Situation

How do you gain the attention, interest and respect of youth who love to stare into their phones, live life online and are immune to everyday communications? It’s a challenge for most brands and particularly acute for telecom operator Ooredoo in Oman, where half the population were born after 1992, making youth a demographic juggernaut vital for growth.

Brief

Our client, Ooredoo Telecommunications, asked us to create a brand named Shababiah (which means “youthy” in Arabic), and use this as the platform for engaging Omani youth.

Objectives

With the commercial objective of acquiring 40,000 new customers in the first six months, the inherent challenge in this brief was how to reach out and grab the attention of youth in Oman, a generation notoriously immune to marketing and jaded in how they consume brands.

The young artists involved include Shayma who creates stories using sand, Saif who creates light paintings with calligraphy, Sarah, an Omani conceptual portrait artists whose art tells hidden stories, Amira who does stunning doodles, Nabhan, an illustrator, Waleed, a figurative painter with a surrealist edge and Rawan, interested in humanism and feminism.

We videoed the artists during the creative process and this became part of the brand’s content for launch on social media. The early stages of their drawings provided interesting ‘teaser’ content as it engaged viewers in the artistic process before the logo was even launched.

Some of the artists went beyond the logo space itself, creating entire canvases for the brand which became the brand’s advertising, SIM card packaging, vehicle livery, press packs and merchandise as well as in its content online and on social media. In every way this was a brand created by youth, for youth.