Meet Dubai

Dubai suffered during the economic crisis, with lots of negative press amplifying the problem.  “Dubai-bashing” reaching a peak in November 2009 when conglomerate Dubai World postponed a payment of $60bn in debt, sending global financial markets tumbling.  The challenge was to influence global news and minimize any negative spillover from Dubai’s financial woes on to Emirates Airlines’ flagship image – which is commercially perceived as being interlinked with brand Dubai.

Emirates decided to tackle this by creating its own content highlighting the many positive sides of Dubai and disseminated it on some of the channels that attacked the city. Two clusters of audiences were the key shapers of the campaign - Dubai residents and international frequent flyers. Residents have a great sense of belonging and had invested in the survival of the city. The communication strategy was to humanize the city by mobilizing its people, emotions & experiences. These would be presented to the world in content that went beyond the standard TVC and featured very little branding.

Emirates recruited four time Emmy award winning producer/director of “The Amazing Race” to produce a series of vignettes, styled as a travel program, following a typical tourist as he interacted with the people and activities Dubai has to offer.

It then segmented all of the cutting room footage by genre and gave it to TV stations for free to use within their own programming. In many cases, instead of free-space added value the brand negotiated for the stations to shoot and produce their own content to complement the footage, because as long as Dubai was shown in a positive light Emirates would benefit.
Longer formats were made available online and a travel nanosite on the New York Times took the video content along with the biographies and faces featured in the videos to create new content.

As a result, nine global networks created positive segments about Dubai, leading to a shift in people’s attitudes towards Dubai – giving a 127% lift in “very favourable” opinion of Dubai, a 225% lift in likelihood to visit and a 129% lift in the likelihood to recommend Dubai. Despite only 3 seconds logo attribution for Emirates out of a 2 minute clip, 86% recalled seeing Emirates in the ad.
Crucially Dubai managed to increase visitor levels. Traffic through Dubai airport was up 9.2%, while traffic to Heathrow was down 2.8% and JFK down 9.2%.