2022 Winners & Shortlists

Cultural / Context information for the jury

As a part of its space exploration agenda, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched the Mars Mission and sent a probe to the Red Planet 7 months ago. The probe was set to arrive on Mars in early 2021. As this was to be the first time that an Arab country had ever arrived on Mars, the UAE government wanted to make sure that everyone in the world was watching. The concept for the mission was ‘Impossible is Possible’, a reference to the many amazing things that have occurred in the UAE and to the difficulty of sending a probe to Mars given that 50% of the earlier missions to Mars had failed.

Please outline the innovative elements of the work.

This campaign used super-realistic sky mapping projection technology that had never before been seen in the Middle East – in fact, the technology had only been used in other countries three times before. To make the two moons looks real, we used two giant 70-metre cranes and a 40-metre holo screen to project two exact replicas of the Mars moons onto the Dubai sky. The screen and the cranes were invisible at night, and the moons – which were visible for miles – looked incredibly realistic. Another important disruptive aspect of the campaign is the way we presented a sci-fi concept to make people talk about the Hope Probe’s arrival on Mars. For a government campaign, this is especially innovative and unusual.