by a surprising reveal. In the end, we reached more than 26 million potential new tourists, and established a relationship where previously one did not exist.

Background

Everyday when we turn on the news or open a web browser we’re confronted with misery. Angry rhetoric, walls going up, borders being closed, decades long alliances being broken. The planet burning. But in a world where people increasingly seem to be turning away from one another, Saudi Arabia, a hidden kingdom, opened it’s borders and arms to the world. Saudi Arabia has long resisted tourists visas which left foreign visitors with little opportunity to discover the many wonders of Saudi. The lack of awareness of the culture has also left the world with an inaccurate impression of the Kingdom and its peple. As the country evolves and now with the launch of the new e-visa scheme, visitors and investors will discover the beautiful landscapes, rich heritage and warm-hearted people. The goal is to establish Saudi Arabia as one of the 10 most visited countries in the world by 2030.

Describe the creative idea (30% of vote)

In the travel industry, established for over a hundred years and riddled with tropes, we leveraged the genuine unknown. We used stunning, never-before-seen landscape images of Saudi, with copy that reads “Where in the world is this?”. This concept was used across outdoor, digital, and a film, to create intrigue in one of the biggest teasers the world has ever seen. This was followed by reveal content, which identified the mysterious beautiful landscapes as all being Saudi Arabia.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Campaign strategy: It took the world and global industry leaders decades to build up the aspiration and allure of their natural attractions and thrilling adventures as tourism hotspots. What we wanted for Saudi Arabia: ride the wave of the global tourism spend and leverage it to its own favor. The creative idea was about interrupting the media with a big teaser that grabs maximum attention with global stories from one county, Saudi Arabia. Therefore, what we proposed was showing stunning images of ideal holiday destinations, places that look like Petra, The Maldives, Italy, The Rockies etc, but spinning it around by asking one BIG question: ‘Where in the world is this?’ Because all these breathtaking places are in one place. Untouched, Unseen and Undiscovered – Saudi.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

The campaign was deployed across multiple formats across multiple markets (53 in total), split into a tease, reveal and sustain construct. This was designed to generate surprise, by explicitly referencing other prestigious hotspots around the world before the unexpected reveal of Saudi Arabia. Threaded through our campaign across all of our formats were two hashtags, designed for consistency and to anchor the global conversation; #whereintheworld was deployed in the tease phase, whilst #WelcomeToArabia was used for the reveal. Our choice of channels were determined by the desire to deliver on two tasks: to create impact on passive/disinterested mass audiences and to deliver information to a smaller, primed audience: Mass impact channels: OOH Print Social Media Rich Media Display Information channels: Social Media Display Paid Search The scale of the campaign was enormous and necessary; it’s estimated that we reached almost 330m people with our media deployment.

List the results (30% of vote)

Given that our objective was to raise awareness and interest in Saudi Arabia as a tourist proposition, we were pleased with our results although we were not able to ratify this further, given the absence of a full brand study. That said, we comfortably outperformed Google’s benchmarks for ad recall, with exceptional results of 67-98% in key markets like Italy, Russia, Spain, Germany and Australia. We also delivered great results for recall on Facebook, bettering the benchmark by a minimum factor of 3 across all markets. Similarly, we beat all Facebook benchmarks by factors ranging from .25 to 4 across all markets for recall. Once our ‘reveal’ phase was live, we saw 4x the growth in Saudi related search terms; a result notable not only because of it indicating interest, but also because searches for the broader Travel and Tourism vertical declined by -2% over the same period.

Credits

Name Company Role
Firas Medrows DDB FZ LLC Executive Creative Director
Kapil Mayekar DDB FZ LLC Art Director
Katrina Petrenko DDB FZ LLC Copywriter
Zahra Mirza DDB FZ LLC Copywriter
Firose Korattikka DDB FZ LLC Art Director
Ali Mohammad DDB FZ LLC Arabic Copywriter
Sanu Raju DDB FZ LLC Digital Artist
Ashish Varghese DDB FZ LLC Producer
Yasmin Shaik DDB FZ LLC Post Producer
Hubert Boulos DDB FZ LLC Planner
Nathalie Gevresse DDB FZ LLC Managing Director
Upasna Ananth DDB FZ LLC Account Director
Neethu Jose DDB FZ LLC Account Manager