Facebook shared the 2016 EMEA Regional Facebook Awards winners from MENA region, also highlighted top trends in regional entries including agencies and brands finding powerful ways to talk about personal and societal topics such as miscarriage, gender equality, and homelessness. Additionally, they saw the increasing importance of mobile video, with more than three-quarters of winning entries including a video component.
Here are the winners, including companies/agencies from Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.
•The Facebook Awards was created to celebrate the best creative work being shared on the Facebook platform
•The 2015 Awards represented our biggest and most inspiring creative collection yet. We reviewed over 2,700 submissions from 160 countries that offered a snapshot of the state of creativity and innovation across Facebook and Instagram and the entire industry
•Also, with 3 million active advertisers (small businesses) on Facebook platform the 2016 Facebook Awards will also include a small business category
The following winners (by category) are as follows:
oFACEBOOK FOR GOOD & BEST USE OF FB PLATFORMS
KAFA (enough) Violence & Exploitation – NGO, Leo Burnett Beirut: please find all assets here.
Campaign Description
In Lebanon, there was no law to protect women from domestic violence. As such, domestic violence was a big taboo, covered by the law of silence, and women did not report easily their abusers, as they were scared of the consequences in the absence of judicial procedures that could protect them.
For years, Kafa, a leading Women’s Rights NGO, has been working relentlessly on developing a draft law project to protect women from domestic violence. The law went back and forth for years, and remained for a long time dormant in the parliament’s drawers. On April first 2014, the parliament was meeting to pass several laws. So, three days before the parliament meeting, Kafa came to us for help. We had three days to gather the community and put pressure on members of Parliament to PASS THE LAW on Domestic Violence.
Campaign Performance
The campaign was no longer just a campaign but it became a popular movement. Online, people, women and men, were posting their pictures with their red thumbs.
Brands spoofed our Red Thumb Icon into their products and posted the images on their Facebook Pages. Celebrities were changing their photos into a photo with a Red thumb
•More than 20,000 physical and digital red thumbs gathered
•A 700% increase in online conversations about domestic violence
•A 350% increase in comments on Kafa’s Facebook page
•1.7 million USD in earned media
2 million people exposed to the campaign from the TV news coverage in a country of 4 million.
Most Importantly, the LAW PASSED. And a month later, a first protection order, of many more to come was issued by a court in favor of an abused women. Few weeks after, a violent husband was sentenced to jail.
oBEST USE OF FB PLATFORMS
Saudi Women’s Online March – P&G, Leo Burnett Beirut
Campaign Description
In the Arab conservative market, Always has struggled to establish a connection with consumers; including consumers who use the brand. Especially in our main market of Saudi Arabia, the feminine hygiene category as a whole is considered taboo. So women are ashamed to be associated with the brand, let alone interact with it online. Targeting women from 15 to 28, it was important to ensure they can listen to our empowering message in an intimate setting. This was done by pushing content on one-to-one setting such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Always launched the first online march where instead of showing their face, women shared footage of their steps moving for a better tomorrow.
Campaign Performance
The Online March movement made it easy for women to express themselves. Targeted media gave visibility to content, leading people to organically discover more user-generated submissions. Influencers adopted the movement, followed by an Instameet to create reference videos by Instagrammers, and then it went mainstream on Facebook and Instagram with targeting support on Facebook. It achieved our objectives of women openly connecting online with a taboo brand. More importantly, Always connected with its audience on women empowerment that could only be discussed directly and at this scale online. The campaign ran for two months as planned, on Facebook and Instagram.
The Online March exceeded our targets for user-generated content and community growth: – It generated more than 45 million impressions on Facebook and Instagram, and 4.6 million print impressions. – The participation mechanism allowed over 5,000 women to express themselves with content they submitted. There were +1 million interactions around that content and +2.6 million organic views on the videos. – Brand affinity has also improved as a result: the Facebook brand page got a +12.51% fan growth (+10,000 new fans in two months), while the Instagram page received +5,500 new Instagram followers (starting from zero).
About categories:
•Social for Good: Awarded to charitable/non-profit org campaigns that creatively and successfully raise awareness and drive positive social change using Facebook or Instagram.
•Best Use of Facebook Family of Brands: Awarded to the most creative, original and well-executed Facebook and/or Instagram campaign concepts.