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.

So far, this one execution has:

1. Garnered 2.5m YouTube views (across English and Arabic combined)

2. Distributed to Shahid’s 16m MAU (monthly active users)

3. Shown in cinemas across the UAE

*We are currently awaiting the YouTube brand lift study, YouGov brand awareness and usage data*