Uk’shona Kwelanga was launched in June 2016 as a campaign for Sanlam’s funeral scheme offering. Through the use of WhatsApp text messages, voice notes, and videos, the series tells the story of a family planning a funeral. 

media update’s Nikita Geldenhuys spoke to Matshisevhe to find out how the series performed and what technical challenges Sanlam’s team had to overcome to make Uk’shona Kwelanga happen.

What goals did Sanlam set for itself with this campaign and to what extent did you achieve these?

We were aiming for 10 000 sign-ups and have doubled this number. To date, we’ve had 22 300 sign-ups to follow the Uk’shona Kwelanga drama series. This equates to roughly 7 300 plus hours of content consumed.

There has also been a much wider reach through the promotional material and publicity of the campaign, which we estimate reached 30 million plus people. We’ve also had great feedback. A lot of people message us on WhatsApp to comment on moments in the story.

We’re getting requests for a second season and subscriptions have also been growing.

Do you know whether any other brands have used Whatsapp as a platform for a series?

As far as we know, Sanlam is the first to do so. That’s why we chose this platform; we wanted to do something different. It also happened to be the perfect platform to reach our audience, as it is accessible and inexpensive.

This is a relevant platform for delivering the funeral product message, seeing that mobile phones are often used when communicating funeral plans. Very few brands have used WhatsApp successfully as a marketing channel as it poses some serious technical challenges.

There are a number of local pioneers in the media and retail space, like EWN and Junkmail.co.za, that we could learn from.

Can you tell us more about the technical setup of this series, including how messages were automated?

We used the Broadcast list function and had multiple groups running at the same time to give people the full experience.

Broadcast lists are limited to 250 people so we had to figure out a way to get people into the right group and avoid duplications. We used multiple numbers to manage the scale of it.

Lastly, what challenges did you face in producing this campaign?

There were two main challenges. Firstly, it was how do we tell an authentic and genuinely gripping story on a messaging platform – which we tackled by combining agency skills with that of Bongi Ndaba, a very well-known scriptwriter, who has worked on Generations and Isidingo.

The second challenge was the technical one of how to deliver the full story at scale with limited resources.

Messaging platforms are increasingly where we’re spending time, so I think we’ll be seeing a lot more campaigns using WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Snapchat. We’re in the very early days of using these platforms, so there is still a lot of creative potential.

Watch the introduction video for Uk’shona Kwelanga.

Can brands use messaging apps for marketing purposes? Find out in our article, Dark social is the new social media – insights from BBM’s Adam Pattison.