From the moment Qatar earned the historic honor of hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup in 2010, everyone has been eagerly anticipating the first-ever World Cup hosted by an Arab nation.

Surely every brand would compete to find a way to be part of it, making it tough to ‘stand out in the crowd’. Due to Ooredoo’s major sponsorship of the World Cup, our client Vodafone faced a difficult challenge in competing for marketing/media activities during the tournament. With Ooredoo being the local market leader, it had a significant advantage over Vodafone.

Despite the challenges, Vodafone sought to maximize their share of voice and capitalize on the attention and engagement during the games, with two goals in mind:

1. Increasing brand image amongst Qatar nationals and ex-pat residents

2. Driving sales and increasing usage amongst football fans who live in or visited Qatar.

Market Insights/Challenges:

1. FIFA restricts non-sponsor brands to mention the World Cup in their communications and prioritizes event's sponsors for media buying of conventional media channels

2. A huge demand for media planning and buying during the Cup which causes a huge ad clutter and higher media buying rates

Consumer Insights:

Although they do not join the physical game, fans are an integral part of the match atmosphere, their enthusiasm and energy can be felt throughout the stadium, and their ‘cheers’ are a universal sign of excitement; cheering fans are the 12th players in the game!

That's how we came up with a strategy of 'supporting the fans' journey' by using the power of social media rather than conventional channels, and created CHEER TO WIN campaign. We wanted to give a reason to the fans to show their excitement about the

By analyzing the marketplace challenges and consumer insights we created a smart yet safe strategy that allowed us to get ahead of our competitors without being tackled by FIFA restrictions.

Our strategy was “to stay in the game without being in the game”, just like fans do. At this point, we planned our execution.

Rather than spending millions as our competitor did, we encouraged fans to be part of the excitement and to cheer for their teams with UGC, creating buzz on social media. The fans’ interactions with the platform during this huge cultural moment proved to be an innovative way of attracting fans to Vodafone. Because the consumers were cheering and supporting their team, the engagement with the brand was positive and uplifting.

We partnered with Meta Creative Shop and created a voice-activated AR filter that lived on Instagram and Facebook. The filter encouraged fans to cheer for their team and the louder they cheered the more goodies they would get from Vodafone (free data) #CheerToWin.

Once the filter was launched, we used content creators to generate buzz on social media. We also promoted the filter with AR ads on Instagram as a new type of advertisement and utilized the creator and user-generated content as ‘branded content by Instagram’ to announce this filter with our consumer's posts.

By offering free data in Qatar, we were able to engage the fans on our platform and facilitate their fan experience. This encouraged them to choose Vodafone over our competitors as they arrived in Qatar and allowed them to gain access to the data for free. Fans stayed connected while cheering for their teams!

We ran the campaign in the 26 markets from which fans were traveling to Qatar. The results were brilliant! We managed to reach the results below with a media budget of only $76,000!

Spark AR (Lens usage)

Opens – 4.600 and * Earned Impressions – 8.100

AR Ads report

Impressions - 5,491,987

Reach – 624,512

And most importantly, we exceeded Vodafone's target with 419,487 Fan Sim card sales and clearly succeeded in the return of the media investment against our competitor! 85% of customers successfully completed digital registration while activating their SIM. More than half of all recharges are done digitally. 1,188 TB mobile data used and 15 Million calls were made during the tournament. 0.5 Million app downloads among 1 million active roamers in country!