PopCon cinema stunt for Emirates NBD covered by ArabAd

ArabAd covered The PopCon, a cinema fraud-awareness experiment Almost Impossible created for Emirates NBD, in which 220 moviegoers received a fake SMS.

The story

ArabAd's staff reported on the stunt on 19 October 2024 under the headline "Emirates NBD runs a scam on its own customers but for a good reason" (opens in a new tab). The piece places it within the bank's #UnitedAgainstFraud campaign.

The brief from Emirates NBD was to make fraud risk feel real again. The bank had already run many awareness messages and films, yet people still believed a scam would never happen to them. Our case study calls the real challenge denial rather than education, and the answer was to recreate the method scammers use instead of warning people about it.

In a live cinema screening, moviegoers received an SMS on the mobile number they used to buy their tickets, offering a free PopCon. The link opened a mobile web page with no app download, asking for personal details. Then came the reveal: a message that they had been hacked, followed by guidance on how to spot suspicious senders, links and urgency tactics. The aim, in the case study's words, was to train people rather than scare them.

According to the case study, 90% of recipients clicked the SMS link. The film passed 3.3M+ video views within days of launch and the work recorded 19.5M+ media impressions.

What the article did not cover

ArabAd describes the experiment and its message. The case study adds the thinking behind it: SMS was chosen because it is the channel people trust most and fall for fastest, and because overconfidence makes people dismiss warnings as meant for someone else.

Why it matters

Awareness messaging can be easy to ignore. Putting the audience inside the scam, then showing them what happened, gave the bank a lesson people could repeat to others. More on our work for banks and fintechs: Banking and fintech.