Giddam - Never Retreat

Saudi Arabia has been performing poorly at the World Cup since their debut 1994. Fans were losing hope… and interest. In fact, a low number of fans were expected to travel to Qatar. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia has been becoming an ever-evolving country in all forms of art, music, cuisine - and it was time to change the perception to the rest of the world.

We developed a campaign called Giddam - one Saudi word that has so much meaning. It means 'never retreat and always move forward'. Using that word, it was inevitable that the Saudi population would rally behind their team to the World Cup, arriving in Qatar in unprecedented numbers. Once they arrived, they were directed to the Saudi House - the biggest fan zone in World Cup history - which paid tribute to everything cultural in Saudi (music, cuisine, culture, art, everything else).

To get the campaign rolling and make use of every media outlet we can, we created videos on all social media platforms to help Saudi fans understand what Giddam was about only two weeks before the Cup. The next step was help fans interact using Saudi's most popular apps Snapchat and TikTok with a custom made lens to show their support of the team. We then contacted influencers to voice the campaign, but to our surprise, others jumped on the bandwagon. Once the Saudi fans got hyped, traveled to Qatar, they were met with incredible outdoor projections on Doha's most significant buildings.

Over 750,000 people from from around the world visited the fan zone in less than 2 weeks.

25,000 Saudi fans marched from the Saudi House to the first game in Qatar against Argentina... helping KSA create the biggest upset in history by beating the eventual champions 2-1.

Online, the campaign received 19 billion media impressions + 22 million interactions with 98% positive feedback. It got 263 million video views and became the #2 trending topic on Twitter.
More importantly, the perception of KSA around the entire globe had changed.