Starring a fully animatronic hero cast member - The Hitchhiker was a one-minute film released in both English and Arabic on YouTube, in regional cinemas and on Saudi Arabian video-on-demand service, Shahid.

WINTER TRAVEL IN THE MIDDLE EAST: NOT ALWAYS THE PICTURE-PERFECT OCCASION

Despite the temporary summer exodus for many holiday-goers living in the Middle East, the region’s most chaotic travel period remains the winter season.

Alongside packed airports, hazardous weather warnings and multi-generational travel - peak pricing for flights and hotels all amounts to a very real strain at this time of year for everyone looking to get away.

Our darkly comic film The Hitchhiker tells the story of unfortunate businessman Ali, who - unable to afford flights home for the winter holidays - hitches a ride back with an unsettling stranger on a dark, empty road.

Ali’s growing peril is narrated by the cynical, cautionary voice of Tony the Snowman – an animatronic AI-voiced snowman created as Wego’s reluctant winter ‘mascot’, who – sat in the back of the car, reminds both Ali and our audience that none of this would have happened if he’d just booked flights using Wego’s multiple payment options.

The film ends as the car continues ominously into the darkness.

We don’t know where Ali’s heading…but it’s not home for the holidays.

SITUATION

Wego has the 2nd highest awareness of any travel booking app across the GCC. It is known for being a good value, one-stop-shop where travellers can search prices of flights and hotels from 1000s of online websites. However, one of the main advantages Wego had over its booking-orientated competitors (that travellers weren’t aware of) was the option of paying for trips in multiple instalments, making travel even more accessible.

Up against global brands with much higher recognition and media budgets, we needed to work harder to connect to people and their travel experiences to try to gain their attention.

BRIEF

How can we drive a huge share of attention for Wego during this peak travel period, whilst also communicating the tangible product benefits we offer versus the competition?

OBJECTIVES

1. Increase brand awareness

2. Drive app downloads

BUILDING A SNOWMAN…IN THE DESERT

For a satirically ‘nightmarish’ campaign, we needed a narrator with the right presence and tone of voice to provide enduring comic appeal and brand recall.

We started by working out what we didn’t want…a human being. Only someone or something with the strongest association to the winter season would do.

So…Tony the Snowman was born. A 4-foot-tall animatronic puppet with enough electronics to run a small city, painstakingly put together in our eventual shoot location, Georgia. But despite his fully formed shape, he needed a voice. After countless vocal auditions that weren’t quite hitting the right note, it was in the deepest libraries of AI that Tony finally found his tune. A solution that allowed us to generate hundreds of alternate lines and additional content pieces without the pressures of a recording studio timeslot.

The result is the sassy, cantankerous snowman seen on screens today.