Move aside, TV soapies: Welcome the WhatsApp drama series

The idea behind this campaign was to educate people in an experiential and accessible way. We wanted it to be as lifelike as possible – also showing the cultural issues of deciding where to lay a loved one to rest, observing important rituals and balancing the demands of the modern world and tradition.

Kotane: The agency brief was to find a way to cut through the clutter around funeral plans and to try break the marketing formulas usually applied to this kind of product. An important element was to build a bigger association with funeral cover in the minds of Sanlam’s audience – so while explaining products was important, we knew we needed to go beyond that. The idea came from thinking around relevant platforms for our audience, with WhatsApp one of the biggest digital platforms in SA, and also what people go through in planning a funeral. Many people will relate to following a family WhatsApp group as this is where a lot of the drama happens in real-life and so is appropriate to be used for this kind of fictional content.

Kotane:

When you follow the campaign, it looks fairly simple – like following a normal WhatsApp group.

But it’s actually quite technically challenging to run, as WhatsApp isn’t designed to be used for brand campaigns, so we had to figure out how to use existing features such as Broadcast Lists to tell a story.

Once we figured out the technical aspects it was a case of telling a good story on that platform.

Luckily we had help from one of SA’s top scriptwriters, Bongi Ndaba, who collaborated on the plot and dialogue. The content was then created to look as authentic as possible and replicate how real people would behave on WhatsApp.

Kotane: We wanted to promote this using the style of a normal TV series. So we’ve used a trailer across Facebook, used some billboards as well as SMS and radio as additional support to drive interaction with the campaign, along with media partnerships with the likes of Daily Sun and City Press.

Matshisevhe: The response has been awesome. On Sunday, 4 June, we were already sitting at over 800 subscribers – they joined the drama before it was launched, just after seeing the trailer and we have been getting a lot of enquiries about the drama and why we chose WhatsApp as our channel.

Kotane: Yes, so far it’s been great – sign-ups are coming in faster than expected and we’ve had a lot of positive comments on social media. As the story takes place over a number of days, our audience spends quite a long time with it – probably 15 to 20 minutes, making it much more immersive than a typical 30-second TV spot. The drop-off rate is also very low, so we think people are getting hooked by the story.

Do you predict more campaigns of this nature in future?
Kotane: Well, in a way what we’ve done is go back to the roots of soap operas, which were literally branded content funded by soap brands – it’s just the technology that has changed. But yes, I think if you want to reach audiences that are numb to normal advertising because they see so much of it we’ll need to find creative ways to communicate with them. We’ve also learned a lot on other campaigns for Sanlam, such as One Rand Man and last year’s Conspicuous Savers – both of those also had strong evolving narratives and an innovative use of social channels.

The WhatsApp drama launched on 5 June and will be available until mid-July. Subscribers will receive a series of updates over seven days – the average time it takes to plan a funeral. To find out more, SMS your name and surname to 45603 or visit the official website.