Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

Objective & Challenge
To highlight their expanded and improved network, U Mobile was developing a branding campaign to further reinforce the position that they are the preferred network for the best unlimited experience. However, the Malaysian telecommunications industry has always been highly competitive with incumbents like Maxis, Celcom, Digi, Unifi, Hotlink and other players who were always staking a claim on being the leader in the unlimited space. This complex ecosystem promotes 4G LTE and fast Internet speeds incessantly, creating highly saturated messaging across the board. U Mobile needed to ensure cut–through communication that is also engaging to penetrate through the clutter and claim a spot at the top of consumers’ minds. U Mobile’s main objective was to own the unlimited experience space of which they are the pioneers as the unlimited data plans it offered were unheard of in the industry in 2019. To speak to its digital–savvy target audience, U Mobile needed to execute this exercise in a mobile–first method to promote an immersive experience that was trendy, engaging and refreshing.

Insight & Strategy
As Malaysians are constantly hooked on their mobile devices, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram are amongst the most popular platforms in Malaysia. Instagram in particular recorded strong growth, nearing one–half of Malaysian Internet users (48.2%). U Mobile sought to capitalise on emerging immersive augmented reality technology on mobile to ensure that each brand interaction would be seamless and meaningful with no download needed all within the platform. To that end, we devised an Augmented Reality social media filter to bring this execution to life. With an ever–changing market landscape of technological innovation, U Mobile deployed this experience via Augmented Reality (AR) to enrich the advertising experience as well as build emotional connections, enabling consumers to engage better with the brand while boosting the bottom line and growing the business in the long run. From this, #MadeForUnlimited was born – a gamification of AR that allowed users to engage and participate in a highly shareable Instagram Stories format with family and friends, designed with U Mobile’s signature quirkiness in mind. This campaign was executed through a Facebook and the Instagram AR filter application with integrated support via online video, radio, outdoor/ambient, and influencer marketing. U Mobile launched this AR filter on their Facebook page to leverage on its high followership. The AR filter was developed to associate unlimited experiences by enabling consumers to stay connected with their family and friends. To deepen the overall experience and for more impactful reach, this gamified AR execution was integrated with outdoor media, allowing selected users to share their experience by displaying screenshots of users’ gameplay on digital billboards across Klang Valley.

Execution
Taking recent trends of the most engaged and popular AR filters, we noticed a few elements that were consistent across – they were funny, expressive and interactive. Utilizing Facebook’s own AR creator studio, SparkAR, we created an AR filter that enhances the user experience through gamification, maximising the capability of the technology and hosted it on Facebook and Instagram. This was a 2–player game where players had to compete with their friends to “eat” social media icons flying towards them to achieve the highest score while avoiding bombs that caused negative effects. Through this, we stayed true to the 3 pillars we identified. Funny: Traps like the bombs were included in the game to throw players off – if they accidentally “ate” them, hilarious penalties would be triggered like face swapping, squiggly eyes and moustaches appearing on their faces. The only rule of the game was to score as high as possible within the given time frame. By creating funny negative effects, this gave a new dimension to the game where players could sabotage their friends, creating a unique experience for each round played. Expressive: Winners are encouraged to show off their winning shot and scores with the hashtag #MadeForUnlimited. To enhance brand interaction, players are also encouraged to submit this through U Mobile’s social pages and selected winners will be showcased on both U Mobile’s social assets as well as on the big screen – digital billboards across Klang Valley! Interactive: Including a competitive element encouraged engagement with family and friends – both in terms of playing together and sharing the game. Tapping into consumers’ competitive nature, the game had a scoring system and a winner indicator. This helps encourage connection and conversations between players, creating talkability and shareability. The AR filter was made accessible on U Mobile’s Facebook and Instagram pages through an organic post. In an effort to extend the AR fun to non–U Mobile users, the AR access was also served as a sponsored post to widen its reach.

Effectiveness
Within 3 weeks, the gamified AR filter had been opened and played over 134k times, with videos saved over 7.2k times and shared 447 times. 4.4% Engagement Rate. On digital platforms alone, this reached over 1.6 million users while the OOH execution across Klang Valley reached approximately 7.5mil individuals who were on the road. Even without incentivising participation with a prize, there was massive increase of 288% in organic conversations. With just RM80k of media spends, this effort generated PR value of RM 1.5mil coverage in overall, effectively cutting through the clutter with an off–the–rails campaign that was at the core of U Mobile’s brand DNA.