Changing the game with a creative advertising campaign

We serve up something different while marketing

COMMUNICATION CHALLENGE

At the outset of the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, the future seemed grim. The entire world came to a halt. It felt as if time had stopped moving forward. Almost all businesses appeared to be affected by a microscopic entity.

How creative marketing faced a new and unknown challenge

The situation in Iran was especially dire as the nation was under the heaviest financial and humanitarian sanctions. We at Zigma8 were not immune to any of it, for despair could be a fatal blow to all advertising agencies, agencies whose job it is to find the silver lining.

When marketing needs to up its game

Our communication challenge would be nothing unusual in that our marketing and advertising activities in Iran should change the way our audience sees things. As advertising agencies around the world, we often use other people—actors and actresses—to communicate to our audience. We felt that our challenge on this occasion would require us to be the change we wanted to see, as Gandi put it. Simply put, our challenge was this: how do we contribute a meaningful message of health while showing that we are also being the change we want to see.

COMMUNICATION SOLUTION

We at Zigma8 quickly turned things around by introducing 3-month tennis training for the team. At the end of the 3rd-month mark, we also held a tournament where all the staff competed against one another. After this, we made tennis the official company sport to encourage our team to stick with it for years to come.

How we brought creativity to marketing

The idea of the tennis tournament may appear simple on the surface, but it was a Net Promoter Score (NPS) booster and a team-building exercise. And more importantly, it is the clients of Zigma8 that also come out the winners. Why? The answer is quite simple. When clients imagine a grim future and believe that their world has turned upside down, we should show them the silver lining.

Since our target audience is businesses and executives, distributing the documented tennis tournament on LinkedIn was inevitable. LinkedIn is also a superior business platform to the likes of Facebook or Instagram. Vitality and engagement on LinkedIn are genuine, organic and more efficient than other platforms.

The ins and outs of a creative advertising campaign

We chauffeured our staff by luxury vehicles to a garden house with tennis courts outside Tehran. We branded the entire garden with Zigma8 logos and visuals, along with snacks and drinks of choice for the team. The agency had selected a prominent coach to teach them tennis. Preliminary lessons were given and then gradually advanced. The 3-month long training encouraged all personnel to continue playing tennis. The Zigma8 team now gets together regularly to play tennis together.

Online creative advertising, but with a difference

We documented the tournament and shared it on LinkedIn. The posts went viral. The feedback for Zigma8 and its staff was undeniably positive. Measuring positive feedback on LinkedIn is not necessarily based on likes and shares but also on creating dialogue around important issues like employer burnout or team-building exercise.

COMMUNICATION RESULTS

Very few organizations have done employee activities to this scale in Iran. To our knowledge, only Zigma8 and the Japanese Embassy can proudly make this claim.

Making a creative marketing campaign that makes a difference

Zigma8 might appear to be a medium-sized boutique creative agency, but the dialogue and the buzz around us seem to be quite significant. The wisdom and insight needed to change the rules of the game and find new perspectives is uncommon in this world. We understand that it is common to get tangled up in a hopeless state of thinking. However, Zigma8 is so agile that the entire team can shift their perspective quickly and view things in a new light.

Serving up an award-winning advertising campaign

Our challenge was to be the change we would like to see. Not only were we able to present this message innovatively — we were able to do it in an award-winning way. Our health-related advertising campaign achieved more than just a change of view. It won gold for Best Social Media Content in the LinkedIn category at the ACEF Content Marketing and Creators Award (CMCA), 2021.