Ramadan is the most important time of the year for Muslims across the region. It’s a time when they fast and pray all day. It’s also a time when brands go in overdrive, launching campaign after campaign, creating content that is often generic, repetitive and cliché. The sheer volume of ads and content during this time makes it virtually impossible to stand out.

Our brief was to break through the clutter of Ramadan communication, and launch an engaging campaign that aligns with Cadillac’s brand values – being bold and iconic.

At the same time, we needed to build brand love with our young maverick audience and make the brand relevant to them.

At a time when fasting Muslims were on the lookout for engaging content, our series, for the first time ever, uncovered the real lives of the unheard, modern youth during Ramadan.

‘Ramadan Unveiled’ is a four-part branded docuseries, captured at night, through the eyes of four young social media personalities, across four cities in the Middle East.

For the first time ever, we dared to unveil a previously unseen side of the holy month, by telling the story of four youth in the region.

“Rihla,” the first episode of the series, captured French-Algerian artist, Sofiane Si Merbat musing about how the modern clashes with the traditional in Dubai.

“Qabila,” captured the story of photographer, Hayat Osama, as she and her male friends interacted freely on the dimly-lit streets of Riyadh.

“Tamahol,” told the story of famed Emirati racing driver Amna Al Qubaisi, who slows down for once to explore the city independently at night.

The final episode, “Moujtama,” was documented by Kuwaiti photographer Maha Alasaker, capturing songs mixing with the sounds of prayer in Kuwait.

An extensive listening exercise for qualitative insights on Ramadan perceptions to feed strategy uncovered a distinct generational divide: while elder demographics expected traditional family gatherings & Iftar tables, the youth simply expected individual, thoughtful reflections.

We strongly believed that for Cadillac to remain true to its ethos of individuality that siding with the drivers of change was the only route. It was plausible we would alienate a certain section of viewers, but we bet heavily on the fact that we would resonate that much more with audiences and potential buyers who we really needed to influence, while also preventing us falling into the trap of creating generic content that would only add to the clutter.

Cadillac’s ‘Maverick’ target audience are independent self-starters, leaders and largely consider themselves to be culture shapers. Which is why we chose stories reflecting their perceptions, on platforms that they’re on.

Each episode was filmed vertically to optimise for social channels.

The four episodes were launched weekly to sustain the campaign through the month of Ramadan. Each episode had a 3-step media approach mirrored across all platforms optimizing first for views to deliver rapid uptake at launch; then for clicks to begin driving leads; finally to both clicks and views in conjunction using dynamic remarketing pools that retargeted users based on previous interactions with the campaign at any stage.

TikTok, Instagram & YouTube were selected as the lead distribution channels. TikTok as the region’s fastest growing social platform for youth audiences provided rapid uptake of the campaign to Mavericks; Instagram as the original visual social platform provided reach opportunity; YouTube as the World’s longest established video platform offered further reach building capability for video content while Twitter’s over-indexed usage in Saudi Arabia was a crucial opportunity for the specific market.

Our clever campaign flipped the notion of what Ramadan communications should look like to increase visibility & appeal of the brand.

Specifically, against a target of 7.7m paid and a further 3.8m organic views we delivered 25.79m total views (10.7m paid, 15m organic). As expected, we generated some negative commentary from traditionalists; yet this was dwarfed by the overwhelming majority of positive commentary and engagement from the Mavericks we really wanted to influence.

Visibility was tracked through our website to measure interest, where we over-achieved our target of ‘key buying actions’ (eg visits to the model selector page and completed lead forms) by 19%, representing a 65% increase on the previous year’s campaign.

Most importantly, the awareness and interest translated to sales on the showroom floor as Ramadan stock sold out completely and additional sales were also taken from summer stock, resulting in a stock oversell of 42%.