While Xpress Money operates in the serious business of money transfers -with all the investment in state of the art technology, regulatory compliance and transparency that comes with it – the beating heart of the brand relies on customer goodwill.
Our brand philosophy is to engage in our customers’ daily lives. We want to be involved, share their interests, and become part of their lives.
We know Xpress Money is a brand of choice for expatriate Arabs in the GCC. We are part of their community, and they are an intrinsic part of ours. We wanted to engage them in their leisure time, when they weren’t thinking of serious financial planning.
So we thought outside the box to create Studio Xpress – an online show dedicated to something our Arab audiences love across the board – football!
The show’s episodes, broadcast on Facebook and YouTube, were timed perfectly to coincide with the drama of the Euro 2016 football cup. Studio Xpress transported audiences to the action in France with behind the scenes commentary and insight.
Studio Xpress pressed into service a fantastic duo of presenters. Maan Dalghan, PR & Communicators Director of Xpress Money’s partner agency Quill Communications, is an amateur enthusiast of the game. We partnered him with Mohammed Awaad, Editor in Chief for Sport 360 Arabia’s website and a football analyst par excellence. Mohammed is a very influential figure, and was the perfect knowledgeable foil to Maan’s conversational skills.
Studio Xpress wanted to entertain and inform. It was a celebration of football prowess without any sales-related goals tacked on. And that’s why it became a phenomenon to be reckoned with – because our audience recognised that we wanted to be part of the football celebration without an overt sales motive.
Players, coaches and teams were all dissected and analysed by our expert duo with 11 filmed episodes broken down to 53 Facebook videos. The conversation was compelling, and our audiences responded. Arab fans from the world over answered the clarion call of football fandom, with a Facebook reach of 5.8 million.The videos racked up 500,000 impressions on Twitter, 1,345,799 views on Facebook, over 115,000 views on YouTube and roughly 1,000 shares with an Engagement Rate of 30% vs. the industry average of 7-9%!
Meanwhile, Mohammed’s personal fan following shone to the fore during the campaign. His Arabic posts engaged his 720,000 plus fans on Facebook and gained traction across other social channels too.
Xpress Money’s ethos is to be inclusive, conversational and engaging. Studio Xpress was no different. The show encouraged live questions submitted on Twitter using the hashtags #StudioXpress and 
#. Over 1,400 questions were received by our dynamic duo, and they answered over 350 of them live on the show to turn the broadcast into a conversation.
But that wasn’t all. Studio Xpress continued its two-way meeting of hearts, minds and football action through special competitions where fans were asked to predict results for cash prizes. Winners successfully forecasting the eventual winner of the EURO 2016 championship were awarded AED 2,000 in cash, while fans predicting the best player, best goalkeeper and top scorer for the tournament receiving AED 1,000 each.
Over 2,000 participants engaged with the competition that ended on the night of June 27th 2016. The final draw for the winners was done during the final episode, which saw a crescendo of noise and engagement while winners from the UAE, Iraq, Morocco, Syria and Egypt grabbed the prizes.
Studio Xpress galvanized the community. And it also yielded aspirational marketing results. It laid the groundwork for launching the Xpress Money Arabia page on Facebook, which netted 40,000 plus followers in the space of a month.
Written by Minella Dsouza, Head – Brand Marketing, Xpress Money
