Today, ElCoach, MENA’s premier on-demand fitness, and nutrition app released its Year in Review 2020 and we are seriously impressed.

With demand on Fitness apps growing by 46% during COVID-19’s first wave, it looks like this team worked harder to offer Arabs a chance to be slimmer and healthier.

Assem Emam, CEO & Co-Founder of ElCoach.Inc says “(we) worked like a beehive to grow our business in this tough time.”

He adds “(aiming to) help people of the MENA region find new and creative ways to stay fit and maintain a healthy lifestyle.”

Work paid off for Users and ElCoach

As the “best-in-class workouts engine in the MENA region”, ElCoach adapts users’ next workouts to push them faster & smarter towards achieving their goals.

Since it is a community-based model, the ElCoach community has collectively performed 2,843,388 workouts during 2020 to lose weight, gain muscle, or increase their fitness level.

No Couch but more Coach

The app also pushed users to turn their locked-down living spaces into gyms with the use of virtual fitness with videos.

As demand for “at home workout programs” with 8 times the size of demand for gym-based workouts. 90% of the demand was targeted towards “Weight Loss”.

Forget Baking, how about 150 K of Healthy Meals?

With ElCoach focusing on nutrition as part of a healthy lifestyle, their year-in-review shows users being less interested in stressing about calories and BMI.

Instead, users were more about nutritional factors like food macros and environment-friendly ingredients.

The app now boasts a roster of delicious vegetarian/vegan meals which empowered the ElCoach community to cook 157,369 healthy meals and eventually burning 165,864,300 calories collectively.

And with the economy suffering in 2020, 69% of ElCoach users opted for “pocket-friendly meals”.

Sweaty Steps for the Win

In November of 2020, ElCoach introduced a progress tracking & step counting feature to aid users in setting goals and measuring the progress of their steps, workouts, calories, and water consumption all in one place.

So, ElCoach community collectively walked  23,240,147 steps, and consumed 2,171,493 cups of water.

The Icing on the Healthy Cake

My most inspiring number, reading this report, was the fact that 88% of ElCoach’s premium subscribers reporting “noticeable change in their body shapes & fitness levels after trying ElCoach for the first few weeks”

It seems the app’s focus on offering a truly local and inclusive perspective on fitness gave the users a push to truly maintain a healthy yet very attainable lifestyle.

Assem wraps it eloquently, saying “It fuels our energy to know that our product resonates with customers and is fueling them to lead healthier and more fulfilling lives.”

Tarek Nour Communications (TNC) released a short and sweet case study on their Ramadan 2020 Campaign for La Poire, and we believe it is marketing gold.

In the two-minute case study published on Youtube, TNC demonstrated the change in Egyptians’ lifestyle this Ramadan for almost everything due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but, for a famous 45-year-old patisserie brand in a country fascinated by Ramadan desserts and is keen on sharing them in close-knit family gatherings even during the pandemic.

In a COVID-19 weary era, selling Ramadan desserts posed a severe challenge. Only family gatherings were limited, and a lockdown was killing the vibe. But we can always rely on TV to remain a Ramadan Fixture.

TNC resorted to Nostalgia mixed with humor in a series of social posts with little to no media spending to remind Egyptians of timeless TV series dubbed in catchy fun conversations about La Poire’s Ramadan Desserts.

Viewers were laughing, and more importantly, they were engaged.

The concise videos became an instant viral hit on Social Media, with views totaling 5.1 Million. Users were commenting, sharing, tick-tocking it, and just laughing at a time of uncertainty and face masks.

According to TNC, La Poire, a proper household name of everything sweet in Egypt, increased its sales by 50% nationwide. The campaign further established the brand’s place as Egypt’s dessert sweetheart.

Why is this marketing gold?

1. Little to No Media Spend

TNC didn’t need to spend money on buying ad slots or employ digital advertising. It didn’t interrupt every Youtube video, but the content proved to catch the attention of customers.

2. Celebrities without the big paycheck

Every Ramadan, it became customary to see the odd post about how much each celebrity gets paid for a Ramadan campaign. This time the production, while featuring stars like Mahmoud Abd El Aziz (RIP) and Raghda, didn’t necessarily need the big paycheck. They just recycled some of Egypt’s all-time favorite Ramadan TV shows from the 1980s and 1990s.

3. Nostalgia doesn’t have to be sad

Contrary to several other campaigns, this one proved to be nostalgic about times long gone doesn’t mean one should be sad or remorseful. Instead, remembering the good old days can still happen with a big grin on your face.

4. UGC is the future

We don’t know about you, but sometimes it feels like when brands “talk” to you, it stops being fun and becomes more like a lecture about how cool they are. Enter User Generated Content, which prompts each one of us to feel like they are part of an immense universal feeling that they MUST interact with.

It is fun for the user and becomes free traffic for the brand. In essence, we all become brand ambassadors for the brand without the hefty influencer price-tag and with much bigger reach than anyone.

5. We all need to learn

TNC publishing a short case study is the right step in demonstrating to budding marketers and creatives, and releasing case studies is each creative’s way of teaching others. The community becomes more knowledgeable, more creative, and, more importantly, more determined to produce, learn, and educate others.

Got a case study you want to share? Show us! [email protected]

Facebook has revealed statistics of its Text-Delights soccer animations that were launched ahead of Russia 2018 World Cup. More than 583 million tournament-related animations appeared on Facebook during the tournament. In total, there were 78 phrases that triggered animations: a few celebratory phrases for each of the 32 countries in the tournament and nine language variants of “Goal!”. Said Facebook in a blogpost.

Now that the World Cup has wrapped, these soccer animations are no longer active.

During the tournament, for instance, when fans of the Egypt national team typed “Yalla Ya Masr” into a post or comment, they might have seen Egypt’s team colors shoot across the screen along with an animation of Pharaohs, a flag and celebratory streamers. When fans of Nigeria posted the team’s “Up Super Eagle” cheer, they might have seen a stream of green and white alongside an eagle. And no matter what country a fan was cheering for, celebrating a big goal — or GOOOOOOOOOOALLL! — activated a soccer ball rocketing across the screen with fireworks and applause.

See a goal in action

These kinds of text effects first rolled out on Facebook in 2017.

Creative Director Zach Stubenvoll, who oversaw the project, describes the process by saying, “Creatively, we pushed the animations to express each team’s pride and capture some of the excitement of watching a game live in a stadium. We looked at every aspect of the experience — from color, icons, motion and sound design — making sure each was thoughtfully considered and relevant for fans.”

During the 2014 World Cup, Facebook noticed that fans were celebrating big goals on the platform in real-time by typing “Goal!” or “Gol!”, but that they weren’t content to use justly a single O. To ensure that they could capture the full scope of fans’ enthusiasm, the team designing this year’s animations developed a new method of pattern matching that allowed for any number of G‘s, O‘s, A‘s, and L‘s to activate the animation. In English, “Goal,” “goalll,” “goooooaaaalllll” and “GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL” all resulted in the animation. The team then repeated this process for nine different language variants of “goal.”

“In 2018, more than 11 million O‘s were used in instances of the English word “goal” on Facebook. But there were more than 85 million O‘s in instances of “gol”, the word in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The most exuberant “goal” contained 63,199 characters—or the equivalent of 17 pages of text written in single-spaced 12-point font.” Said Facebook

Most popular country cheers during the World Cup

Mexico comes first on most popular country cheers list with 84 million cheers, Brazil comes second with 64 million, Argentina third with 64 million, Egypt fourth with 47 million, and Colombia fifth with 41 million. According to Facebook data.

[table id=3 /]

Source: Facebook

Source: Facebook

How often did you use text delights during the World Cup to cheer for your team?