STC wanted to maintain its leadership in international Roaming services, which can be attributed to its global exposure and wide network of regional and international strategic partnerships, enabling it to provide the “best and lowest” rates to its customers. The Roaming bundles that STC offers are renewable, and multiple subscriptions are allowed to meet the need for larger data volumes during travel, for both postpaid and prepaid lines, delivering roaming services on land, on sea and in the air, by covering countries all over the world. However, Roaming is a daunting topic in terms of its financial implications for subscribers’ phone bills, especially for travellers who want to tell and share their stories with family and friends back home. The challenge was to dilute the perception of Roaming as being a very expensive service, which was driving STC subscribers to switch to local SIMs when travelling. We came up with a strategy addressing our target audience (the Young Millennials) that would inform them about the various advantages of the Roaming service from STC, while entertaining them simultaneously. This translated into an amusing online show – ‘Rayi7 Rayi7’ – in which a group of friends travel with a Puppet character and enjoy new experiences together on vacation, with no internet hiccups. The Puppet represented a left-behind friend who still managed to be part of the fun! The results exceeded all expectations (over 10 millions views).
Result
The popularity of the show led to our Puppet becoming the ‘talk of the town’ and the face of STC Roaming. Results have far exceeded the original targets set: • Audience viewership has reached 10 million – 166% over target, which made STC the number one operator in terms of branded YouTube shows (Source: Campaign Analytics & YouTube). • Several episodes surpassed 50% organic views, 40% view-through rates and 70% average view duration. There was significant growth in recurrent viewing across episodes, with over 60% of viewers having watched a previous episode, as well as a 50x increase in YouTube and Google searches, with episode titles leading top-of-mind searches within the telco field. Daily organic visitor activity on the channel was tripled, year-on-year (Source: Google Analytics). • New channel subscription has reached 5% (original KPI was 2%). (Source: Campaign Analytics). • Roaming product subscriptions have achieved a 14% increase, compared to last year’s data (original KPI was a 5% increase) (Source: STC Sales Data). • The campaign was recognized as a “best practice benchmark” for Google in the Middle East. • The total earned publicity value for the STC Roaming is $320,000.