During Ramadan, Food-and-Beverage brands heavily compete over limited and overpriced tv sponsorships and ad-space across tv channels to build relevancy and boost sales. To cost effectively advertise over 25 of its products during Ramadan 2023, Almarai had to find maintain a wide reach and build high product relevancy. With 23Mil. people flooding online platforms enjoying an ever-increasing number of Ramadan shows, Almarai decided to hijack all premium MBC tv content, and sandwiched over +500 customized videos on their online platforms. A smart algorithm guaranteed Almarai products were present throughout all Ramadan’s consumer online entertainment moments.

Although Almarai Food & Dairy is the leading brand in several of its categories across the GCC market, but due to its extensive portfolio of over 700 different products, it has witnessed a drop in some of its products’ sales to more specialized competitors with less products to focus their marketing efforts on throughout the year.

Situation: Across the Muslim world and in Saudi, the holy month of Ramadan is known for hyper-consumption especially when it comes to food. During this month, brands right and left compete fiercely for a share of higher consumer expenditure

Brief: Maintain and defend existing market share for ALYOUM

Objectives: Improve brand awareness to stand in the face of a communication barrage from competing brands, and increase salience so that ALYOUM has higher consideration and recall during the purchase moment

Due to the large number of Ramadan tv shows spread out across tv channels people flock to online entertainment platforms like Shahid to catch up on the variety of shows spread-out across TV channels all in one place.

Shahid’s monthly active users reach 23Million compared to 10Million users the rest of the year with an average of 1hr 15 minutes spent per session.

Research also shows that 32% of consumers who view contextually relevantads are more likely to act than those who are targeted on demographics.

Knowing that Almarai Food & Dairy portfolio caters to our audiences throughouttheir Ramadan day-to-day we decided to build strengthen our product relevancy not just by riding on Shahids content but through-out all of our target’s online entertainment journey from post-show discussions or late content snacking onYouTube and social channels through Contextual Communication that captures all Ramadan entertainment moments and drives relevancy at scale.

We identified the most popular MBC content line-up in 4 genres: (Drama-Comedy-Social-Cooking) and with a clever hack, and zero sponsorship costs, Almarai found its way into every single episode that ran on Shahid, with customized 10” ads tailored to each & every episode.

So when viewers tuned into “Tash-Ma-Tash: the comeback” whose heroes had a fallout years ago and finally came together they saw our honey content with a headline “Inseparable match like ghee and honey.”

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And to make sure we own the entire entertainment discussion on social channels, our algorithm used trending hashtags to link our +500 creative-assets to every post-show conversation on social and every episode search on google, making sure each user gets a relevant contextual Almarai content based on his conversation and google search.

We also targeted trending hashtags and relevant keywords on YouTube &Twitter, making sure Almarai was relevantly present throughout all Ramadan moments.

Almarai contextual campaign overdelivered with 17M+ reach with a total of554M impressions and a 174Million total views. The choice of content, coupledwith targeting & ongoing optimization, helped Almarai establish relevance withdynamic communication across all moments throughout the month. Thistranslated into a lift in ad awareness by 6ppt, consideration by 5ppts andultimately a positive jump in volume sales of 5.8 % versus Ramadan 2022equivelant to 20.2% increase in revenue.