2022 Winners & Shortlists

Background

Alexa is a voice AI that can help you with tasks, entertainment, general information, and more. Whether you’re at home or on the go, Alexa is designed to make your life easier by letting your voice control your world. Amazon's purpose is “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company..." and inspired by that we wanted to launch one of their products; Alexa; in Saudi Arabia. However, we they were not launching it in "Arabic", but Alexa was going to be launched in Najdi. The actual dialect spoken in the central region of the Kingdom and widely understood in Saudi Arabia. While the official written language in KSA is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), in everyday life, Arabic speakers use dialectal forms of Arabic, with many vernacular variations. Our objective was to populate and enrich Alexa with the content and references that allow it to be part of the culture, not an intruder.

Describe the strategy

Our angle was to get the buy in of our potential target audience in Alexa as a legitimate and genuinely cultured AI was to associate with 6 brands that have been a part of the life of the Saudi people for a long time. From food, delivery services and even mindfulness apps like Dominos, Jahez and Tawazon.

Describe the execution

The roll out of the campaign started with the launch event on the 7th of January where the regional team interacted live in Najdi with Alexa on stage. Afterwards we announced that it's now live with a tweet. The content created and fed into Alexa was carefully selected based on different cultural aspects (Humor, Adult and children stories, Poetry ).

List the results

1. 15.2 million views 2. Almost 2 million engaged through liking, shares and comments