2022 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for Integrated?

Taraji is the biggest sports brand in Tunisia with +3M devoted fans but its Telco Taraji Mobile barely converted 10% of this audience. Fans didn’t see the mobile brand as essential to the club experience. To boost subscriptions, we took Taraji Mobile’s narrative away from football and centered it around what really unites fans: lifestyle. The new positioning was anchored around the diverse community of Taraji and its rich pop culture. We repositioned through a multichannel campaign and focused on street activations for proximity. Since the launch, Taraji Mobile sold 3.5x more SIM cards than its set objective, a record.

Background

Taraji Mobile was born from the partnership between Taraji and TT, the national operator, 8 years ago so the club would benefit from a new source of income and TT would benefit from the club’s reach and affinity to recruit a massive, engaged audience in a saturated mobile market. Taraji Mobile had a potential audience of millions, yet turnout was limited. Up until 2019, the operator converted less than 230K subscribers, far less than projected. For years, football was a big part of Taraji Mobile’s brand narrative, whereas the true bonding opportunity lies in the lifestyle and the cultural assets of the club. Taraji’s centenary was a much-anticipated event. For Taraji Mobile, it was an opportunity to redefine its bond with the club’s fans to boost its base. For the centennial of Taraji, Taraji Mobile's primary objective of was to convert 100k of new Taraji fans.

Describe the creative idea

Remind Taraji fans that as they dress Taraji and live Taraji, their Telco had to be Taraji Mobile. “El Mkach5a” see their club as a nation: an organized entity made of millions of people that share a passion, common culture, language, beliefs, and history. “Taraji ya dawla” which means “Taraji our nation” is their most iconic cheer. To understand the nation of Taraji and its citizens, we would set the décor to Bab Souika, the medina neighborhood where the club was born. In Bab Souika, red and yellow are part of every celebration and a fixture in most retail spaces. Whether you go to a wedding, a circumcision or for a simple haircut, the club’s colors will surround you. For this audience, being a true Taraji fan isn’t about football but about belonging to a centennial community with deep-rooted culture.

Describe the strategy

For Taraji’s centenary, we needed to switch Taraji Mobile’s narrative away from football to a new lifestyle territory that celebrates the club’s popular culture. It was important to paint an authentic portrait of the Taraji community and how seamlessly its mobile brand not only blends in but belongs there. To gain relevance, we reviewed our point of view and our role in fans lives. We took a pride stance, that celebrates how the passion for the club translates to everyday life, bringing our campaign’s tagline « Ahna Haka N3ichou : this is us ». To maximize its impact, we employed a multi-channel strategy that started in January 2020 and is still going strong.

Describe the execution

Our campaign « this is us » celebrates the club's lifestyle and its people through a multi-channel strategy that started in January 2020 and is still going strong. We took the fans out of the stadium into a brand film that celebrates their deep attachment to the club: Street culture, social media references and anime design fueled our creative. We collaborated with "4lfa" a Taraji rapper and included a diverse cast for the film and the print campaign. Taking the celebration to the streets, we launched a “Mobile Studio” where fans could be recorded singing for their team in every region. And at the end of 2020, we took the club’s trophies out on a national “Trophies Tour”. Unfortunately, the pandemic worsened in Tunisia putting it on hold. To remedy, we leveraged AR through a dedicated mobile app that allowed fans to take photos with virtual trophies everywhere.

List the results

Since the launch of the new platform in the beginning of 2020, Taraji Mobile sold 353k SIM cards despite the pandemic Taraji Mobile sold 130k SIM Cards in the 3 months of launch despite the pandemic, 140k more SIM Cards in Q2 2020 and 83k SIM Cards between January and April 2021. The new narrative sparked a very positive response from the fans as they took our new material and made it their own: Pictures, memes, hashtags, the Taraji community embraced our tone and finally welcomed us among them. The campaign had an estimated reach of 1.2M people on Facebook and the film soon became Taraji Mobile’s most shared video along with 40k interactions. The study tour and trophies tour stopped in more than 10 cities on their way and gathered thousands of fans. The tours’ reach on social media was very wide, counting more than 750k people.