With a series of outdoor campaigns that can be traced back to August 2018, foodservice mobile app Otlob finally reached the peak of their OOH strategy last December, with a strategic OOH campaign that took over October Bridge with 1km worth of exclusive offers with Cairo’s leading restaurants. Walid El Saadany (Otlob Managing Director), Ahmed Refaat (Otlob Marketing Manager), and Ahmed Kotb (CEO of AD Store Advertising Agency) share with us the insider story of the campaign. With its strong yellow color theme, the campaign’s goal was to deliver the message that “Otlob aims at offering a wide range of promotions with top restaurants, serving our customers and offering them top service with top quality against the competition.”, Mr El Saadany explains. Ahmed Refaat, responsible for offline marketing and campaigns, tells us that “after the noticeable success of the hard-selling outdoor campaigns last year, we decided to go bigger with this campaign, through featuring our offers on many billboards all over Cairo and hammering on the exclusivity we have with our special partners. Parallel, we managed to reach our customers via all the possible online and offline communication touch points.”, focusing their OOH strongly on reaching their target audience where they are: on the move “to main universities, industrial locations and working centers”. The marketing team at Otlob, which comprises more than 12 members, worked hard to deliver the campaign concept of “Save with Otlob” and all the required designs within just 2 weeks, producing everything in-house, and then outsourcing the production and media buying process to Ad Store, the agency led by Mr Ahmed Kotb. With the purpose of increasing the number of orders for each of the participating restaurants communicating Otlob’s main RTB which is the exclusive discounts, the team claims to be open for new communication mediums as part of their approach to brand positioning and awareness. Both Walid El Saadany and Ahmed Refaat agree that “The whole team are very excited & proud of being part of this campaign. We were pretty positive that the campaign’s reach covered our audience successfully, the positive feedback especially on social media is one of the success indicators, also naming the combination on 6th of October Bridge after Otlob”. Ahmed Refaat continues, “We approach our outdoor strategy by setting the budget, then looking for the best locations in terms of visibility. The outdoor landscape in Cairo is very challenging, but it does offer a wide range of locations and different sizes which can meet the needs of any client according to the campaign’s target with the appropriate media planning. The main challenge, however, is the poor after-service from agencies, as the monitoring and reporting services of the agencies leading the market does not really support our needs.” While the campaign is still on the roads with new offers from a wide variety of participating restaurants, MD Walid El Saadany let us peak at Otlob’s strategy for 2019: “For the upcoming period, we are going to continue providing our customers with hot exclusive deals, in addition to being part of all the occasions that are of interest to our customers.” The strategic serial on October Bridge will certainly resonate in the market for months to come. Ahmed Kotb from Ad Store confesses that “it was a great venture to work on Otlob’s OOH campaign, it was challenging, and it promised to be a successful campaign. After receiving the brief, we first focused on fulfilling the target geo-coverage, then we focused on delivering a unique creative idea because we didn’t want it to be just another campaign on the road. So we reached to the idea of giving Otlob’s audience the longest OOH serial combination, a continuous sequence of the same ad for nearly 1 kilometer on 6th of October Bridge”.
