2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Background

The year is 2020 and Motorola is completely irrelevant in the minds of Saudis. The brand had all but disappeared after the early 2000s, when its iconic clamshell Moto Razr was dominating the market. Since then, it had been replaced by the arrival of smartphones, notably Apple's iPhone and Samsung's range of smartphones. But now, 20 years later, Motorola was staging a massive comeback with a reimagined, sleek and modern Razr 5G. But at $1,500, the brand new Razr was by no means affordable, and it needed to be positioned in a way that appealed to a new generation of Saudi smartphone users who had not necessarily been exposed to the brand in the past. And we had to do that for a category that was extremely cluttered with many players, and in a social media landscape that was equally as cluttered.

Describe the strategy

We had to stand out from the rest, we needed to be relevant, and we needed to find a way to connect to a Saudi demographic that was not necessarily aware of Moto's history in the region. We needed to find a way to be relevant, culturally, and to make a grand entrance into the Saudi market. So we looked at what Saudis within our target audience were into. Our trends research showed us that music often came up as one of the key interests for Saudis aged 25-40. So the idea of a music video/original song quickly came to life. Our partner for this endeavour was a young Saudi comedian/performer called Khalid Assiri, and we got to work on putting the lyrics and the tune together, and planning the video that would accompany it. Instagram and YouTube were our two key platforms, due to their popularity in Saudi.

Describe the execution

What came out was an original song called "Flip" - a cool, catchy hip hop track that contained a mixture of English and Arabic lyrics such as "move your body like Razr" and "fast 5G like Moto", and with some high energy dance moves. We were set. We also wanted to make sure that we leveraged Khalid's 980K+ followers on Instagram and his 600K+ subscribers on YouTube. So we let him post the content on his pages first, with YouTube hosting the full music video, and immediately the song went viral.

List the results

With zero media dollars invested behind the video, it went viral with over half a million organic views in less than 5 days, and over 1,300 comments. (we are now at over 700K views). We also had amazing engagement on the content he shared on Instagram: Over 85,000 organic engagements including 700 saves and over 600 shares. But most importantly, we managed to shift the perception of Moto in the Saudi market. A brand lift study we conducted on Facebook and Instagram showed that we managed to move the needle when it came to awareness, message comprehension, and purchase intent. 1) Our brand recall shot up across all age groups at an average of 8.25 points (especially amongst our key target group aged 25-44) 2) Our 5G core message was understood and accepted 3) Purchase intent grew particularly amongst those aged 35-44 (those who are able to afford the phone)