The real fuel that will drive the Kingdom’s economy will never be its oil, it has always been and will always be the capabilities of its people.

The idea was to let the youth of the country realize that they are the fuel of the country, it is neither the oil nor anything else.

The opportunity was in the fact that Almarai, a locally established company that has become the world’s largest vertically integrate dairy producer, was the perfect source to send out such a message, since it has been regarded by the Deputy Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman (who is the driving force behind the Kingdom’s economic reforms) as “a model for a country trying to wean itself from oil dependence”.

To capture everyone’s attention, we distributed unbranded oil barrels across streets where young people hung out, the barrels had one open-ended statement: “our real petrol”. (Sep 9th)

We pushed the conversations around the mysterious oil barrels online by having influencers talk about them on their social media accounts. We had almost all young people guessing what the statement meant. And had all major media channels talk about our mysterious barrels. (Sept 10th,11th,12th)

Then on the Saudi national day, we launched an online film revealing the real fuel behind the barrels, the young people of Saudi. The film started with scenes of barrels with the same statement spread across every corner of the country, then actual people came out of the barrels. The film ended with the statement: “our real petrol is our human capabilities”. (Sept 13th-April30 2017)

To trigger further conversations around the campaign we launched the hashtag # our_real_petrol_is_our_human_capabilities.

The online film had 14,309,075 views, that is almost half the population of the country. Online conversation about the barrels went viral. People began to guess and debate over what the barrels really mean across a number of social media platforms.

Examples of messages:

- Indeed! God give the Saudi people grace and success.

- Amazing and just beautiful

- We’ve been saying this for years but no one listens and finally a Saudi brand raises the bard and sends this message to all.

- Beautiful and emotional ad

- Graceful country

- And the list goes on and on…

Almost a week after revealing the Almarai branded video and revealing the messages on the on-ground barrels, which explained the true purpose of the campaign, and with an outstanding minimal total media spend budget of only $90,000, the campaign was able to break records and achieve the following;

- Over 14 million Video Views & 10 million post engagement

- Over 61 million Impressions

- Over 4 million Instagram views with over 3.5 million engagement

- Over 2 million Twitter views

In line with governments Vision 2030 plan to motivate Saudi youth, the campaign found a place for itself as one of the most effective empowerment campaigns for the youth in the history of Saudi Arabia.