Guinness World Records attempt

ASK
Within Discovery Networks’ bouquet of channels, HGTV (Home & Garden Television) performs extremely well globally. However, in Kuwait, it’s a relatively unknown brand. Discovery and its broadcast partner in-market, beIN, challenged M&C Saatchi to drive awareness for HGTV and, ultimately, paid subscriptions.

The objectives were defined by the client as:

• Develop a single campaign that engages a large Kuwaiti audience with the HGTV brand
• Demonstrate increased share of voice across traditional and social media
• Demonstrate a direct business impact by driving beIN subscriptions

BRUTAL SIMPLICITY OF THOUGHT
First, we looked at the markets where HGTV performs particularly well, such as in the US and UK, which overwhelmingly pointed towards a female demographic aged between 25 – 45. If we wanted to increase overall viewership for HGTV in Kuwait, how might we engage Kuwaiti women of the same age?

We then turned our attention to what type of activity would have the most business impact, whilst keep in line with what our research revealed, as well as remaining sustainable. Given we were looking to achieve widespread awareness through a single piece of activity, it needed to be a mass-involvement event and we wanted to go big. And what could be ‘bigger’ than a Guinness World Record (GWR) Attempt? To ensure our attempt was also tied undeniably to the HGTV brand, we set our sights on achieving the World’s Largest Gardening Lesson.

Strict guidelines from GWR dictated that the person giving the lesson must hold relevant qualifications in the field they were teaching in and, from our research, we knew our most effective approach would involve collaborating with an influencer. Our ‘digging’ led us to gold when we identified 28-year-old Kuwaiti national, Alzainah Albabtain of @itallgrows. Alzainah, who had turned her passion and love for organic home gardening and cooking into a popular insta-blog, boasted an established and engaged network of female followers in our target demographic; our strategy for execution, therefore, involved leveraging Alzainah’s demonstrated influence to achieve our KPIs.

IMPACT

• 1 sold-out event (including 100 ‘waitlist’ tickets)
• Gold | Best Campaign in Kuwait | MEPRA (Middle East Public Relations Association)
• Gold | Best use of Influencer | MEPRA (Middle East Public Relations Association)
• 400+ event attendees, including spectators
• 286 record participants
• Top tier media attendance, including live broadcast
• 47 pieces of media coverage
• Millions of social impressions
• Alzainah’s e-commerce site increasing traffic by 12%
• Increase in interaction across HGTV’s platforms
• Share of voice increased by 40% compared to the previous month
• One New Guinness World Record

Client: HGTV (Home and Garden Television)
Office: Dubai
Year: November, 2019