Omantel – Oman's leading telecom provider – used a very culturally relevant insight of 'good morning' messages sent on WhatsApp groups to activate a purposeful brand campaign targeting its entire database of customers, run entirely on WhatsApp. By doing this, not only did they successfully own Oman's most popular morning ritual, but turned our entire database into a unique owned media platform for distributing the campaign.

Omantel is Oman's leading telecom provider with a network of 3.8 million customers (population of Oman is 4.7 million).

Sending good morning messages on family and friends WhatsApp groups is a very common practice in the Arab world, and in Oman. Everyone is used to waking up to these messages on various groups.

Most of these messages are forwards featuring 'good morning' or inspirational quotes on random images of flowers, sunrises, scenery etc.

Domestic tourism in Oman is very low, with most residents choosing to travel to more flashy and glitzy neighbours like Saudi Arabia and UAE – who have tourism budgets that are almost ten times those of Oman.

However, what Oman lacks in tourism budgets, it more than makes up for in beautiful natural landscapes and hidden sights waiting to be discovered.

Omantel – Oman's leading telecom provider – wanted to launch a purposeful brand campaign that would earn brand love by targeting its network of 3.8 million users to get positive conversations going around Omantel, and position Omantel as a brand that truly cares for Oman and its people. The objective was to maxmimise reach and impact with a minimal budget.

With an active network of 3.8 million Omantel users with active data plans and WhatsApp registered numbers, we had a unique opportunity to turn our database into an owned media channel.

All across Oman, millions of Omantel customers wake up to good morning messages on WhatsApp groups, featuring cliche pictures of scenery, flowers, sunrises, etc.

We decided to hack this morning routine with a nationwide campaign executed entirely on WhatsApp by creating good morning greetings that replaced the cliche images with beautiful scenery, sunrises, flowers, etc. of Oman's undiscovered hotspots, and targeting our entire database of 3.8 million customers with them.

Our target audience comprised everyone in Oman with an Omantel number – and WhatsApp accounts registered through that number. And our objective was to earn brand love and establish ourselves as the leading telecom provider that cares about Oman and its people.

Which is why, our strategy was to use an easily available database of numbers to target the entire country with Omantel branded messages that were not only native to their morning WhatsApp routines, but also celebrated Oman people to fall in love with its hidden beauty.

And all it took was a few WhatsApp forwards.

To execute the campaign, we first used AI image recognition to aggregate and analyse millions of 'Good Morning' messages on the internet and then classified them into broad groups, such as: Mountains, Oceans, Sunrise, Sunset, Flowers, Beaches, etc.

We then sourced images from photographers, tourism databases and our own archives to create 'Good Morning' messages featuring scenery from all 61 provinces across Oman's 11 governorates. Each message was crafted with messages inspired from the unique dialects and sayings of the different places.

We didn't just stop there – each image was geo-tagged with the exact location of the place where the picture was taken for inspiring people to visit it themselves.

And every morning, one of these messages was sent directly to our entire database (almost the entire country), via WhatsApp.

With a very-low cost of image sourcing and editing, and no media spend – we reached a captive audience of 3.8 million people, achieving a 230% growth in Omantel's WhatsApp channel traffic, and a 29% rise in positive mentions for Omantel.

The equivalent earned media estimates of this reach would amount to +460,000 OMR (+1.2 million USD).

Not only that, we even succeeded in reconnecting Omanis with the beauty of their own country while cementing our foothold in the market as an Omani brand invested in better for Oman. Following the launch of our campaign, Oman witnessed a 37% increase in domestic tourism and a 300% increase in traffic to the VisitOman website.

WhatsApp Oman became the new, most talked about morning ritual of Omanis across the country.

The campaign demonstrates a clever use of data – by turning our entire database of mobile numbers into a zero-cost media channel to engage with our customers everyday.

In addition to that, AI image recognition tools were effectively used to aggregate and analyse millions of 'morning greeting' images online, classify them in broad categories and inform the production of new images featuring images of Oman's landscapes.