Carat SSA wins Gold at the Assegai Awards

Kenyan’s are football fanatics and with football being a passion for the Guinness consumer, Guinness arranged that football legend Rio Ferdinand would visit the country to seek out extraordinary fans of the English Premier League.

The objective of the campaign was to bring the fans love of the game to life through a new and exciting media innovation that complemented Guinness’ existing Rio Ferdinand Made of More campaign.

The excitement had been building for his visit, however, waiting was not an option and the team decided to deploy a never been seen tech idea in Nairobi to ensure that Rio appeared “in person” at more places and to more fans even before his scheduled arrival date. Fans were caught by surprise as Rio Ferdinand got ready in a London studio for a live stream Q&A and challenge session with unsuspecting fans via the inconspicuous digital billboard. Fans were given the opportunity to chat live and challenge an EPL icon right in their home bar, in split-second real time. Once the live session completed, the footage was stitched together to create a gamified, reaction-based Rio billboard that would tour Nairobi bars.

The Rio live billboard created solid pre-visit hype for the Guinness Rio Ferdinand campaign with significant social engagement. Reaching more than 3.7 million Kenyans and achieving Guinness’ highest Facebook brand recall of the year, the Rio live campaign was a first for Africa. The campaign pushed tech and innovation and cemented Guinness positioning as a beer Made of More.

“Innovation is a core pillar of our output at Carat. Bringing home, a Gold for Best use of Technology really is testament to this.” – Graham Deneys, Group Strategy Director for SA & SSA.