2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for PR?

Because this campaign showed that banks and those participating financial institutions actually care about the public and their welfare, and are in-line with the government, all to build more awareness and credibility towards Riyad Bank and the participating financial institutions and spread direct awareness messaging to enable for a safer financial environment.

Background

Today, everything is being digitized for our convenience, but financial frauds found it the perfect opportunity to attack, resulting in an eye-watering 42 billion US$ reported in losses last year globally, and SR49 million ($13 million) locally in Saudi Arabia. So we were challenged to tackle that phenomenon and raise complete awareness in a completely different, engaging and enticing way, linking 13 banks under one umbrella, lead by our own Riyad Bank. Objectives? Raise awareness on financial fraud methods and impact all viewers, resonating awareness and education through different targeted messaging.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

What we want to do is to create a campaign that flips the table on all frauds, emphasizing that we should be the ones hiding our data in order to expose them. So what we started with is to research the behavior of frauds, and how they act, and as a result of our data we identified that people symbolize frauds with masks, as they always keep their identity hidden. And this was our main inspiration! Let's simply be the ones who wear the mask to hide our identity instead of the fraud. Hence, the mask became the main tool of the campaign along with our hashtag #خلها لك #keepitsafe

Describe the PR strategy (30% of vote)

Our target audience is literally every person in Saudi Arabia with a mobile device, from teenagers to seniors. Our integration tactic was developed through the journey we established, from the outdoor teasers, supported with the digital account that collected all blabbing on what this campaign is about and what our teaser is, empowered by our teasing flashmob to create a direct hint, and then raising the momentum of the campaign in the main flashmob event, revealing the campaign at once in outdoors, digital and TV, and supporting it with in branch activations of all banks, making the employees wear the mask with the message. Our approach was to embed the mask everywhere and distribute 1.5 million+ masks on-ground, making it the talk of the town, diversifying the colors, making it nearly impossible for people to guess the brand, applying our integration tactic step by step.

Describe the PR execution (20% of vote)

To maximize our campaigns effect, we split it into phases: First, we embedded the mask everywhere and enticed people to know it. Next, we built hype and Edutained people through flash-mobs of masked people, ourtdoor teasers, influencers, and TV appearances, making the mask element the talk of the town. People were trying to guess what the mask represents and who was behind it, and hashtag account got thousands of views within days! Then, we worked on revealing our campaign through a synchronized phygital experience, and on-ground, we revealed our campaign through a physical flash-mob, BTL, TTL, and ATL. At the flashmob we included both our teaser and revealer, we had hundreds of regular people wear our mask as they go about their day, creating the shock element to everyone who was there. Then, came our revealer, exposing our main campaign and commercial on a national scale digitally and on-ground.

List the results (30% of vote)

Between influencers and organic growth, we managed to generate " Per Platform: -17,9M Outdoor Reach -1,500,000 Flashmob Traffic -45M Twitter Views, 4.9M Engagement -6.5M Instagram Views, 965K Engagement -14.4M Snapchat Views, 7M Lens Use -205,000 Microsite Visits, 5,128 Submitted Forms, Overall: -171 Million Impressions -2,500+ Comments Overnight -9.4m+ views All with the support of 50+ Influencers With over 2500 comments overnight, engagement was through the roof with diverse sentiments. Some loved it, some challenged it, but most importantly, everyone was discussing it, all while using the campaign’s hashtag as a signature, activating it instantly, and helping us spread awareness even further, covering the financial fraud topic by 100% of the Saudi population, for they made it too cool for people not to understand.