Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

The Challenges
TM; the national telco carrier in Malaysia with a 34 year legacy. The downside of a legacy brand is that relevance diminishes as time goes by. With connectivity becoming increasingly vital, the brands which provide this very same service are far from the consumer’s minds. Come Merdeka, TM set out to revive their lost brand relevance by staying away from the herd churning the same content.

Insight, Strategy and the Idea
Rewind to 1980s, Merdeka was an occasion that brought people together; watching the parade, hoisting the national flag, harmonious gatherings of all races. Fast forward to today: Thanks to the need for connectivity, there is a sever and a divide in real life connections. Our devices have taken center stage and are pushing us further apart. The barrage of content that brands release during Merdeka just adds on to this distance apart. If there was one brand that could actually bring people together this Merdeka, it was TM. The brand that millions of Malaysians grew up with.

Media Execution
We wanted an execution which brought people together; LITERALLY! We took an iconic Merdeka melody, ‘SejahteraMalaysia’ and put our spin on it with 6 languages. A tongue in cheek execution which reflected how TM itself connects people through devices. ‘#TMSejahteraMalaysia’ was released with a twist: in order to derive the full essence of the song, Malaysians would need to join 2 devices together. The act of bringing two phones together to watch the full video created two windows which told the same story across time, from different perspectives or simply combined to create a single scene. The video then played out a series of vital, little moments of human connection that cover the full spectrum of Malaysian life. We executed a 360 digital campaign around this. Educate: We ran an advertorial on SiakapKeli as well as social and display ads to highlight the dual screen experience of our video. Mobile was an integral part of our campaign where we ran the direct CTA to come together to watch #TMSejahteraMalaysia. Engagement: We pushed the video across digital, teasing with short clips and snippets of the song to embed it into the heads of every Malaysian. Contextual targeting matched specific scenes of our video to content online. Example: bonding over food snippets targeting food content, playing with childhood friends targeting school holiday activities. This strategy ran across social, display, and YouTube. Intent: On Search, we bought a range of Merdeka related keywords, with a specific focus on Merdeka entertainment. All the action that we stormed on Digital using Search, Social, Display and Video directed traffic to our microsite which hosted the content and lyrics of the song in all 6 languages. The site was also enabled with social sharing features to push virality.

Results and Effectiveness
On Social, we had over 150,000 mentions, 85% of them positive We gained 8 million impressions on digital and a 15% VTR. Despite a low relevance score on Search and bidding on generic keywords, we garnered a CTR of 3%.