202​2 ​Finalists

Case Summary

Lifebuoy has been at the forefront of pandemics, championing prevention through handwashing for more than a century. The challenge during Covid 19 was to give the world the simplest and yet one of the most effective interventions to help save lives. An intervention born in a pandemic but could last many lifetimes. The idea: H is for Handwashing. An initiative aimed at making proper handwashing commonplace by seeding it in early childhood. Encouraging parents, teachers and care-givers to teach this new Alphabet to inculcate handwashing habits and drive behaviour change.

Case Summary

Most product innovations are designed to LEAD the user. Very rarely do tech companies stop to LEARN how users are creatively using our tech in unexpected ways. This Effie case is inspired entirely by Grab users creatively lifehacking our app in a way we never expected. We noticed an odd trend during the pandemic: ordinary users were "hacking" GrabFood and GrabMart deliveries platform to send on-demand gifts to friends and families living in other countries and cities. This "hack" inspired us to create a new 100+ cities Intercity Gifting

Case Summary

India has one of the lowest female labour forces in the world. A big reason for this is periods! Yes, periods make 23 million girls drop out of school; crushing their dreams of becoming a doctor, nurse, teacher someday. Whisper, passionate about ‘Keeping Girls In School’ wanted to change this. We organised a pad donation drive, a petition (with UNESCO) to add period education in schools and provided period education online. Resulting in 12% top line growth, 11 million packs donated, 1 million+ petitions; 3 million girls educated on periods.

Case Summary

As a world-recognized liquor brand, Jägermeister earned fame with its signature green glass bottle and stag logo. However, as the brand became famous, Chinese copy-cat brands began impersonating Jägermeister, imitating the product’s iconic traits – misleading consumers and ultimately stealing sales. Jägermeister overcame this challenge by humanizing the challenge with “Bugger off Copycats”. Collaborating with celebrity Lidan, we leveraged his distinctive traits in the campaign to call out imposters. Making our point–just like Jägermeister, there is only one Lidan. Winning back our market share with a 30% increase in sales

Case Summary

This is a case about how a native Indian cola brand, Thums Up, went against all odds to become a market leader at a time when COVID-19 tore through the carbonated beverage industry. The secret to Thums Up’s success was an outcome of the brand’s courage to overturn traditional cola marketing conventions on their head. Instead of delighting the over-delighted urban youth, Thums Up went all out to appeal to the upcountry Indian youth. The efforts led to a 56.91% increase in Quarterly sales compared to pre-pandemic period.

Case Summary

During the Covid-induced lockdown, Indians were snacking more than ever before, yet Oreo cream biscuit sales declined by -19.3%. Stuck indoors, while parents were bereft of work-life balance, children lost out on their playmates. Most importantly, despite families being at home together, the last thing on their agenda was family time. This is the story of how Oreo, inspired 3.9Mn Indian parents to spend more time playing with their children, contributing to emotional well-being of families, and thereby increasing volume sales by +30.4% and value sales by +34.3%

Case Summary

In a fragmenting category, oats had fallen out of favour and were no longer the flavour of the day for young Aussies; an issue for the market-leading, heritage brand Uncle Tobys. So, Uncle Tobys repositioned themselves with a new voice and perspective on the world, changing the way young people saw the brand AND the product. Through a nationwide ‘oatervention’ with supporting contextual creative, Uncle Tobys woke young Aussies up from their superficial behaviour and helped them find true fulfilment in a wholesome bowl of oats.

Case Summary

Indian consumers are in a relationship with their neighbourhood chemist — but it’s just not working out as their needs today have far outgrown what the chemist can deliver. Consumers constantly face issues with medicine availability and exorbitant prices. Pharmeasy — India’s leading e-pharmacy solves for both these issues. So we started a conversation about what’s not working in Indians’ relationship with their local chemists. As a result, Pharmeasy’s GMV grew 35%, we got 3x engagement on social vs competition,and Pharmeasy enjoyed a 50%TOMA score for the first time ever.

Case Summary

What’s better than the best? The Besterest! For over 100 years Gillette has pushed the boundaries of shaving technology. But there is a problem…whilst consumers know that Gillette makes the best razors, millennials see Gillette as a brand for their dad’s. After 10 years of stagnant sales it was time for a shake-up. The self-aware ‘besterest’ concept pokes fun at Gillette’s innovation. With Julian Denison (Deadpool-2) as our lead talent, the results speak for themselves: Ending the year at 94% UBA (+10%pts), delivering sales growth at 4% (H2 2021).

Case Summary

Battery brands talk about batteries first. Shifting the paradigm, we focused on our portable lights. As disaster preparedness and prevention is part of the Japanese way of life, we built our story around these disasters (disguised as creatures of the dark) while using the quintessentially Japanese art of manga. This saw Energizer Japan launch an interactive, HTML-animated manga series to reach our goal of building the Japanese consumer’s brand consciousness towards the brand. The series had over 30,000 readers, a 47% increase in sales and 1,359 new touchpoints.

Case Summary

Presenting the esteemed brand ambassadors of Fantasy Cricket Gaming Apps this IPL (The Indian super bowl of advertising) - MS Dhoni. Sachin Tendulkar. Rohit Sharma. Gautam Gambhir. Sourav Ganguly. A human-sized brain. Who do you think stood out in a cluttered parity category? Delivered a whopping 3X jump in revenue? And 88% increase in new users?

Case Summary

India has the world’s largest private holdings of gold worth over $1.5 trillion. Indians buy close to 150 tonnes of gold in coins and bars, and 70% is bought offline. PhonePe saw an opportunity to eliminate India’s offline gold dependency. The campaign managed to reassure people of the purity, the price, the delivery, and the seamless experience of ordering gold on PhonePe. The campaign made PhonePe India’s default digital destination for buying gold. Giving PhonePe a 70% spike in traffic for gold, and a 30% growth in transactions.

Case Summary

2021 was another tough year for Australians in lockdown, separated from families, waiting for the “new normal”. But without the new normal of online retail, ALDI needed to find a way to get shoppers back into stores for Christmas. While most brands followed ‘brand Covid’ conventions of togetherness, ALDI showed Aussie’s the Christmas they craved. From birds inside birds, to French champagne, ALDI proved you can’t overcook Christmas. Australians didn’t hold back, showing us their Overcooked Christmases on TikTok and helping us beat our Seasonal product sales by 400%!

Case Summary

Covid affected many industries, but none more perilously placed than Tourism New Zealand (TNZ). With international tourism halted, TNZ were forced to majorly pivot or risk economic crisis. So for the first time since the 1980s, they advertised to New Zealanders (Kiwis). The goal being to convince Kiwis to holiday and spend as if they were tourists. Introducing ‘Do Something New, New Zealand’. A completely integrated campaign that constantly found new ways to encourage Kiwis to do new activities. It became famous, changed attitudes, and helped save NZ’s tourism economy.

Case Summary

AIA, an insurer that prides itself on focusing 100% on Asia, demonstrated its insider understanding of Asian – specifically, Singaporean – parents and all their quirks in its first ever retirement campaign. “What will YOU do when they grow up?” jolted these self-sacrificing parents who obsess over their children’s future to plan for themselves, then gave them a personalised Retirement Quotient based on which agents could tailor recommendations. This drove market-leading growth in consideration, and 60% annualised net premiums growth.

Case Summary

Bournvita makes Mental-Health as critical as Immunity during Covid. While Indian parents chased immunity during pandemic, 2020 NCRB data revealed that a total of 11,396 kids died by suicide in India, which was 31 deaths per day! Reason being emotional trauma from social confinement, which parents weren’t noticing. Bournvita wanted mental-health to be as critical as immunity. We launched ‘Get The Message’, breaking the 4th wall to awaken parents. Successfully got over 1.5 million parental sign-ups, making them focus on an equally focus on Mental-Health as much as Physical Health.

Case Summary

Taiwan’s divorce rate ranks first in Asia. "Married or not" is a hot topic and closely related to home purchases. “Marriage” in Taiwanese culture has the meaning of “build a home”. To encourage young people, the film depicts the story of a girl working in household registration office (a place marriage, divorce, birth, and death registered), through her eyes, leading the audience to witness her journey from doubt to belief. It created 14 million views within a week, arousing resonance and discussion, making Sinyi Realty a new topic among couples.

Case Summary

Bournvita makes Mental-Health as critical as Immunity during Covid. While Indian parents chased immunity during pandemic, 2020 NCRB data revealed that a total of 11,396 kids died by suicide in India, which was 31 deaths per day! Reason being emotional trauma from social confinement, which parents weren’t noticing. Bournvita wanted mental-health to be as critical as immunity. We launched ‘Get The Message’, breaking the 4th wall to awaken parents. Successfully got over 1.5 million parental sign-ups, making them focus on an equally focus on Mental-Health as much as Physical Health.

Case Summary

The Philippines remained to be the last country in the world with classrooms shuttered by Covid-19. This is the story of how McDonald’s transformed its unused party rooms (also shuttered by pandemic restrictions) into lively classrooms to help students and teachers struggling with the distance learning system. Piloted in 2020 and expanded in 2021 into 249 locations all over the country, McDonald’s Classroom helped redefine the brand experience in the new normal, and not only generated fame for the brand, but uplifted Filipinos’ trust in the company.

Case Summary

India’s 2nd Covid wave in 2021 proved to be a bigger setback for the small businesses. So, in the sales-critical Diwali season, when brands went back to the deep-discounting playbook on e-comm channels, Cadbury reinvented its 2020 edition of #NotJustACadburyAd yet again. It got a world-famous celebrity Shahrukh Khan to endorse countless-nameless stores along with its own by combining data and MarTech innovation. This use case proved to be useful again in uplifting 1000s of small-businesses, and registering a +35% jump in sales for Cadbury’s gifting in the pandemic.

Case Summary

This is a case about how a native Indian cola brand, Thums Up, went against all odds to become a market leader at a time when COVID-19 tore through the carbonated beverage industry. The secret to Thums Up’s success was an outcome of the brand’s courage to overturn traditional cola marketing conventions on their head. Instead of delighting the over-delighted urban youth, Thums Up went all out to appeal to the upcountry Indian youth. The efforts led to a 56.91% increase in Quarterly sales compared to pre-pandemic period.

Case Summary

In July 2021, Indonesia overtook India as Covid's new global epicentre. Grab turned our humble promo code bar into the single largest donation-crowdfunding tool in the country. in just 3 weeks, 724,000 Grab users sacrificed their promos to join the country’s fight to get oxygen and PPE supplies to Indonesia's healthcare frontline.

Case Summary

Covid affected many industries, but none more perilously placed than Tourism New Zealand (TNZ). With international tourism halted, TNZ were forced to majorly pivot or risk economic crisis. So for the first time since the 1980s, they advertised to New Zealanders (Kiwis). The goal being to convince Kiwis to holiday and spend as if they were tourists. Introducing ‘Do Something New, New Zealand’. A completely integrated campaign that constantly found new ways to encourage Kiwis to do new activities. It became famous, changed attitudes, and helped save NZ’s tourism economy.

Case Summary

In July 2021, Indonesia overtook India as Covid's new global epicentre. Grab turned our humble promo code bar into the single largest donation-crowdfunding tool in the country. in just 3 weeks, 724,000 Grab users sacrificed their promos to join the country’s fight to get oxygen and PPE supplies to Indonesia's healthcare frontline.

Case Summary

Pedigree’s mission is to end pet homelessness by 2030. But 1 in 5 animals are returned to shelters because they aren’t a good match for their new family. We needed to rethink adoption. Introducing MyHooman - the first end-to-end adoption system that puts dogs first. It’s smart match algorithm means our dogs are matched with the right family, the first time. Since launch, a third of the people to the experience have found their perfect match. And of those matched, 39% are happily in their forever home.

Case Summary

Building mass awareness is not an option for VELO - a smokeless tobacco product. To do our job right, we needed to reach less and not more people. Specifically, only verified age 20+ adult smokers. This is a unique challenge for media, but we overcame it through technology-led consumer journey optimization. Reaching only verified users, and tunneling them directly to our website through a secured bypass solution. This led to increased ecommerce sales of 122%.

Case Summary

Two of the most common grouses of Grab delivery riders are (1) too much downtime while waiting for restaurants to prepare food, and (2) that gig work is "dead end work" with little prospects for career growth and self-development. Grab's new 5 minute Academy was designed to address precisely both these grouses by turning driver downtime into driver upskilling time.

Case Summary

What do you do when category leaders promise reversal of hair fall in 14 days, and 7 days? Especially if your brand is 10x more expensive? 5 days? Or 3 days? This is a case of a challenger brand’s bold ‘under-promise’ to build credibility. An under-promise built on tapping the psyche of the fatigued, cynical, over-sold buyer. And how in a country that is accustomed to hyperbole, an under-promise delivered by a ‘unique whistle-blower’ built a business that is now growing 3.3x faster.

Case Summary

We needed to increase awareness and understanding of Motor Neurone Disease for MND NZ. The debilitating nature of MND means that overtime your muscles deteriorate to a point where you lose the ability to use everyday items. To demonstrate this, we created ‘David’s Unusables’ – a media-led idea that digitally charted the ‘real-life’ decline of David Seymour by selling items he could no longer use on NZ’s leading e-marketplace -TradeMe. The creative use of this platform captured nationwide attention and drove home the effect of the disease in the process.

Case Summary

Due to COVID-19 outbreak, stray animal shelters in Taiwan were faced closure and adoptions events were unable to proceed as usual, which greatly affected the chances of adoption. PChome 24h Shopping, took advantage of the most popular media during the outbreak, the ecommerce’s “shipping box” to raise the visibility of stray animals issue. With 0 media budget, related posts got over thousand shared, nearly 4000 interactions, reached more than 100,000 people. The number of adoptions increased tripled, with 21 dogs and cats in September, 26 dogs and cats in October.

Case Summary

Pedigree’s mission is to end pet homelessness by 2030. But 1 in 5 animals are returned to shelters because they aren’t a good match for their new family. We needed to rethink adoption. Introducing MyHooman - the first end-to-end adoption system that puts dogs first. It’s smart match algorithm means our dogs are matched with the right family, the first time. Since launch, a third of the people to the experience have found their perfect match. And of those matched, 39% are happily in their forever home.

Case Summary

How KFC Australia found a whole new seasonal peak to own; Xmas in July. KFC said ‘bucket’ to Christmas traditions that have no place in the Australian summer and are inherently filled with stress, often with the sacred shared meal at the centrepiece of the drama. We flipped those conventions with a distinctively free-spirited KFC twist giving Aussies the license to have the Christmas they really want. In July.

Case Summary

In 2020, Tourism New Zealand launched the successful Do Something New campaign – convincing New Zealanders (Kiwis) to holiday and spend like international tourists. A year in they faced their hardest challenge yet. ‘Shoulder season’. A quiet tourism time, where most Kiwis hunker down at home. We needed to overcome this seasonal barrier and inspire Kiwis to continue ‘doing new’. Introducing Recharge Season: A campaign that created a whole new season, convinced Kiwis to recharge by doing new activities, prompted nationwide spend increases and resulted in a supercharged ROI.

Case Summary

2021 was another tough year for Australians in lockdowns, separated from families, waiting for the “new normal”. But Australia was coming out of hibernation just in time for Christmas. While most brands followed ‘brand Covid’ conventions of togetherness, ALDI stood out by giving Aussie’s permission to have the Christmas they craved - one of birds inside birds, to French champagne and award-winning hams. ALDI proved you can’t overcook Christmas. Australians didn’t hold back, showing us their Overcooked Christmases on TikTok, helping us beat our target for Seasonal sales by 400%

Case Summary

Since 1992 Optus has challenged Australia’s legacy telco Telstra by building its brand on standing for “Yes” in a category that loves to say “No”. But thirty years on Optus’ commitment to “Yes” needed re-stating in order to re-orientate the business internally and build relevance externally with contemporary Australia. This entry shows how our “It starts with Yes” campaign with short video at its core impacted upon key brand and business metrics as one of our region’s biggest challenger brands said yes to starting the next chapter in its history.

Case Summary

We needed to increase awareness and understanding of Motor Neurone Disease for MND NZ. The debilitating nature of MND means that overtime your muscles deteriorate to a point where you lose the ability to use everyday items. To demonstrate this, we created ‘David’s Unusables’ – a media-led idea that digitally charted the ‘real-life’ decline of David Seymour by selling items he could no longer use on NZ’s leading e-marketplace -TradeMe. The creative use of this platform captured nationwide attention and drove home the effect of the disease in the process.

Case Summary

How do you get GenZ excited about the Big Mac when they saw it as their “dads’ burger”? The answer: rather than promoting the Big Mac, you create a shared cultural moment, fueled by social media, that gives this generation a chance to remake something that belonged to their parents into their own icon. With the help of Hong Kong’s rising pop idol Keung To, we turned an old-fashioned burger into the sandwich of Hong Kong’s GenZ, reconnecting the brand with a younger generation and breaking viral records.

Case Summary

KFC Bucketheads at the cricket are a major highlight of each Australian summer. However, for the 2020/21 season, COVID-19 and harsh restrictions placed upon Aussies threatened to rob KFC of its biggest brand activation of the year. With summer the key sales period in the category, this could have had drastic business implications upon KFC. Pivoting at pace to find a new home for the Bucketheads, a The Buckethead Dance on TikTok was born. A dance that not just allowed Bucketheads to live on, but one saved summer for KFC.

Case Summary

The Challenge One of Vietnams biggest festivals Trung Thu was losing relevance, especially in a military lockdown The Insight Nostalgia is a powerful trigger to get people to celebrate a festival by rekindling past memories of it The Idea Keep festive stories alive virtually Bringing the Idea to Life We developed AI Technology to bring alive old festive photos and co-created content so people can experience the festival in a lockdown The Results We reached 47 million people with 14 million engagements & grew ecommerce by 8%YOY

Case Summary

In 2018, Skinny was struggling. It was the smallest player in NZ’s telco market. In one fell swoop, it lost almost half its distribution. Brand measures were stalling, and revenue was declining. The future looked uncertain. The big guys had finally won. But we had one chance to supercharge our growth against the odds. We changed our target, turned it into a proposition, and delivered it to the whole of New Zealand. In the end, we grew customers, who stayed longer and spent more with Skinny than ever before.

Case Summary

According to Kantar, PX Mart is the most leading supermarket in Taiwan. Its value-for-money image makes it the must-visit supermarket for mums, however, young people see it as a place of thrifty. Young people know that PX Mart can help them save money, but they don’t fancy the brand due to its thrifty image. We transformed its thrifty image by leveraging fashion, fitness, and living attitude in the consecutive years. PX Mart membership under age of 30 grew 30% per year and becomes the most visited supermarket for young generation.