2022 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for Creative Strategy?

How do you drive awareness around a social issue? You learn what makes that issue resonate with your audience - you make it personal. The task was to help struggling small businesses get back on their feet. The same businesses that make up the cornerstone of every neighborhood, and with whom we all have personal relationships that are beyond just business. In short, the solution was weaponizing the love people had for their local shops to get them to become selfless advocates and use their personal profiles as advertising space.

Background

Being a small business owner has always been hard. It’s been even harder for the past two years when streets have emptied, and people have become more dependent on online purchases. In the Levant and North Africa, family businesses are a staple of every street and neighbourhood, run by and for the residents of those areas. Simply put, they are the heartbeat of our communities. But with the pandemic causing a global recession, small businesses, often ill-equipped to face a rapidly evolving e-commerce landscape, were going out of business. Simply by shopping online, people were inadvertently shifting their spending to giant corporations, turning SMB to an endangered species. Facebook saw a window to help. The brand wants to be a key partner for SMBs and was keen on encouraging people and their communities to support their local shops. How could the global giant Facebook support local shops from MENA regions?

The Interpretation of the Challenge (30% of vote)

Economic turmoil is unequal – especially when it comes to eCommerce. Giants like Amazon, Carrefour, Ebay and others can spend on online advertising as they please, saturating our search results and our feeds. SMBs are nowhere as lucky. For them, getting more customers is an uphill battle. A simple google search is enough proof: the big companies come first, leaving smaller businesses to the later pages that no one ever bothers clicking on. We knew people loved the local stores in their community, but our challenge was much bigger: SMBs were not just competing among each other, but rather faced a David vs. Goliath situation, facing major companies on an uneven playing field. These businesses heavily rely on footfall to generate sales. And outside of their regulars, their main source of new business was passers-by seeing the store sign… and during a pandemic – this was a lost cause.

The Insight / Breakthrough Thinking (30% of vote)

SMBs have personal relationships with their customers. They know their names, what they want and exactly how they want it. Customers become part of the family and feel like they have a personal stake in that business, pushing everyone they know to experience the places they love. When competitors hold all the cards and have all the money and the advertising space, what is there left for SMBs? They have something much more powerful: the love of the people. What we needed to do: find a way to make this love louder, more vocal and thus more useful for the businesses that communities wanted to support. How can we turn people’s love for their favorite SMB to advertising space? By using their most powerful asset: their social profiles.

The Creative Idea (20% of vote)

We created “Space for Rent”, a movement empowering people to become a living ad space for their favorite SMBs. All they had to do: turn their cover photos and social profiles to become an advertising space for their favorite coffee shops, bakeries or craftsmen. The movement was kicked off with an online film celebrating the real relationships people have with their local SMBs (no actors, only real stories and people) encouraged everyone to join the movement. Toolkits made it easy to participate. Famous actors, chefs, and influencers rallied to our cause (without any compensation): Mohamed Henedy, Faisal al Saif, Kris Fade and many others across the region joined the movement, donating their profiles to share posts and stories about beloved SMBs. Faced with all this love and support, the SMB themselves showed their thanks and appreciation with videos, notes and packages to those that stood by them.

The Outcome / Results (20% of vote)

What started small turned into a movement. It became the talk of the region, with more than 100+ articles covering it worth $1,217,125 in earned PR value. Over 60% of all the articles used the campaign hashtag in the headline helping spread our movement! On Facebook and Instagram, the campaign received over 245,000 total interactions – (and that’s just from verified accounts, public accounts and manually tracked pages). The videos and reels shared by our partner content creators highlighting some of their favourite local businesses have been viewed at least 2.3 million times. All this taking place in French, English and Arabic across the entire region! For Meta, the outcome was strong too, with their role as a key partner to SMBs being mentioned in 100% of the articles. And not one piece of coverage was negative! Here’s to using social media for good by amplifying our love and support!

Please tell us how the work was designed / adapted for a single country / region / market.

While the overall insight was universal across the whole MENA region where it ran, it was still important to make it relevant and resonant with consumers in each country. To do that, the work included real SMBs from across the region. Whether that was a Lebanese restaurant, Jordanian Bakery, Egyptian artisan or Moroccan hair stylist, supporters of these SMBs spoke about them in their country’s dialect. Posts about the campaign also ran in Arabic, English and French in order to ensure the message is received by the wider multilingual audience present in each country.