Dubai-based creative agency VICE Arabia developed a campaign this summer to drive tourism to the Comoros Islands for its client VisitComoros.org.
The campaign was targeted towards audiences in the UK, where it ran across the UK’s Met Office Weather website.
The team were inspired to offer UK residents an alternative to the drearily bleak weather reports the UK witnessed over the summer, by offering a vacation to the sunny sands of the Comoros Islands.
They did this by displaying screenshots of Comoros Islands’ warm and sunny temperatures with enticingly witty copy across it in an effort to play to UK residents’ common disappointment of missing out on having a ‘real summer’.
“Only a creative team who live in a warm climate like Dubai could really understand just how bad this summer was in the UK,” said John Davenport, Executive Creative Director, VICE Arabia. “Cold? Cloudy? Rain? That’s not summer! Our creatives jumped on this insight and realised exactly what the UK consumer was going through and just how much they needed some sunshine,” he explained.
VICE Arabia deems the campaign to be “what is probably the cheapest travel and tourism shoot in the history of marketing’ as the idea of using screenshots provided a ‘zero-cost shoot’.
“The technique of using simple screen shots of the weather in Comoros was driven by one thing: the budget,” Davenport said.
“Having a very small budget can be an obstacle, but sometimes it can force creatives to come up with a really innovative solution. When you don’t have a budget, you have to have a strong idea. You can’t hide behind production.”
The agency advised the client to run the campaign when the weather in the UK was particularly bad. Featuring copy like ‘Wondering if that 43 minutes of sunshine last week was your whole summer?,’ and ‘Hi there Britain. Not having much summer this summer?’ the creative assets then prompted viewers to book a visit to Comoros with an embedded link to the client’s website.
The social and economic impact of the campaign was also incredibly beneficial to Comoros. “Since the COVID lockdowns the tourism industry in Comoros has not yet recovered to the extent that bigger destinations like Mauritius and the Caribbean have,” said Davenport, who attributed this to a lack of “big muscle marketing budgets.”
According to VICE, the campaign drove significant results. “On the days that the campaign ran, hotels linked to the project reported a 15 per cent increase in enquiries and bookings,” said Davenport. The campaign drove roughly 4 million page impressions, of which 54 per cent were women and 46 per cent male, skewed heavily towards upper income people in urban areas who travel.
Credits
VICE Arabia:
Raul Palhares, ACD Copywriter
Catherine Galustian, Designer
Lina Khaled, Senior Designer
Sarah Berro, Senior Creative Director
Germán Espita Benavides, ACD Art Director
