The archive · Content & Film · Marketing decision · 2024–2025
Al-Futtaim Toyota turns streets named after women into audio stories — Dubai Lynx GP
Geo-targeted audio turns female-named streets into narrated stories for drivers — 1.8M impressions, Dubai Lynx 2025 Audio & Radio Grand Prix.
Al-Futtaim Toyota · Memac Ogilvy Dubai · Yango Ads
What it had to solve
Dubai's streets carry women's names, but most drivers do not know who those women were. For Emirati Women's Day, Al-Futtaim Toyota wanted to honour the women who shaped the UAE and connect its own deep-rooted local legacy to that story.
How it works
Dubai is full of streets named after influential Emirati women, but their names have become invisible landmarks. For Emirati Women's Day 2024, Al-Futtaim Toyota, Memac Ogilvy, the RTA and PHD turned those names back into stories.
Using geo-targeting inside Yango Maps, the campaign detected when drivers were on a female-named street such as Hessa Street or Latifa Bint Hamdan Street and played an audio story about the woman behind the name, narrated by female Emirati voiceover artists. The navigation app became a storytelling platform, and Toyota vehicles became mobile narrators.
Radio traffic announcements about the streets, OOH placements and social content spread the same stories to people outside the cars, making the campaign a city-wide cultural moment rather than a private in-app experience.
The work reached over 200,000 unique users and logged 1.8 million banner impressions, and went on to win the Grand Prix in Audio & Radio at Dubai Lynx 2025, plus a SMARTIES MENA 2025 Silver for real-time marketing.
Why it lands
- The insight was geographic: women's names were already on the map, so the campaign only had to give them a voice instead of creating new media.
- Audio was the right format because it plays into the commute without demanding attention — the story arrives exactly when the driver is on the street it is about.
- Female Emirati narrators made the medium part of the message, so who told the stories mattered as much as what they said.
- Extending to radio traffic announcements and OOH turned a navigation feature into a shared public narrative.
What it did
The in-app experience logged 1.8 million banner impressions and reached over 200,000 unique users, with 668,000 search-menu impressions, 155,000+ impressions from 3D map objects at 2.5% CTR and push notifications at 5% CTR. The campaign won the Dubai Lynx 2025 Grand Prix in Audio & Radio and a SMARTIES MENA 2025 Silver for real-time marketing.
What you can take
When a brand's story is rooted in place, the city itself can be the medium: put the narrative where people already are — the daily commute — instead of interrupting them somewhere else.
Since then
The campaign ran through Emirati Women's Day 2024 and beyond, with the audio stories remaining in Yango Maps. Its recognition followed at Dubai Lynx 2025, where it won the Grand Prix in Audio & Radio, and at MMA MENA SMARTIES 2025, where Yango Ads took Silver in Real-Time Marketing. For Al-Futtaim Toyota it became a flagship example of turning brand heritage into cultural relevance.
Sources
- Memac Ogilvy & Toyota: UAR's streets tell drivers the stories of groundbreaking women
- Al-Futtaim Toyota Turns Streets into Stories for Emirati Women's Day with Journey into Herstory Campaign
- Al-Futtaim Toyota and Memac Ogilvy Dubai capture Grand Prix at prestigious Dubai Lynx festival
- All the 2025 Dubai Lynx Awards
- Yango Ads wins Silver for 'Journey into Her Story' at SMARTIES MENA
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