Big congrats to @crowninja for winning bingo TWICE with their fantastic pixel art pieces! Below are some Q&As so you can get to know our big winner and how they tackled this challenge.
What was your artistic process while working on the women of ROTE pieces?
I started by picking a main color that I associated with each character, I used that color to build the palette (I wanted to use red with Molly, but I had already used it with Starling and didn’t want to repeat colors), then I tried to create little scenarios for them, like how Malta is at the docks and Kettricken is hunting, I wanted the pieces to feel like they were scenes in a game where you interact with the characters. Designing each character was the hardest part, but the backgrounds were very easy and fun, so sometimes I made the entire background before the character.
2. What are your artistic inspirations?
I started doing pixel art recently, so a lot of my inspiration comes from YouTubers like Brandon James Greer who make tutorials as well as timelapses.
3. Who was your favorite to illustrate?
Patience and Lacey! I had a lot of fun designing the background and their color palette was my favorite to work with.
4. Who was a more challenging to illustrate?
Bee, for sure. I knew I wanted to do something for her from the beginning, but it was hard to translate my mental image of her into pixel art. Her facial proportions, for example, were difficult to figure out, because I wanted to draw attention to her eyes but couldn’t do a lot of details, and I had given everyone the same black-dot eyes, but they looked odd on Bee. I ended up giving her a different eye design from the others. I also struggled with her color palette, I gave her a more yellow-ish coloring instead of pure white. It was hard but I had fun.
5. Was there anyone else you wish you could have illustrated?
I really wish I’d gotten to draw Nettle and Amber! I actually wanted to do a “full” bingo card with all the characters, but I think that was pretty unrealistic.
Lotto 6/49 is Canada’s most popular national lottery game and has been offering Canadians a chance to win daily since 1982.
In Quebec, over 70% of Lotto 6/49 tickets were being sold to the over 50 crowd. Millennials were less enthusiastic, associating the lottery more with its poor odds of winning than the promise of riches. So Loto-Québec, which runs Lotto 6/49 in the province, saw an opportunity to inspire this segment to play.
In 2015, Loto-Québec and agency partner Sid Lee launched an integrated campaign “You Should Play 6/49” that highlighted everyday moments of luck (for instance, catching every green traffic light) as evidence that anyone is lucky enough to win, and expanded on the ubiquitous phrase, “You should play the lottery,” to turn these moments into purchase occasions.
In the three years since its launch, “You Should Play 6/49” has successfully reassociated its brand with luck, resulting in increased brand health metrics and sales among the millennial segment. Along with a Gold win for Sustained Success, the campaign earned the Grand Effie at the inaugural Effie Awards Canada competition in 2019.
Below, Alex Bernier, Executive Creative Director at Sid Lee, shares more insight behind this effective work.
Effie: What were your objectives for the “You Should Play 6/49” campaign?
AB: People, specifically young adults, didn’t believe in their chances of winning anymore. Our main goal was to shift the way millennials perceived lottery games such as Lotto 6/49 and inspire them to feel lucky enough to play the lottery.
Effie: What was the strategic insight that led to the big idea?
AB: While Millennials did not seem to believe in their odds of winning the lottery, they clearly seemed to believe in their odds of winning in everyday life. We found that they revealed themselves to be an amazingly positive generation. As we pushed our thinking further, we realized Millennials’ optimism and positive outlook on the future could completely change the reason why they play Lotto 6/49.
Luck emerged when we put our optimist Millennial hat on. The world became a place filled with luck. It is everywhere and it happens all the time. How is it that one morning, we can hit every green light on our way to work? How is it that our flight to Paris is on time when all others were cancelled? How could we have met our future husband or wife on a subway ride? As a matter of fact, big or small, many of life’s most beautiful things happen by chance.
To truly benefit from this insight, we needed to find a way to make Millennials think of Lotto 6/49 when luck occurs.
Effie: How did you bring the idea to life?
AB: This idea works well across applications, including web, TV, radio, newspapers, displays and experiential. We can think of a million different scenarios that show how lucky we are every day. The creation goes beyond the scenes we film. We can show originality through both traditional media as well as online advertising. For example, we placed a “You Should Play 6/49” media message above the article for the first baby of the year, and we had displays in metro stations when the last train passed to remind passengers that they were lucky they caught it. We also did a few activations. For example, we sent real four-leaf clovers to PyeongChang to support Team Canada, and we helped festivalgoers find their lost items at Montreal’s Osheaga Festival, to name just a few.
Effie: How has the campaign evolved since its initial launch?
AB: Each year we had different goals.
Year 1: Launch the new expression and entrench it into the culture
First, we needed to show everyday moments of luck that would remind people of the expression. Due to cultural and language factors in Quebec, we favoured television as it remained the best medium with which to reach Millennials and others. We created a flexible platform of short TV spots that recreated situations that people could relate to, whether they happened to them personally or not, creating endless possibilities to pick up on new moments of luck.
Year 2: Extend usage to more situations & contexts
The second year, Lotto 6/49 emphasized a few moments of luck Millennials would most likely engage with. In Quebec, hockey players hitting the post is a notorious moment of luck, usually the mark of a crucial play in NHL games. Lotto 6/49 created ad banners that appeared on hockey fans’ TV screens only on those occasions.
Year 3: Make moments of luck feel even more personal
The third year, Lotto 6/49 looked for ways to create genuine moments of luck Millennials could encounter. Every August in northern Quebec, a shooting-star spectacle lights up the night sky. While most Quebecers know about it, few are able make the trip to see it in person. Lotto 6/49 went on location to broadcast it on Facebook Live. Every time a shooting star appeared, a banner prompted viewers to make a wish with a purchase. In only three hours, it reached 1 in 10 Quebecers.
Effie: How did you know the work worked? Were there any surprises in the results you achieved?
AB: When “You Should Play Lotto 6/49” became part of Quebec’s popular culture, we knew that it worked. Having people share with us their moment of luck and seeing how the campaign really evolved into something bigger than the promotion was really a positive surprise.
Effie: What are the biggest learnings you took away from this case?
AB: My first lesson would be that at the end of day, it’s all about collaboration and being open-minded. This is a perfect example of how strategy, media, and creation are equally important in the deployment and execution of a campaign. Ideas can come from anyone on the team, from the client side, from other disciplines, and even from just walking down the street. They can come from everywhere. My second one is easy: have fun! We had a lot of fun together as a team and it showed in the final result.
Alex Bernier, Executive Creative Director & Partner, Sid Lee
Now creative director, Alex joined Sid Lee as a copywriter fresh out of school (even though he thought he was an Art Director – that’s how green he was). Whatever brand he touches he brings to the next level, namely because of the high-quality standards he imposes on himself and his team. It’s probably that same reason that led him to become the youngest president of the 9th edition of the Créa, an award show celebrating advertising in the province of Quebec.
Winner Spotlight: “Amigos de Whatsapp” by Cerveza Poker (Bavaria) & DDB Colombia
November 28, 2019
GRAND EFFIE
2019 Effie Awards Colombia
Bavaria Brewery's Poker, a well-known Colombian beer brand, was up against a series of changes affecting the local beer category, not least that consumers were drinking less overall. To reverse a negative start to the year, Bavaria (owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev) & DDB Colombia set out to increase sales by 5% during March 2018. The brand was able to successfully re-engage its audience by creatively navigating around the no-advertising policy of what had become one of Colombia’s most popular social media apps: Whatsapp.
The result was “Amigos de Whatsapp.” The campaign, launched in March 2018, effectively differentiated Poker in a competitive beer category, achieved a 12.5% sales increase in two months time and went on to win the Grand Effie in the 2019 Effie Awards Colombia competition – the second Grand Effie win for the brand in four years. It also earned trophies in the Promotions (Gold), Beverages – Alcohol (Gold) and New Product or Service (Silver) categories.
We asked the DDB Colombia team for more insight on their winning work. Read on for our conversation with Borja de la Plaza, President & CEO, Jorge Becerra, VP Planning, Natalia Fuentes, Account Director and Miguel Bueno, Senior Planner.
Tell us about your Grande Effie-winning campaign, “Amigos de Whatsapp?” What were your objectives?
DDB: The last few years have been of great movement for the beer category in Colombia. The emergence of new competitors, the impacts of constant tax reforms, the regulations of the new police code, as well as various changes in consumer habits and preferences, have made Poker's leadership threatened from different fronts. Our consumer target are young people who drink less beer every day, which makes us play a game of stimulating their consumption of beer. It is a context in which we have to make them constantly fall in love with the category and with our brand.
Our objective was to reverse a negative start of the year, increasing the sales of the brand by 5% during the month of March 2018.
What was the strategic insight that led to your big idea?
DDB: For years, Poker has positioned itself as the beer of friendship: We have always said that where there are friends, there is Poker. However, due to advertising restrictions, by the beginning of 2018 no brand could be present in the new “habitat” of friendship: WhatsApp groups (82% of people in Colombia use this platform as the main means of talking with their friends).
Friendship is not only alive in bars and streets now. Friends are constantly engaging with each other on Whatsapp.
This leads to a decrease of meetings with each other. Therefore, as a brand that talks about doing whatever it takes for friendship, to encourage their gatherings we had to start where they were: engaging with them using their own language, memes, posts and videos, through the platforms where they are constantly talking to each other.
How did you bring “Amigos de Whatsapp” to life?
DDB: This was a campaign that didn’t give away cars, trips, or money with our beer bottle caps. Instead, our gift was friends who consumers would want to have within their Whatsapp groups.
During the month of March 2018, under the caps of 160 million bottles of our beer, we printed phone numbers that consumers could add to their Whatsapp contacts. Each number had one of 14 different bot-friends with whom people could interact and receive tailor-made content, and which gave them the chance to win different prizes.
We created over 6,000 pieces of content that were distributed throughout the month of the campaign.
How did you know the work worked? What was the most significant or surprising result of the effort?
DDB: By the end of the campaign, Poker reached a sales increase of 12.5%, achieving an increase of 1 point in their market share (that, in this category, translates to 9 million additional US dollars for the brand).
The campaign accomplished over 32 million interactions on one social network, Whatsapp. This is over 1 million daily interactions. This means that we increased our social media traffic by 110,000%, an unimaginable number, as this would have cost 3 million dollars in digital media if we wanted to achieve it on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
We reached over 7 billion impressions during the month of the campaign, including 28 million views of all of our video content.
We exceeded the regional benchmark for video retention by 200%.
The organic view rate reached over 70%.
We earned over 1,313,000,000 Colombian pesos in free press.
And the most important KPI for Poker, “A beer that I like to share with my friends,” increased to 72.2% during the month of the campaign (from our average benchmark of 62%) -- not only overcoming the national average but establishing a new record for all Bavaria brands.
In the end, we also collected thousands of cellphone numbers from our consumers, strengthening our data base with more information from our clients -- data that we have started to employ in our loyalty and promotional platforms.
What were the biggest learnings you took away from this campaign?
DDB: In Colombia, the beer category has a large media investment. And it relies on creativity to differentiate brands from each other. This makes it more challenging every time we launch a new campaign.
We have a brand that is not only a leader in sales, but is also best positioned on a communication level. Therefore, any effort we make has to be bold, big, and has to impact the culture of our consumer to become outstanding.
For this campaign, what is most relevant is that we stepped out of the boundaries of communication and did something that was never done before: advertise through a medium that doesn’t allow advertising, Whatsapp, and have consumers become the ones who willingly add our number and start a conversation.
And this was our learning. We have to challenge the “status quo” and come up with different ways to engage with our ever-changing consumer.
This is your second Grand Effie win for Poker (congratulations!). What do you think has been the most significant contributor to this ongoing success?
DDB: We have challenged ourselves as a team of clients and agencies to look at a campaign not only as a business challenge but as something that constantly breaks everyday life for our consumers. This idea, which is talked about by hundreds of brands, really takes the form of action for us. Our campaigns are data-driven, and we constantly look for media innovations. These [Poker] campaigns are a sample of our actions going beyond the speech, and this is the “modus operandi” of our team.
As President & CEO, Borja de la Plaza leads the DDB agencies in Colombia, a group of more than 500 people which he took over in November 2016. During his tenure, the agency became a creative powerhouse, winning the “Agency of the Year” title two times. Prior to moving to Colombia, he was Chief Operating Officer at DDB Latina’s Miami HQ, responsible for Latin America, Spain and the US Hispanic market. Borja was born in Spain, lived in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States – he also holds American citizenship - before moving to Colombia where he lives now with his wife Connie and his dog Rocco.
Jorge Becerra, VP Planning, runs the strategy department at DDB in Colombia. At only 33 years old (13 working at Omnicom), he has been responsible for developing integrated communications strategies for some of the most valuable brands in Colombia and Latin America. Formerly Director of Planning at Sancho BBDO, Jorge is one of the youngest advertising executives in Colombia. In the last couple of years, he and his team have designed some of the most successful strategic platforms in his country (working for clients such as McDonald’s, ABInBev, Avianca Airlines, Quaker, Bayer, LG Electronics, Johnson & Johnson, Casino Group, Pepsi, Huawei, Claro and BBVA). In 2018, he was named by Scopen as one of the ten most admired professionals in the Colombian advertising industry, and he has also been recognized as one of the most influential advertising professionals in Latin America, according to Adlatina magazine. He has won more than 70 Effies, 3 Grand Effies, 2 Cannes Lions, and several other awards such as D&AD, One Show, Clio Awards, London Festival, Wave, El Sol, and El Ojo. He lives with his wife in Bogotá and is a frequent keynote speaker and panelist at private and public forums on best practices in marketing, consumer trends, and innovation.
Winner Spotlight: “The Bridal Uniform” by UN Women & BBDO Pakistan
November 14, 2019
2019 Effie Awards Pakistan
GRAND EFFIE
Child marriage threatens the education and safety of thousands of girls every year. In Pakistan, activists had been long campaigning to outlaw the practice.
In 2017, UN Women (The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) set out to call lawmakers to action. Partnering with BBDO Pakistan, they organized a surprise takeover at Bridal Couture Week, one of Pakistan’s biggest annual events, to debut “The Bridal Uniform.”
“The Bridal Uniform” propelled the issue of child marriage to headlines and reignited the national debate. The work earned the Grand Effie in the inaugural Effie Awards Pakistan competition in 2019, and took home Silver at the 2019 APAC Effies (regional) in the Positive Change: Social Good – Non-Profit category.
Read on to hear from Jamshed M. Kazi, former UN Women Country Representative to Pakistan, and Ali Rez, Regional Executive Creative Director, Middle East and Pakistan at BBDO Pakistan, for more insight on this Effie-winning work.
Effie: What were your objectives for “The Bridal Uniform”?
JK: 21% of girls in Pakistan are married before the age of 18 and 3% are married before the age of 15. Apart from the adverse impacts this has on their health, education, rights, and overall well-being, it is estimated that ending this practice could lead to a $US 6 billion increase in national income. The issue of child marriage has been well documented and many international and national development actors have been working relentlessly for many years to bring about positive change.
The main objective of the campaign was to spark a conversation among a wider audience, especially influencers and policy makers who would normally not be familiar with or have been advocates supporting the cause of ending child marriage. Marriage is a momentous occasion in any person’s life and it ought to be celebrated, as it typically is in Pakistan with fanfare and ceremony, but it was important for people to recognize that not all brides (or grooms for that matter) ought to be celebrated, especially if this comes at the price of depriving them of their right to health, education, and livelihood opportunities.
Effie: What was the strategic insight that led to your big idea?
AR: Data shows that education can be one of the most powerful tools to help girls avoid child marriages, and fulfill their potential. The longer a girl stays in school, the less likely she is to be married before the age of 18 and have children during her teenage years. We used this strategic angle to build our idea.
The insight came from the typical Pakistani bride herself, who traditionally wears an elaborate wedding outfit — bright, colorful, heavily embroidered dresses with flashy jewelry. Every year, the Pakistani bridal-wear fashion industry hosts large events in which new styles are revealed by big name designers. Dresses sometimes sell for millions of rupees. These shows are typically attended by local celebrities and have extensive media coverage.
There is an incredible amount of attention given to the outfit a bride will wear to her wedding, and it takes up most of the conversation in marriage planning, in every demographic in Pakistan. One could say that the bridal gown in itself is treated as a uniform for a bride. We took this insight and connected it to the other uniform that a young girl wears, one that is positive for her life: the school uniform.
Effie: How did you bring “The Bridal Uniform” to life?
AR: In collaboration with the nation's best known bridal-wear artist Ali Xeeshan, we meticulously designed a new kind of a bridal outfit — one that symbolises the trade-off that takes place when a girl is married young and is deprived of her right to an education.
“The Bridal Uniform” had been crafted by merging traditional Pakistani wedding outfit embroidery patterns with a schoolgirl's uniform.
We then hijacked the platform of the country’s biggest bridal fashion show evening: the Bridal Couture Week. As the showstopper of the night, amidst bejeweled adult brides in elaborate gowns, and with the nation's top fashion bloggers recording, out walked on the ramp a little girl wearing a Pakistani schoolgirl's uniform embellished with beautiful traditional bridal motifs. The irony in the piece was unmistakable.
An online petition was launched to advocate a change in law in order to protect young girls, all in an effort to reach lawmakers in the government.
Effie: How did you know the work worked? What was the most significant or surprising result of the effort?
JK: The pre-adolescent girl model who ‘gate crashed’ one of Pakistan’s most well attended and high-profile bridal fashion shows, adorned in jewelry and wearing her school uniform along with other glamour models on the ramp, very quickly became mainstream news, both nationally and internationally. In part, this re-ignited a discussion within the National Assembly (parliament) of Pakistan where UN Women assisted in crafting new legislation inspired by best practices from other predominantly Islamic countries where laws have already been passed to outlaw child marriages. If passed, the law will apply nationwide and will be a big win for the women and girls of Pakistan. At present, only the province of Sindh has passed a law where the minimum age of marriage for girls is 18.
Effie: What was the biggest learning(s) you took away from this effort?
AR: We realised that in order to have an effective and memorable impact on the audience, we must deliver our message to them when they are least expecting it, and do it in a way in which the intrusion is welcomed. In order to connect with people on an emotional and authentic level, we not only had to create something highly meaningful that didn’t sound like adspeak, but also had to be strategically accurate. We used the power of fashion design and, by integrating a highly local insight that utilised traditional craft, managed to connect on a very relevant level with an unexpected execution.
Jamshed M. Kazi is the former UN Women Country Representative to Pakistan. He is currently the Country Representative to ASEAN UN Women in Indonesia.
Ali Rez is the Regional Executive Creative Director for Middle East and Pakistan at BBDO. He has been named South Asia Creative of the Year by Campaign Magazine.
Read the full “The Bridal Uniform” case on the Effie Case Database >
Netsafe is an independent, non-profit online safety organisation. It provides online safety support, expertise and education to people in New Zealand. It’s been around for more than 20 years, founded in 1998 to help New Zealand’s internet users stay safe online.
After noticing the growing influence of technology in their respective areas, the New Zealand Police, Ministry of Education and several not-for-profits teamed up with telecommunication organisations and IT industry partners to create an independent body focussed on online safety. Together they created the Internet Safety Group (rebranded Netsafe in 2008).
In 2018, Netsafe wanted to curb the alarming increase in phishing attacks - fraudulent attempts to obtain personal information through hoax or scam emails. Between 2015 and 2018, phishing attacks had grown by 65% worldwide, and just in New Zealand, $257m per year was being lost to cyber crime - and that’s just the reported amount. The shame and humility victims feel after falling prey to an internet scam means most attacks go unreported.
So Netsafe partnered with DDB New Zealand to create the “Re:scam” initiative, a crew of AI chatbots designed to respond directly to scammers’ tactics. Since launch, the bots have saved thousands from falling victim.
“Re:scam” earned 11 Effies – including seven Gold – in the 2018 Effie Awards New Zealand and 2019 APAC Effie Awards competitions, in categories including IT/Telco, Data Driven, Limited Budget, and Experiential.
Below, Rupert Price, Chief Strategy Officer at DDB New Zealand, explains how it worked.
Effie: What were your objectives for “Re:scam”?
RP: The objectives for the “Re:scam” campaign were relatively straightforward.
First, make people aware of the dangers of internet phishing scams. It was important to educate New Zealanders on the telltale signs of email scams and also to reassure them that they weren’t alone. By demonstrating that this was a widespread problem, we could show New Zealanders there was no shame or humility in being the target of an email scammer – it happens to all of us. This would be measured by earned media coverage, as we had no budget to buy media exposure.
Second, give internet users a tool to fight back against phishing scams. Not only did we want to reduce the number of people falling prey to such scams, we also wanted to discourage the scammers in the first place. By showing the scammers that people were on to them, although outside of legal jurisdiction, we wanted to show them people were prepared to fight back. This would be measured by the level of direct engagement with the campaign.
Third, make people aware of Netsafe’s role in keeping Kiwis safe from harm online. We wanted New Zealanders to know there was an organization protecting their interests online and to show them that they had somewhere to turn if they had any concerns about online safety. Knowing you are not alone is powerful encouragement when fighting back against cyber crime. This would be measured by visits and enquiries to the Netsafe website.
Effie: What was the strategic insight that drove the campaign?
RP: Obviously email scammers rely on the art of disguise, exploiting people’s inherent sense of trust through pretending to be someone they’re not. To succeed, this scheme relies on most people to be trusting, which most New Zealanders generally are.
Our big insight was, of course, that this ‘bond of trust’ has to work both ways. Not only does the email recipient have to believe they are dealing with a credible sender, but the scammer also has to believe they are dealing with a gullable and willing recipient for the scam to work.
This breakthrough insight gave us our big idea. We were going to beat the email scammers at their own game. If they were going to impersonate people with an ‘offer too good to be true’ then we would impersonate a willing and gullible victim to waste their time - without wasting ours.
Effie: What was your big idea? How did you bring the idea to life?
RP: An AI-powered chatbot that imitated human victims, wasting scammers’ time and protecting real people from harm. Re:scam was an AI-based initiative that gave people a tool to fight back against scammers. When someone received a phishing email, they could forward it to [email protected]. Our program then picked up the conversation and replied to the scammer based on the email. Replies were designed to lead scammers on for as long as possible with exchanges that wasted limitless hours of their time.
Effie: If scammers were busy talking to a robot, they weren’t talking to real people.
RP: This was a good first step, but at its heart Re:scam was a faceless entity, not built to be shared en masse. Because we had no media budget, if we wanted to give ourselves a chance of breaking into culture and driving mass awareness, we needed to give the bot some personality. Or rather, multiple personalities.
We introduced AI cat-phishing to the world with a deliberate blend of human and computer-generated creativity.
We engaged IBM’s AI ‘Watson’ to help analyse the content of messages and formulate responses, and created a digital video as the centre-piece of our communications. This mirrored the multiple personalities of Re:scam by showing different C.G. faces and voices flickering in and out.
To show that anyone could be a victim of an email scam, Re:scam was created to mimic various types of personalities. With deliberate spelling mistakes and malapropisms, each “character” had their own backstory and unique way of talking.
From the retiree asking “The Illuminati” if they had a bingo night he could join (and who sent his bank details through One. Number. At. A. Time), to the single mother who was excited to win big money, each was programmed to be as frustrating and time-consuming as possible, while remaining human enough to avoid detection. Sometimes our bots would accuse the scammers themselves of being bots.
Every time they got a response, they now had to second guess themselves.
Effie: How did you measure the effectiveness of the effort? Were there any surprises in the results?
RP: Being a campaign designed to directly encourage consumer interaction (for the campaign to work, it required people to do something), primary measurement was relatively simple. The campaign would succeed or fail based on the number of people who forwarded on their phishing emails and let the Re:scam AI bots to do their thing.
The thing that surprised us most was the sheer volume of responses we received. 210,000 scam emails were forwarded onto us over the campaign period. Most of these were from New Zealand but many were from overseas also. The big learning for us was that an entirely earned and owned channel campaign in today’s media landscape is a truly global campaign, if the idea is strong enough.
The secondary measurement of the campaign, the objective of which was to raise awareness of the issue, showed the earned media coverage for the campaign was everwhere. Through New Zealand news media outlets Re:scam reached an audience of 4m+ across all networks, (that’s nearly the entire population of NZ, by the way). However, the campaign’s global reach was in excess of $300m+ through media outlets as diverse as The BBC, The Guardian, El Pais and CNN.
Effie: What was the greatest challenge you faced when creating this campaign, and how did you approach that challenge?
RP: The greatest challenge we faced with the Re:scam campaign is that we had no media budget. As Netsafe is a non-profit NGO, its primary channel of communication is though the news media. It relies on the ‘newsworthiness’ of the issues to get picked up in the news media and carried to the audience.
Of course, this is a high-risk strategy. There was no guarantee the news media would be intrigued by our initiative, and depending on the news cycle of the day, other stories might take precedent. The news media creates interest, which is then amplified on social media. Since pickup from news channels is vital, we must always push ourselves to come up with ideas that create interest beyond the issue itself. In the case of Re:scam, we knew internet scamming and phishing tactics was a topic of public interest, but we also knew that our unique and innovative AI bot solution would be of equivalent news interest.
Of course, we also had to build the AI Bot, which was no mean feat itself!
Effie: What lessons can marketers take away from your work?
RP:
Don’t be afraid to try something that has never been done - someone has to be first, so why not you?
If it doesn’t exist, be prepared to build it yourself.
Don’t let a lack of a budget hold you back - great ideas will always prevail if there’s enough will and conviction behind them.
Make sure your campaign or initiative ‘adds value’ to your audience in some way. If it’s not through utility or enlightenment, at the very least entertain them along the way.
***
Rupert Price is the Chief Strategy Officer at DDB New Zealand/Interbrand New Zealand.
Rupert’s career in advertising spans nearly eighteen years in London’s most pre-eminent agencies and now nearly eight years in New Zealand. In the UK, Rupert worked on brand and advertising strategy with Y&R, AMV BBDO, JWT, Saatchi&Saatchi and Ogilvy.
Beginning with local projects for companies including Kellogg’s, Unilever, The Army and Sainsbury’s, Rupert broadened his skill set to take on global strategic roles for BP, SAB Miller, Unilever and American Express amongst others. In 2010, Rupert relocated with his young family to New Zealand.
Now working with DDB and Interbrand, Rupert has delivered strategic projects for Westpac, Lion, The Warehouse, Lotto NZ and now Vodafone. Rupert has won numerous IPA Effectiveness Awards, Effies and APG Awards and has been involved in highly awarded advertising campaigns including Persil ‘Dirt is Good’ and Dove ‘Campaign for Real Beauty.’
2018 Effie Awards New Zealand:
GOLD – Limited Budget
GOLD – Most Effective Use of Digital Technology
GOLD – Most Effective PR/Experiential Campaign
GOLD – Best Strategic Thinking
GOLD – Most Progressive Campaign
SILVER – New Product or Service
SILVER – Short Term Success
BRONZE – Social Marketing/Public Service
Read more Winner Spotlight interviews >
2018 Effie Awards New Zealand judge Mark Earls shares his thoughts on “Re:scam”
Winner Spotlight: “Vodafone Sakhi” by Vodafone India & Ogilvy India
September 12, 2019
2019 APAC Effie Awards
GRAND EFFIE
All images and videos courtesy of Vodafone & Ogilvy India.
In 2017, a sinister new form of sexual harassment emerged in parts of India: local mobile phone retailers were caught selling their female customers’ phone numbers to predatory men – often for less than a dollar – subjecting victims to lewd messages at all hours within their own homes.
In response, Vodafone (India’s second-largest telecom provider) and agency partner Ogilvy India developed a free service, “Vodafone Sakhi,” which generated decoy phone numbers to safeguard women from predators. In addition to keeping women safe, Vodafone earned customers’ trust and loyalty in a challenging category.
“Vodafone Sakhi” earned the Grand Effie at the 2019 APAC Effie Awards competition, plus seven Effies across the 2019 Effie Awards India and APAC competitions (see below for the full list). Vodafone has also been ranked among the Effie Index’s Top 5 Most Effective Brands globally since 2013.
We asked Hirol Gandhi, EVP & Integrated National Head of Team Vodafone, and Kiran Antony, CCO, Ogilvy South & Team Vodafone at Ogilvy India about their effective case below.
Effie: What were your objectives for “Vodafone Sakhi”?
HG & KA: In 2017, mobile phones went from being a tool of empowerment to a channel of harassment. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), India records a crime against woman every 1.7 minutes. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), women’s privacy and safety was under threat from a new front - a government helpline for women in UP received over 500,000 complaints from women about being harassed by unknown men via their mobile phone.
This was being facilitated by a bizarre new scheme: Prepaid phone subscribers had to share their phone numbers with neighborhood retailers to top-up their calling cards, and journalists uncovered several unscrupulous retailers in Uttar Pradesh selling the mobile numbers of their women customers. Numbers were valued based on their appearance; an ‘attractive’ woman’s number could fetch close to Rs. 500, while an ‘ordinary’ looking woman’s number would fetch Rs. 50. These victims were subjected to lewd messages and calls at unearthly hours.
Women in UP now had to be wary of unwanted attention in the privacy of their own homes, leading to declining usage of mobile phones.
Our objective was to grow share and usage in an underpenetrated segment - women subscribers in one state of India, Uttar Pradesh (UP).
Project Grow for Good: Vodafone needed to make more women in UP feel confident about using their mobile phones more frequently, leading to a higher ARPU (average revenue per user). To accomplish this, we set ourselves the following objectives:
Increase Vodafone’s acquisition of new women subscribers in UP.
Increase usage amongst women subscribers of Vodafone in UP
Increase average revenue per user amongst women subscribers of Vodafone in UP.
Increase retention of women subscribers of Vodafone in UP.
Effie: What was the strategic insight that led to your big idea?
HG & KA: The fundamental problem: In order to continue using their phones, women had to share their numbers with men they couldn’t entirely trust – for Prepaid calling card recharges, they had to share their phone number with retailers.
An advertising campaign was not going to help solve the problem.
To overcome this problem, we drew inspiration from a tried and tested tactic that women used to avoid sharing their number with undesirable men.
Women in urban India give out fake numbers to avoid sharing their real numbers with people they don’t trust. They sometimes switch the last two digits around or provide entirely fake numbers. This provided us with an elegant and workable solution.
Strategic Approach: Enable Vodafone women subscribers to give retailers they didn’t trust a fake number, to recharge their real number.
Effie: How did you bring the campaign to life?
HG & KA: A woman’s best friend in a man’s world
The emphasis of our new service was on making women self-reliant. We wanted our offering to evoke a feeling of familiarity and trust amongst women. We named the service “Sakhi” which literally translates to “close female friend” in Hindi.
Vodafone Sakhi – A friend that helped safeguard women’s privacy
While we had developed a solution, communicating it was another problem entirely. Traditional mass media such as radio and television would result in massive spillover, as it would also reach men. Vodafone also ran the risk of painting honest retailers with the same brush as unscrupulous retailers who were trafficking women’s numbers.
A service for women, propagated by women, at women-only touchpoints
We created a communications ecosystem comprised of only women to promote Vodafone Sakhi. From explaining the service, to enrolling women, to verifying subscribers – every step was carried out by women. To ensure zero spillover, we used three women-only touchpoints:
Primary Health Camps: We enlisted women health workers at primary health camps, which women usually attended only with their friends or their female family members.
Women’s colleges: Safety sessions were conducted for students after classes, where students were taught how to activate the service.
Activation instructions in wrapping paper: We provided jewelry stores and women’s clothing stores with branded wrapping paper which contained instructions on how to activate the service.
To enroll non-Vodafone customers onto the service, we created a special Vodafone Sakhi information pack. Teams of female promoters were used to promote this pack at the touchpoints.
Effie: What was the greatest challenge you faced when creating “Vodafone Sakhi,” and how did you navigate it?
HG & KA: Developing a solution that would work for smartphone and featurephone customers alike, given the limited penetration of smartphones amongst women subscribers.
We put forth the question – Would it be possible to credit prepaid calling card recharges using an alternative 10-digit number that was mapped to a woman’s original cell number?
This would allow women to continue with their existing recharge behavior without compromising their privacy. The product team responded with a simple and effective solution.
Product Innovation: An industry first service that combined the convenience of the neighboring retailer while assuring complete privacy via a proxy number
To maintain anonymity, we created a system wherein a machine-generated proxy 10-digit number could be delivered to individual phones. The request for this number could be generated by sending an SMS (Private to 12604), to ensure that feature phone users and smartphone users alike could avail the service. Women could give this number to the retailer and specify the amount they wanted to recharge while protecting their privacy.
This service could be activated via a missed call from any number. Once Vodafone Sakhi was activated, Vodafone call centres sent out a verification call to authenticate that the number was owned by a woman, to prevent misuse.
Effie: How did you know the work worked? What was the most significant result of the campaign?
HG & KA:
1. Women on Vodafone Sakhi showed a higher usage on both voice and data.
2. There was an increase in APRU amongst Vodafone Sakhi subscribers.
3. Churn amongst Vodafone Sakhi subscribers was reduced.
Effie: What were the biggest learnings you took away from this effort?
HG & KA: Creating inclusive innovation
The usage and penetration of mobile internet is limited amongst women subscribers in India. Creating a solution that used SMS, instead of a mobile internet-based solution, helped increase the adoption of the service amongst smartphone and feature phone (mobile phones without internet) users.
Building communication ecosystems composed entirely of women
Women-only communication touchpoints helped create safe spaces where women could talk about the issue at hand with other women who faced a similar problem. Partnering with women influencers and promoters helped Vodafone demonstrate a greater level of empathy for the problem and added to the solution being offered.
Building on existing behavior
With Vodafone Sakhi, women didn’t have to change their existing behaviour. Because they could recharge at the same retailer without revealing their number, there was little hesitation around adopting the service.
***
Hirol Gandhi is Executive Vice President and Integrated National Head of Team Vodafone, Ogilvy India
Avid biker, cricket player & enthusiast, and die-hard F1 fan.
Hirol Gandhi happens to share his last name with the great Mahatma. And that adds a lot of weight on his shoulders. He started with Trikaya Grey in 1998. As a part of his first assignment, he made colour televisions accessible to millions of households in India with Akai. After a brief stint at Contract, Hirol joined Ogilvy at the start of the new millennium. He spent his first 6 years urging Indians to dip only Parle Biscuits in their tea. The next 3 years were devoted to showing India how to celebrate joyous occasions with Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, instead of Mithai (Ironic, given his fondness for Indian sweets). Eager for new challenges, he spent the next 6 years consolidating the market leader position for Unilever tea portfolio, Bajaj Motorcycles and SBI Life insurance. In the last five years, he has dedicated himself to making Vodafone, the most loved telecom brand in India.
Hirol is a hardcore cricket fan and is hoping that India will win the next T20 cricket world cup. This to him would be a fitting farewell for India’s best ever captain – ‘Mahendra Singh Dhoni’. Even though cricket is his first love, most of his weekends are spent watching F1 races, when there is no crisis that needs to be averted.
Kiran Antony, CCO, Ogilvy South and Team Vodafone, Ogilvy India
Kiran Antony joined Ogilvy as an intern way back in 2001 and shortly after that began working on Orange/Hutch. He has been an integral part of all major campaigns on Hutch/Vodafone over the years. In 2004, he moved to Ogilvy Bangalore to work under V Mahesh (late) and Rajiv Rao who were the creative heads leading Ogilvy South at the time. Other than Vodafone, he has also worked on brands like Ceat, Bru, Federal Bank, Mid-Day, Star Sports.com, Akanksha Foundation, Poker Stars, Lenovo, Future Group, Vedanta, Al Jazeera, L&T to name a few.
Kiran is also the recipient of several national/international awards at Cannes, CLIO, London International Awards, Kyoorius and the Creative ABBY Awards.
Awards earned by “Vodafone Sakhi”:
2019 APAC Effie Awards:
GRAND EFFIE
GOLD – IT/Telco
SILVER – Positive Change: Social Good – Brands
BRONZE – Branded Utility
2019 Effie Awards India:
GOLD – Small Town & Rural Marketing
GOLD – Direct Marketing
SILVER – Positive Change: Social Good – Brands
BRONZE – Services – Telecom
Winner Spotlight: “Highway Gallery” by Louvre Abu Dhabi & TBWA\RAAD
May 16, 2019
2018 MENA Effie Awards
GOLD – Media Innovation – Existing Channel
SILVER – Travel, Tourism, and Transportation
Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in 2017 as the first universal museum in the Middle East, with a world-class collection of archaeological treasures and fine art spanning thousands of years. At launch, the museum welcomed crowds to a series of sold-out events - but just a couple of months post-celebration, visitor volume stalled.
Together, Louvre Abu Dhabi and agency partner TBWA\RAAD needed to attract locals to the museum – and the solution would need to counteract the UAE’s lagging enthusiasm for museums in general, and lack of awareness about the Louvre Abu Dhabi in particular.
Enter “Highway Gallery,” a series of masterpieces from Louvre Abu Dhabi displayed along the most highly-trafficked road in the UAE. The project integrated OOH and radio, with interpretations of each piece broadcast through the speakers of each passing car.
After successfully changing attitudes and attracting visitors, “Highway Gallery” took home a Gold and Silver Effie in the 2018 MENA Effie Awards competition.
Below, Remie Abdo, Head of Planning at TBWA\RAAD, shares insight into how she and her team got people sampling the museum and excited about the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Read on to hear how the team challenged the definition of innovation and found inspiration from unlikely sources.
What were your objectives for “Highway Gallery”?
RA: Louvre Abu Dhabi opened its doors in November 2017. As the first universal museum in the region, and with unprecedented architecture and innovative exhibitions, it ticks the ‘first’ and ‘ests’ checklist of the country’s superlatives. Add to that a string of opening events a 360 campaign, concerts and performances, global and regional celebrity visitors, a 3D laser mapping light show, and several ribbon-cutting events… and you won’t be surprised to know that opening month, tickets sold out.
However, the reality wasn’t that sweet.
Two months down the lane, once the opening hype faded, UAE residents were not that interested in visiting anymore. Fear of the ‘Eiffel Tower Syndrome’ — becoming a touristic landmark that locals don’t visit — became the new worrying reality.
The objective was as simple, and complex, as getting UAE residents to the doors of the museum.
What was the strategic insight that drove the campaign?
RA: To solve the problem at hand, we dug for the problem behind the problem. We asked, why weren’t UAE residents interested in Louvre Abu Dhabi beyond the opening ceremonies? One would have thought they’d be excited to have the Louvre in their capital city.
The UAE population consists of two major groups, the Emiratis (15% of the population) and the expats (85%). We investigated each separately.
We discovered that Emiratis believed museums ‘are not for them.’ They found museums boring and archaic, and they are more into other forms of entertainment. Their interest in Louvre Abu Dhabi was limited to their interest of having the ‘Louvre’ in their country – another prestigious milestone.
Expats were skeptical, likely to agree with the sentiments: ‘a Louvre without the Mona Lisa is not the Louvre’, ‘this will be a replica of Louvre Paris’, ‘this won’t be like the Louvre’. They were quick to compare Louvre Abu Dhabi to the Louvre in Paris, and were not interested in a doppelgänger.
Their pre-judgement wasn’t founded. Emiratis didn't know what museums were exactly, as they had never had any locally – and when they traveled, museums weren’t on their bucket lists. And expats didn’t know what Louvre Abu Dhabi could offer - and how could they love something they didn’t know?
The insight was clear: UAE residents were not into ‘Louvre Abu Dhabi’ museum, not because they didn’t love it, but because they didn’t know it.
What was your big idea? How did you bring the idea to life?
RA: Alex Likerman, author of The Undefeated Mind, said ‘Trying something new opens up the possibility for you to enjoy something new. Entire careers, entire life paths, are carved out by people dipping their baby toes into small ponds and suddenly discovering a love for something they had no idea would capture their imaginations.’
Aligned with this thinking and our insight, Louvre Abu Dhabi needed to give residents a taste of the museum in order to capture their minds and drive them to visit. In the FMCG world, the solution would have been a no-brainer: distribute free samples of the product. Borrowing from retail best practices, the strategy boiled down to one question: How do we give a sample of the museum?
We introduced The Highway Gallery: A first-ever roadside exhibition featuring 10 of Louvre Abu Dhabi’s most magnificent masterpieces on giant, can’t-miss, 9x6 meter (approx. 30x20 foot) vertical frames. Among the works featured were Leonardo da Vinci’s La Belle Ferronnière (1490), Vincent van Gogh’s Self Portrait (1887), and Gilbert Stuart’s Portrait of George Washington (1822). The frames were placed as billboards along over 100km (approx. 62 miles) of the E11 Sheikh Zayed Road, the busiest highway in the UAE with an average of 12,000 cars commuting daily and the road that leads to Louvre Abu Dhabi.
But neither the size of the exhibition nor the choice of the artworks was a rich enough sample of the museum. Louvre Abu Dhabi needed to give a sneak peek into the artworks with their corresponding stories, beyond the aesthetics. Without context, the artworks lose their value.
Hence we used old ‘FM transmitter’ technology to hijack the frequencies of the most-listened-to radio stations on the highway. The FM devices synchronized and instantaneously broadcasted the story behind each art piece through the radios of cars passing by the frames. This was the world’s first audio-visual experience of this kind.
Example: When a car passed by the frame featuring Vincent Van Gogh’s Self Portrait (photo above), the passengers could hear on their radio speakers: “Say hello to Vincent Van Gogh, one of the greatest artists of the 19th century and the grandfather of modern art. He painted this Self Portrait in 1887, just three years before his death at 37. The impassioned brushstrokes reflect more than his artistic style, they reveal Vincent at his happiest and most-inspired. See them up close in our museum gallery Questioning A Modern World”.
What was the greatest challenge you faced when creating this campaign, and how did you approach that challenge?
RA: There were many challenges, but two notable ones.
The first, and easier to tackle, challenge was technical. We were innovating with an old medium, and when you’re the first to try something, it often doesn’t work quite right the first time. Until the very first day of the exhibition, we were still fixing bugs here and there. In such situations, disappointment settles in at some point, and you feel judged -- especially by those who told you ‘you can’t do it’… but the key in such situations is to use this frustration as a motive.
The second challenge was a bit bigger than us. Museums, in general, don’t appreciate creating replica of their artworks, and definitely not using these replicas as giant OOH media. We had to do a lot of selling to the client and go through multiple layers of approvals that got progressively more difficult.
How did you measure the effectiveness of the effort?
RA: The objective was to get UAE residents to the door of Louvre Abu Dhabi in the absence of all opening ceremonies. And we did just that. By the end of the Highway Gallery Exhibition, the declining numbers of visitors was a thing of the past, as the museum exceeded its monthly target x1.6 times. This time people were going to appreciate the artworks, ultimately achieving the museum’s main objective of footfall for the art.
Of course, we got some freebies along the way: Louvre Abu Dhabi followers on social media grew 4.2%; the online negative sentiment around the museum was reduced to only 1% and the positive sentiment grew 9%; Louvre Abu Dhabi brand recall registered a 14% uplift (regional average = 7%).
The Highway Gallery also got free local, regional and global coverage with CNN calling the gallery the “first of its kind in the world,” Lonely Planet stating that “Abu Dhabi became a lot more interesting,” The National regarding it as a “Highway to Heaven,” etc.
The museum became part of the conversations about Abu Dhabi through the press, but even more so through the people themselves. After stagnant Louvre Abu Dhabi online mentions during the previous months, the Highway Gallery garnered a 1,180% increase in mentions.
What are the most important learnings about marketing effectiveness that readers should take away from this case?
RA: Shifting perspective, as a means for innovation
‘Traditional media’ is a repelled expression in today’s world. Say “billboard” or “radio” twice and you will be labelled as the ‘traditional’ ‘non-digital’ ad person stuck in the old ways of doing things. With innovation, Louvre Abu Dhabi gave two traditional media a well-needed resuscitation, turning them into the most innovative and modern media combination of today.
The advertising industry witnesses changes by the minute – media channels deemed obsolete, processes reckoned too old. We naturally tend to discard the old and jump on the new to be perceived as innovative. However, this case proves that a new perspective on the old can create even more innovative solutions.
Good artists copy, great artists steal
It is unthought-of for a refined art industry to plagiarize from a mass FMCG practice. Drawing the parallel between an experience-based industry and a commodity-driven industry allowed the museum to find an unprecedented solution to its problem. Who said we can’t sample a museum?
In advertising, looking into adjacent industries is considered common practice. To create truly disruptive solutions however, looking into far-fetched industries to extract best practices can broaden our thinking, and ultimately make all the difference for the industry we are in.
Were there any unexpected long-term effects of this campaign?
RA: Last month, we launched the Tolerance Gallery, a sort of “Highway Gallery version 2” in support of the UAE’s ‘Year of Tolerance 2019.’ We placed sacred artworks representing different religions, from the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s collection, along the same Highway. This innovation is also set to be adopted soon by the Abu Dhabi government to alert drivers in cases of extreme fog to avoid road accidents. Several additional usages are being considered by different industries.
Remie Abdo is Head of Strategic Planning at TBWA\RAAD.
Remie would like to live in a world where purpose is our bread and butter, insights are our currency, storytelling is our language, common sense is more common, and free time is free.
An advocate of purpose, she tries to add sense to everything she does.
On a personal level, she tailors her own clothes; grows her own vegetables and fruits, swaps consumerism with cultural-consumerism; obsesses about problem solving; and enjoys sharing ideas.
The same applies to her career. She is a firm believer that advertising is not an industry but a mean to a higher end; that of finding true solutions to real problems, influencing mindsets and shaping cultures for the better.
Her ethos: “If I am leaving my kid behind to work extra hours, I’d rather make it worthwhile”, continues to bear fruit in the shape of Cannes Lions, WARC, Effies, Dubai Lynx, Loeries, London International Awards, as well as judging global awards shows.
Remie started her career at Orange Telecom, BNP Paribas and the French Football Federation in Paris. After her Parisian adventure, she entered the agency world in Dubai making her way up from junior planner to Head of Planning at TBWA\RAAD Dubai today.
