2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Background

In Lebanon, a country beset by financial difficulties, Alzheimer’s disease affects tens of thousands of elderly Lebanese. It makes them forget who they are, making them live in anxiety of their surroundings, and even their loved ones. The Alzheimer's Association Lebanon's aims to raise awareness of the disease, its impact, and ways to live with it for patients and their families and caregivers. Although AAL is the leading non-profit in this field in Lebanon, communication budgets are modest, and so awareness communications are intermittent. So relying on smart tactics with partners, AAL aims to reach people each segment at a time. For Alzheimer's Awareness month, we wanted to raise awareness that although the effects of Alzheimer’s disease are irreversible, studies showed that areas in the brain linked to musical memory remain largely undamaged by the disease.

Describe the strategy

When communicating how to better handle symptoms, the communications are targeted to caregivers and families, not the patients themselves. Our message needed to highlight music as effective at triggering memories, and reducing anxiety for patients, because of all the happy memories linked back to their golden years. We decided to be as efficient as possible, and target those who are most likely to react to this information, in a place where there would be a large number of them; on Music streaming platforms, to music fans. We partnered with Anghami. With over 14 million active users and over 10 billion streams in 2019, it's the Arab world's largest music streaming app. Through this partnership, we turned the Anghami platform into an Alzheimer’s disease awareness and symptoms management tool. We launched the Zikrayat Playlist ("Memories" Playlist). An automated tool that generates relevant music playlists based on the patient's year of birth.

Describe the execution

Every Anghami user in Lebanon was exposed to the Zikrayat Playlist initiative on their Anghami app home screen. All they had to do was write the patient’s date of birth, and the Zikrayat Playlist was generated. Each playlist contained the most popular songs from that patient’s youth, making it easier for caregivers and families to know the relevant songs that could trigger happy memories for each person. The campaign went live on 19 September till the end of the month for around 2 weeks time, being available for all users in Lebanon. It relied on in-app exposure to daily users, with minimal support from external media (including owned social channels) because of a limiting budget.

List the results

Relying only on the app interface, and owned social channels, with $0 media spend, we achieved 206,283 user Impressions over 2 weeks and a reach of 62,015, with over 30% Conversion Rate and using the feature. Compared to the average reach rate of other digital AAL communications, the campaign achieved over 3000% more interactions, and raised awareness about the role of music in aiding with the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.