Valentine “Make A Move”

Background

Welcome to Lebanon’s dating scene, where there are 6 women for every man but it is still taboo for women to make the first move.

Since Exotica, Lebanon’s leading flower-shop chain, is all about “Make a difference”, the ambition was to make a real difference in 2010 by trying to help every single woman get herself a Valentine by encouraging women to take their happiness into their own hands.

Idea

Two months before St. Valentine’s Day, an anonymous blog was posted at ivysays.com. Tweeting and blogging about single life in Beirut, Ivy became the local Carrie Bradshaw and quickly gathered an enthusiastic following amongst young single women.

On her blog, Ivy published her manifesto stating the new rules of the dating game.

Rule Number One: I have the right to make the first move.

The manifesto was then printed and distributed in the streets, turning Ivy’s cause into that of every single lady in Lebanon.

At the height of her popularity, Exotica officially joined forces with Ivy and put up posters urging women to “Make a move”. Exotica was now mentioned by name on Ivy’s blog but with the same message, it’s time the girls took matters into their own hands.

Each girl could tell a guy how she felt about him by offering him a rose with a coded meaning. There were seven differently-coloured roses, each with a different meaning, created as a result of crowdsourcing and asking women for their ideas.

Now 10,000 differently-coloured roses were handed out to single ladies in the trendiest district of town for them to give to the man of their choice.

After getting a flower from a girl, the guy could decode his rose on the blog and if successfully hooked buy HER a bouquet of Exotica roses to seal the deal on Valentine’s.

Coded e-flowers were also sent online.

Results

Sales at Exotica shops were 21% higher than at Valentine’s 2009. There was massive PR generated by the campaign and it was acclaimed both in newspapers, on TV and in the blogosphere.

ivysays.com got an average of 1,200 views a day, in a country with only 400,000 high-speed connections, making it the most popular blog in Lebanon in February.

Girls identified so much with the message that they started creating and personalizing their own sashes.

But most of all, we got countless thanks from recently hooked up couples.

Our Thoughts

In many ways Lebanon is still a very patriarchal society. Leo Burnett Beirut seem to be single-handedly trying to change this. A year ago they were behind the Khede Kasra campaign to empower women and here they are encouraging women to be a little bolder in the dating game.

This is social engineering and the real crunch moment of the campaign would have been when Exotica declared themselves to have been behind the blog and the blogger. Many people could have turned away from the campaign at this point, realizing they were being marketed to. The fact they didn’t is largely down to the lightness of touch of the work and to the fact that it seems the men of Lebanon were equally in need of some help with their love lives.