Case of Action Global Communications and Byyd: How to Attract the Attention of the Audience to the Tourism Industry by Using Game Mechanics

Byyd launched an international advertising campaign to increase media coverage for the annual Dubai Shopping Festival and attract tourists to Dubai, exceeding its target by 16%. In this new case, we are talking about interacting with the audience effectively, what kind of creative to use, and the promotion strategy.

Tasks:

• Announce the Dubai Shopping Festival for an audience from the CIS.
• Attract tourists to have a vacation in Dubai.

Decision

The Dubai Shopping Festival is held annually and is accompanied by locally and globally known celebrities’ concerts, music shows, prize drawings among buyers and other entertainment. For over a month, shopping malls and shops have sold their collections with discounts of up to 75% and even 90%. The first festival occurred in 1996 when there was only one shopping mall in Dubai. More than 200 thousand people came to the holiday, and the following year five times more. The number is still constantly growing.

The Dubai Shopping Festival is the world’s longest and most visited festival. Now the number of tourists coming here is several times higher than the local population.

The task of the Byyd team was to convey information about the festival and ensure maximum coverage of the audience in the CIS.

Timofey Kochubinsky, Account Executive Byyd:

We would like to thank our partners from Action Global Communications for the opportunity to take part in such an ambitious project. We have already successfully carried out several joint international projects, but in this case, the scale turned out to be impressive: during the advertising campaign, we reached more than 7.5 million people from three countries at once, and more than 200,000 thousand people got acquainted with the features of tourist attractions in Dubai.

Mechanics

To solve the tasks, we proposed to conduct an advertising campaign throughout the selected countries using engaging creative in the RichMedia format and implemented in-game mechanics.

We selected a list of relevant interests from the fashion and shopping category for the most accurate hit in the target audience.

Development of a promotion strategy

To reach the target audience, in addition to targeting by social demographic parameters (men and women, 20-60 years old), we proposed to use targeting by the following interest groups:

• Interests related to fashion and shopping: fashion and style, clothes, shoes, shopping, online shopping, coupons and contests.
• Relevant to income levels B + and C: money and investments, stocks, real estate purchases, jewellery, cruises.

The project included the development and implementation of the Rich Media creative. The team decided to use the new game mechanics “memo”. The rich media format is optimal for maximising the involvement of users in the project, bringing them to the site, and increasing the memorability of the brand, product or, as in this case, the event.

The HTML5 standard allows you to implement almost any mechanics of user interaction, including selection, building a route to a destination, emotional animation, and complex game mechanics.

Anastasia Startseva, Action Global Communications:

It was very comfortable for us to work with colleagues from BYYD within the framework of such a responsible project. Constant communication at all stages, availability at any time, and prompt resolution of various technical and organisational issues, all showed the highest qualification and professionalism of Byyd employees. The responsiveness and assistance of colleagues helped implement our creative ideas successfully and achieve the significant promotion of Dubai tourism among the audience of the CIS countries.

To carry out the advertising campaign, Byyd also developed a landing page adapted to work with mobile devices, which, in addition to information about the festival, included a drawing of a trip to Dubai for two.

To participate in the contest, we offered the website visitor to play three mini-games (puzzle, search for objects, labyrinth). For winning, the user received a part of the promo code, which could enter into the registration form. After passing it, the user had to share the draw on social networks. The number generator randomly selected the winner, and the broadcast was posted on the website on December 30, 2021.

Anton Saprykin, Production Group Head of Byyd:

This project was, in a way, a challenge for our department. We had to complete much work in a short time. We used new game mechanics to develop an advertising creative. In addition, a large amount of work included the development of a landing page, based on which we implemented three more interconnected mini-games with different interaction mechanics that users had to complete to receive a promotional code for participating in the grand prize draw.

Results

Impressions:

• planned — 14,894,000;
• actual indicators — 17,350,744.

Overdelivered impressions were 16% higher than the budget.

Clicks — 355,023. Coverage of the most interested audience allowed us to exceed the planned number of clicks by 19%

Approximately 7,640,395 unique users are covered.

The number of unique users on the landing page was more than 200,000.

Behavioural indicators:

• sessions — 295,394 (Transition rate 84%, benchmark — from 70%); 
• bounce rate — 32% (average for mobile advertising — from 45-50%);
• average time spent on the website 01 minute 07 seconds (average for mobile advertising — from 30 seconds);
• registration in the draw — 1550 users;
• reposts in social networks — 572 times.

Oleg Kononov, Mobile Manager of Byyd:

The project finished successfully. We achieved higher results than originally planned. The audience was extremely interested and interacted with the creative and landing. And since we carried out all the work on setting up the landing page analytics on our side, we could monitor changes in user activity online and take the necessary measures to optimise the advertising campaign on time to achieve the best results.

Brand Lift

A Brand Lift survey accompanied the campaign to measure awareness of the Dubai Shopping Festival event. Below are the statistics on the dynamics resulting from the advertising campaign.

In the first stage, the survey results of a random sample of new users from among the target audience showed:

Question: Do you know about the Dubai Shopping Festival?

• Answer option “yes” — 31% of clicks
• Answer option “no” — 69% of clicks

At the end of the ad campaign, we asked the same question to users who saw the ad creative during the ad campaign (retargeting):

• Option “yes” — 86% of clicks
• Option “no” — 14% of clicks

According to the research results, it was possible to determine the organic level of knowledge about the event among the target audience (31%) and the dynamics of its increase following the results of the advertising campaign (86%), that is, we can note an increase in the indicator by 177%.

Team

• Anastasia Startseva, Action Global Communications
• Oleg Kononov, Mobile Manager of Byyd
• Anton Saprykin, Production Group Head of Byyd
• Timofey Kochubinsky, Account Executive of Byyd