Ads that fast with you is a Mina Halal digital ad campaign for Ramadan, geo-targeting Muslim Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area. Ramadan is a busy time for Muslim Canadians. All the stresses of an immigrant’s life continue unabated even as they abstain from food and water for 12 to 18+ hours a day. (With Canada’s longer daylight hours in late spring and early summer, Muslims here fast longer than in most other parts of the world.) We knew our communications couldn’t just cruelly shove images of food in their faces at a time when their hunger pangs were strongest.

Our Big Idea: A Ramadan campaign that keeps the fast and breaks the fast with you.

A brand that fasts with you: We chose to be empathetic. During the hours our consumers were fasting, we showed no food in our ads — empty plates moved through the sky in our ads “rising” and “setting” in sync with the sun and moon.

A brand that feasts with you: Plates loaded with delicious Mina Halal chicken were only shown when fasting was done for the day and our consumers gathered for their nightly family feasts.

A brand that follows the sun and moon with you: Our campaign “kept and broke the fast” with Muslim Canadians — the creative in our ads changed in sync with the progress of the sun and moon through the sky.

A brand that feels for you: We couldn’t afford to get the timing wrong — it would result in fasts broken too early. As fasting for Ramadan begins at sunrise and ends at sunset, our campaign needed to adapt to daily changes in sunrise and sunset times for just like our consumers did so we partnered with The Weather Network (TWN) to execute our creative idea.

TWN’s weather-based, location-based sunrise and sunset data, combined with real-time user-location data, allowed us to deliver customized messages to Muslim Canadians across the GTA, at sunrise, sunset and during the day, precisely for their specific locations. We used this to deliver accurate suhoor and iftaar times — real-time clock updates — which were dynamically inserted into the ad headlines based on when and where users viewed the ad. The ads used 24-hour spatial tracking of the sun and the moon to dynamically update time-matched visuals – an empty plate for suhoor and a full plate for iftaar; a white plate for the moon at nighttime, and a yellow plate for the sun during the day.

The campaign ended with a celebratory message that leveraged local moonrise times to mark Eid, which begins when the new moon is sighted.

2023 Marketing Awards: two golds for Digital and Holiday/Seasonal Advertising in the Multicultural category
2022 Summit Marketing Effectiveness Award: Best of Category for Online Advertising and Marketing