2022 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for Creative Strategy?

This case demonstrates how LIAMO, a new pasta brand trying to enter the market, managed to disrupt the entire industry with one exceptional idea. Building on a strong audience insight that was derived from a relevant challenge parents are facing in the region, and pairing it with an exceptional creative idea, LIAMO was able to enter the category with a bang.

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.

The Interpretation of the Challenge (30% 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?

The Insight / Breakthrough Thinking (30% 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. Everything from texting to yelling, nothing seems to even nudge the kids. Diving deeper into gamer culture and scouring hours of gaming streams on Twitch and YouTube, we realized one key thing. 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 for a period 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!

The Creative Idea (20% of vote)

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. 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.

The Outcome / Results (20% 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.

Please tell us about how the work challenged / was different from the brands competitors

Pasta brands in the region such as Barilla, Panzani and De Cecco are stuck talking to brands in an old-fashioned way, showing the perfect family gathering around the table enjoying a pasta meal together. The reality, however, is far from that. Parents struggle to get their kids to join the table. We tapped into this reality and didn’t ignore it like the rest of the traditional pasta category, disrupting the advertising scene in the process. While other pasta brands produce ads about something going wrong while cooking and the mother fixing it and making the entire family happy, even her mother-in-law, we took a more realistic approach. We showcased the actual struggle parents face with getting their kids to leave their games and join them for dinner and gave them the ultimate solution: kill your kids!