Yas Island used a recognizable and nostalgic hit song with new lyrics across media channels to promote its attractions and offers.
Objective
The diversity of daily experiences that Yas Island provides stands out from other "staycation" destinations. Despite this, Yas Island was still being affected by the remnants of the pandemic, with consumers choosing alternatives due to proximity and a lack of top-of-mind awareness when it came to staycations for United Arab Emirates (UAE) families. To change this, Yas Island challenged consumers to seek truly travel-worthy experiences instead of the usual cookie-cutter hotel experiences.
Context
In the first year of the campaign, Yas Island wanted to connect strongly with its main audience of millennial parents. It did so through nostalgia, writing and producing a video-driven hit song "Yas Yas Baby," which riffed on Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby." The tune served as a call-back to the time when millennial parents were young themselves and to their childhood memories with their own parents. Yas Island thus banked on the song striking the right chord and connecting with them as parents themselves today. Yas Island encouraged the UAE population to "#BreakLikeYouMeanIt" through an engaging video coupled with a summer promotion and a strong call to action.
Target Audience
The campaign targeted audiences within the UAE to capitalize on the staycation trend that occurred due to the pandemic.
The campaign's audience consisted of three main segments — in order of priority:
Creative and Media Strategy
Yas Island aimed to change the perception of staycations for its audience from relaxation to fun and adventure. Yas Island had everything it needed to challenge what people thought of summer staycations in UAE's heat.
The total media budget for this campaign was distributed across four main digital media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, along with OOH via the Burj Khalifa. The budget allocation was skewed heavily towards Facebook and Instagram at 40 percent to drive the highest reach, followed by YouTube at 20 percent, and TikTok at 18 percent — with the remaining going to the Burj Khalifa.
Yas Island launched the campaign with a Vanilla Ice-inspired music video, with the familiar "Ice Ice Baby" catchy beat starting the video, but with lyrics that played on what Yas Island had to offer, showing the breadth of fun activities available on the island. Promotional messaging was left until the end of the video, allowing the video to gain organic popularity. The music video was launched and promoted on Yas Island's social channels.
The ad was also featured in cinemas around the country helping Yas Island raise awareness and exposing the ad to over one million viewers across the UAE, giving the campaign much-needed reach.
The campaign was the first major campaign in which Yas Island leveraged TikTok, communicating with its fun, young, and trendy audiences with the perfect video. Its presence across the platform as well as on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram made the song become a hit, achieving a positive sentiment score of over 60 percent.
Yas Island planned and executed the world's first largest karaoke display on the Burj Khalifa, where it teased its audience on social media beforehand to gather for and experience the event. Yas Island played the song and displayed the lyrics on the screen during the weekend, where hundreds of people sang and danced along to the tune.
Yas Island went from ranking sixth to first in its category.
The campaign achieved the highest growth in Buzz and Ad Awareness both within its category and among some of the country's leading brands and spenders. This proved that with its limited budget and below-average media spends, Yas Island was able to generate the strongest ROI of any travel and leisure campaign in the UAE.
During the campaign, revenue increased by 113.8 percent, average order value on the website increased by 11.2 percent, and Yas Island's e-commerce conversion rate hit an all-time high of 2 percent.
