Communicate

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In January, media agency OMD swept six of the 10 Media Cristals at the MENA Cristal awards, including a Grand Prix for the Wrigley chewing gum “Let It Glow” campaign and a Special Award for “Instant Mobility,” a launch campaign for Saudi mobile phone operator Mobily. OMD also won the Media Grand Cristal for its “We’ve Covered It” stunt for Mobily.

    It was one of the most talked-about campaigns in the kingdom last year: Last May, around 300 billboards, plus unipoles, mupis (especially around malls) and electronic boards in the country’s three largest cities were covered with blankets, while newspapers were circulated in black plastic bags. Ten-second TV spots of the Arabian desert being engulfed in a black shadow were also broadcast on pan-Arab stations more than 20 times per day, all with the tagline, “We’ve covered it.”

    “Mobily was launched in [late] 2005, and we started working with them two years ago,” says Jean Jabbour, creative director at OMD Arabia and head of the team handling the Mobily account. He says that over two years, the operator’s market share grew dramatically to 40 percent and it wanted to share its success with consumers.

    “So we played with the wording,” says Jabbour, speaking to Communicate on the sidelines of MENA Cristals in the mountains outside Beirut. “Mobily had covered a huge amount of services in just two years of business. But we wanted to create the hype, so we chose a teaser concept. Teasers are always a huge success in Saudi Arabia where people are usually very curious – to the extent that massive traffic jams happen for a small accident on the road.”

    According to Jabbour, people were stunned, wondering what on earth Mobily could had covered. “Consumers were calling Mobily’s call centers just to ask about the meaning of the campaign,” he says. Later on, the message was unveiled, much to the Saudi public’s relief: Mobily had covered all telco services.

    People had been mislead into believing the campaign was dealing with the network’s geographical coverage, to the point that, according to Jabbour, the buzz prompted Mobily’s largest competitor, STC, to launch its own “ambush campaign” about its own coverage. “In just the first week, our whole objective was achieved,” says Jabbour.

    He boasts that the campaign even diluted the imminent launch of Zain, the kingdom’s third mobile phone operator. “They delayed their launch by three or four months,” he says.

    The campaign boosted awareness of Mobily’s offering. In its wake, the operator’s market share surged by 15 percent, says Jabbour. “The effort was done in a record time of only five days, thanks to the support of Mohammad El Mousfer, the media manager at Mobily, who made it happen.”

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