2022 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

This case demonstrates how a new pasta brand was able to make waves in the market and disrupt the category through an innovative online experience. By developing a new platform for parents to interact with, we managed to create an exceptional online experience they could use to spend more quality time together with their children and enjoy a nice meal as a family.

Background

Oh no! Another pasta brand is coming! LIAMO was looking to launch in Lebanon with a small budget. To succeed, they needed to unlock a core target consumer: young families – especially parents. The good news is that pasta is the world’s favorite food so it’s not a hard sell to put it on the menu. The bad news is that it is very hard to differentiate in this category and to connect with the families as they get constantly bombarded with ads. Since LIAMO was a new pasta brand launching in Lebanon, the brand needed to gain maximum awareness fast, get conversations going and inspire their target audience to shift brand – all this with a limited budget. LIAMO had to come up with something completely new and different that was sure to gain awareness quickly and spark interest among households.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

We talked to parents of gamers to get into their heads and understand the extent of their struggles. What we learned is that parents have tried everything to pull their kids away from their screens to join them for a meal. Diving deeper, we realized gamers can often get frustrated when a better player constantly kills or beats them in the game, which could lead to them “rage quitting” and leaving the game behind to cool down. We decided to use this to our advantage. So how could LIAMO – a pasta brand – help parents to quit playing and come to the dinner table? Well… by hiring a hitman of course! Introducing: “Kill your kids” – a program where parents can (out of love) hire someone to kill their kids virtually - in their games - so they can enjoy a nice bonding moment IRL at the dinner table.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

The pasta category is stuck into traditional (and boring) communications: every ad is about the moment of family connection and bringing families together to the table with a nice dish of pasta (that mom cooked, of course). What we needed was to take a modern and disruptive approach on this family moment, one that would be true to today’s parents and their real life challenges (rather than their idealized advertising version). A real issue surfaced as we were diving deep into our audience: many parents these days have kids who are gamers, and getting them off screen to come eat with everyone at dinner time proves to be challenging even to the most convincing of parents. The challenge: How could we reinvent “family dinner time” communication by focusing on getting gamers off their screens and to the table so everyone can enjoy a nice meal together?

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

Through an online portal developed and powered by LIAMO, parents could log on and pick a gaming assassin (made up of highly skilled Fortnite and PUBG gamers) to enter their child’s game and kill them multiple times, frustrating them enough to leave the game. So as dinner time approaches, parents could hire one of these expert gamers and send them their child’s gaming tag to go and take them out. The hitmen were influencers and the games were live streamed on Twitch, giving even more reasons to the child to stop embarrassing himself in front of an audience, instead quitting the game and joining the family for dinner - served by LIAMO pasta.

List the results (30% of vote)

The campaign was a total hit (we couldn’t resist the pun) with 1,167 in-game kills with over 823 parents participating. We reached over 120,000 gamers on Twitch and 96% of hits were successful. Parents and children thought that the entire activation was funny and took it in good spirit leaving comments: “Guys 😱🤭🤪 I just told someone to kill my son online, in the game yaa’ni not in real life, and I’m scared!” “Do you think I’m a bad mom enno I told someone to shoot habibi my son to bring him to dinner? And to see his face? And please do you think I can ask someone to shoot his dad? 🤣” Even better, it was picked up by gaming publications and got a dedicated thread on Reddit! This is how you enter a traditional category like pasta with a bang.