FP7/Cairo, part of McCann Worldgroup, has won the Warc Awards' Grand Prix in the Effective Content Strategy category, rewarding branded content strategies that can demonstrate a business outcome, for its Coca-Cola campaign 'Hijacking the African Cup'.
Working on a variety of fronts, online and on the ground, Coca-Cola used an imaginative integrated campaign, hijacking the African Cup of Nations in Egypt without being the official sponsor and managing to outshine its competition on all awareness and brand parameters.
The results saw Coke's content shares numbered 111,000 vs Pepsi's 51,000; the Coke hashtag usage was 165,000 vs Pepsi's 55,000; awareness for the football association went up by 10% and brand love grew by 5 points in just a month.
The Grand Prix-winning campaign also won the Best Multiplatform special award for a content strategy that has successfully used a range of different communication channels.
Commenting on the Grand Prix winner, jury member Nick Kendall, founding partner of media broker Electric Glue, said: "Saliency is so important to Coke and that's what they achieved - mental presence. They placed themselves on the fans' side and, most importantly, in their songs and therefore in their hearts."
The judging panel of 16 chaired by John Dokes, global chief marketing officer and general manager of AccuWeather Network, awarded a further four Golds, four Silvers and four Bronzes and two more special awards to campaigns that ran in Brazil, Egypt, India, Lebanon, Malaysia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom and United States, for brands including Antarctica, EGBank, Orange and Whiskas.
The Warc Awards' Content Strategy winners are:
All winners for the annual Warc Awards, a global case study competition in search for next-generation marketing effectiveness that focuses on the effective use of emerging marketing disciplines, have now been announced and can be viewed here.
The Warc Awards 2018 Report, providing an in-depth analysis, learnings and trends from the winners will be published in September 2018.