2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Background

This year was unlike any other. We all overcame our own challenges and hurdles. Ultimately, celebrating Saudi National Day during the pandemic was a different experience for everyone. Gatherings may have been limited to keep everyone safe, but we wanted to remind our audience of the 'spirit of Saudi National Day'. The people of Saudi Arabia are passionate and this passion truly comes to life on Saudi National Day. Our campaign aimed to bolster that emotion and generate increased unity across the nation. For the 90th Saudi National Day, we decided to set ourselves an ambitious goal of raising awareness across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To be specific, we wanted to drive a positive impact for our audience – this included increasing purchasing intent, improving our PTO (Proud to own) and of course, watching the nation fall in love with our new Galaxy Note 20.

Describe the creative idea

How did we accomplish our goals? We partnered with our own brand ambassador, the talented young artist Molham and together we created a custom song to help uplift & bring back the traditional Saudi pride. In this spirit, we partnered with Tiktok and ran a hashtag challenge with the ما_يهزنا_ريح# during Saudi National Day. We asked our Saudi audience to join us and share their love and pride for Saudi. The highlight of the activation was the branded music as it was explicitly created for TikTok and by a native TikTok creator. The patriotic upbeat song was successful in inspiring users to create original content for the brand. Samsung was also mentioned in the song, which resulted into a great earned exposure for the brand across audiences on TikTok.

Describe the strategy

TikTok data showed that consumers in Saudi are spending an average of 68 minutes a day on TikTok. In addition, there was a 79% increase in monthly active users YoY. We leveraged TikTok's unique hashtag challenge offering as being the ideal medium to bring consumers in Saudi together due to its engaging nature. In parallel, we had a brand lift study setup in order to measure uplift in awareness, consideration, and purchase intent.

Describe the execution

The TikTok hashtag challenge was active throughout the Saudi National Day period between September 21st-26th. In addition, we ran a TikTok Top View for 2 days as well as in feed ads for maximum exposure and with call to action to participate in the hashtag challenge. We also worked with 10 of the most popular TikTok creators to take part in the challenge which helped increase our reach and engagement.

List the results

The results were exceptional. Participation in this hashtag challenge has exceeded all expectations with more than 240,000 videos created, surpassing the market benchmark of 120,000 to 200,000. The campaign has driven an increase in the core audience's UGC created at 6,378, which is significantly higher than the market benchmark of 1000 – 2500. The campaign delivered over 400 million video views, exceeding the market benchmark by 62%. Overall Samsung saw a 13% lift in awareness, 20% increase in purchase intent, 7% lift in recommendations, 30% equity growth (PTO), 14% increase in sales, and 1.5% increase in market share. This year, Saudi National Day overcame the challenges we all face and demonstrated what a unified nation can achieve.