2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

CONFESSIONS

BrandUNILEVER
Product/ServiceLIPTON SUNSILK & REXONA
EntrantUNILEVER EGYPT Cairo, EGYPT
CategoryFiction & Non-Fiction Films: 5-30 minutes
Idea Creation FREMANTLE MEDIA INTERNATIONAL Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Media Placement MAGNA Cairo, EGYPT
Production FREMANTLE MEDIA INTERNATIONAL Dubai, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Why is this work relevant for Entertainment?

The entertainment industry provides a wide spectrum of media, including movies, music, amusement parks and other attractions that audiences worldwide have grown to love. However, many companies are undergoing significant changes in terms of their content-delivery methods and revenue-generating models. Unilever decided to capture their female consumers through an online mini series in a new disruptive and very organic way. The aim was to cater pure entertainment and engagement content.

Background

knowing that consumers spend more than a quarter of the day engaging with digital content, Unilever needed to create a non-intrusive engaging experience for users. Since video consumed intentionally is viewed for five times longer on Facebook compared to imposed content/advertising. The platform seemed like the perfect opportunity since over 66% of social media users trust the platform. Year on year we see that native content innately gets higher views and engagements. The objective was to integrate Unilever products Lipton, Rexona & Sunsilk in a subtle way within organic content to show case the use of the products in the daily lives of relate-able characters.

Describe the creative idea

The idea was to emulate young women's lives and problems through an online series staring fresh faces that looked felt and sounded like our target audience with the objective of being relatable and creating a connection. Creatively we wanted to make sure that the people and the aesthetics were close to our target. We wanted to make sure that the issues we discussed hit them right in the core. From family drama to friends and and boyfriends and even career we wanted to make sure we captured a wide spectrum of relevant issues.

Describe the strategy

Since most of the Unilever's target profile for Lipton, Rexona and Sunsilk are heavy social media users. Unilever collaborated with Fremantle to capture this opportunity to be the first brand to co-create organic Facebook exclusive web series production. To come up with the concept we studied the lives of young women in Egypt capturing the kind of struggles they deal with in this stage of their lives by capturing online confessions & speaking to psychologists. The 14 episode concept starred a bundle of young fresh new faces. The idea of "Confessions When Girls Talk" was to explore the daily lives of a group of young women in Egypt showcasing a variety of issues and very much relate-able hardships and from relationships, to work and even friendship & family drama. We captured the stories in a lighthearted, real non dramatized way. Each episode averages 10mins to align with Fb viewership habits.

Describe the execution

Unilever partnered up with Fremantle to create the 14 episode production, the trick was to come up with creative and subtle ways to integrate Unilever products in the daily consumption habits of the characters in each episode. We focused on Lipton, Rexona and Sunsilk, each of them were showcased differently in each of the episodes promoting the different variants of each product integrated in the character's day to day lives. The episodes were posted every other day to capture the fast paced video consumption on FB and get people hooked. To create engagement and sense of cult following to the show, we had the stars of the show do a commentary video were they take fans' questions and discuss what their characters are going through in the last episode.

Describe the outcome

The launching episode alone had over 3.8M views and was shared over 2.8K times. Over all the webseries achieved over 14.7M Views with over 197K interactions and 7.9K shares on Facebook.The results were amazing reaching over 15.2M users with 9% engagement rate which 30% higher than the benchmark. Audiences were hooked on the show leading to 19% VTR which a whooping 90% above the benchmark. Confessions showed positive results across Awareness lift (6.7pt) , favor-ability among males ( 8.3 pt) & Females (7.7pt) During the last episode over 70% of the comments were expressing their bitter sweet feelings about the show ending and were calling for season2 not to mention that 99.8% of the interactions were positive. The show's page captured over 140K followers organically. In addition sales sparked by +20 Bps right after the show.

Credits

Name Company Role
Anahita Kheder Freemantle Creative team
Lamia Naguib Unilever client
Nihal Abdelaziz Magna Egypt media
Mostafa abouhussein Magna Egypt Media
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