#MarketingExcellenceAwards MY 2020 highlight: Goodday taps on tech to inject Hari Raya cheer

Bagging the silver award for the category “Excellence in Marketing Innovation” at A+M’s Marketing Excellence Awards 2020 is Etika Beverages. The beverage company was recognised for the Hari Raya campaign executed under its milk brand, Goodday, titled “Selamat Seleb-Raya”.

Collaborating with Noir by Entropia, Goodday looked to inject some fun over the muted festivities of Hari Raya in 2020, when the country was still under movement control order. Tapping into technology such as artificial intelligence and 3D character modeling, the brand managed to engage Malaysians and spread some cheer over the festive season. Here’s an in-depth look of how they did it.

Challenge

The year 2020 saw a very cautious celebration of the festive season, Hari Raya Aidilfitri. Instead of joyous festivities that saw families gathering and sharing meals, Muslims in Malaysia had a subdued holiday with people observing social distancing and discouraged from leaving their homes.

Despite the usual cheer being dimmed, Etika Beverages’ milk brand, Goodday Milk Malaysia, wanted to bring its goodness into the homes of Malaysians through the socially-distanced Raya.

The milk brand, which had been around since 1968, is sometimes perceived as a legacy brand. Hence, the key challenge was to gain penetration amongst younger milk drinkers. As the consumers of younger generations are more tech-savvy, Goodday decided to kickstart a one-of-a-kind campaign idea, and launch a tech-driven initiative.

The campaign also aimed to differentiate Goodday from other brands that are also trying to capitalise on this festive occasion.  

Strategy

Goodday teamed up with agency Noir by Entropia, and custom-designed an engaging campaign titled “Selamat Seleb-Raya” that aims to encourage Malaysians to stay indoors and avoid unnecessary travels. There were three crucial parameters that the team strived to achieve, to make the experience impactful, relatable, and personal.  

To achieve a campaign that is impactful, Goodday launched a digital initiative utilising webAR (augmented reality experiences that are accessed through a web browser), 3D volumetric capture and character modelling to bring out the extraordinary first-ever webAR-based experience. Using webAR tech, consumers will be able to bring "virtual celebrities’’ to life for "house visits’’ during Hari Raya celebration, adding that element of excitement to an otherwise muted Raya celebrations this year.

Goodday also understood how big celebrity idolisation is for the Malay community and, in a bid to be relatable, identified top 10 Malay celebrities based on a collective positive social mention by their fans. The team then layered six crucial parameters: brand proximity, social credibility, affinity correlation, catchment scale, multi-platform proactivity and engagement rate to decide on the "virtual celebrities’’ it wanted to work with.

To make the campaign personal, Goodday and Noir by Entropia used webAR technology to enable users to get a virtual 3D model of their favourite celebrity to appear in their homes. The user can walk around the celebrity, take pictures with the celebrity and even make the celebrity perform a song and wish them and their family for Raya.

Execution

In just less than three weeks, the team kick started the 3D character-modelling groundwork. Next was perfecting the animated movements of each character, ensuring that the movement seems as natural as possible. The movements need to be in sync to the celebrities’ "main acts’’ which included greetings, and singing while playing the guitar.

One day before the campaign went live, the team presented the 3D model of their own character with each celebrity, much to their excitement. The celebrities shared on their own social platforms which then garnered tremendous response from their fans. Two major content aggregators, Oh Bulan and Sirap Limau, picked up the buzz and featured the innovation on their pages, amplifying it further.

Additionally, Goodday also announced a creative photo challenge for consumers. The brand encouraged consumers to take a photo via the webAR with the chosen virtual celebrity to express their best creativity. Consumers can then upload it and hashtag #GooddaySelamatSelebraya and tag Goodday to join the contest. Every week, five lucky winners with the most creative photos will get to win RM500 cash each, totalling up to RM10,000 cash prize.

Results

Throughout the one-month campaign, Goodday Selamat Seleb-Raya reached out to over 4.65 million audience, and accumulated over 10.5 million impressions, 18k pageviews, 9,387 unique visits and 6,596 unique visitors from various traffic source to its webAR page.

Its creative photo challenge contest also garnered a total of 487 submissions from 25 May to 21 June 2020. The number of contest submissions was six times higher than Goodday’s key competitors’ social contests held during the same period. Last but not least, Goodday’s campaign helped citizens in getting through the tough time and ease up the process of adjusting to the new normal.