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Warid Sundialing Turns a Billboard Shadow Into a Rate Finder
Warid's Sundialing campaign is a 2014 outdoor billboard execution created by Scanad Uganda in which a sundial-style structure casts a shadow that points toward the country customers can call at Warid's lowest international rate, turning a single static media asset into a live, functional communications tool in the Ugandan market.
Published in January 2014 in Uganda, Sundialing emerged at a pivotal moment in Warid Telecom's commercial history. According to Olyvt Wordpress, the campaign ran across the 2013–2014 period, coinciding with Airtel's acquisition of Warid Uganda in 2013, as reported by bharti.com. Rather than retreating into conventional promotional messaging during that transitional phase, Scanad Uganda delivered a piece of outdoor work that operated on both a practical and a conceptual register. The billboard did not merely announce a rate — it demonstrated the rate in real time, using the movement of the sun as its media channel.
The campaign's objective was clear: to communicate Warid's competitive international calling tariffs to Ugandan subscribers in a format that was immediately legible, memorable, and physically engaging. In a category where price points are notoriously difficult to differentiate at the point of outdoor contact, Sundialing collapsed the distance between the advertising message and the consumer decision. A commuter glancing at the billboard could read the shadow's direction and understand, without any supplementary copy, which country was cheapest to call at that moment. That mechanic is the campaign's defining intelligence. Clapboard scores Sundialing 66 out of 100, recognising the conceptual strength of the execution while noting the inherent limits of a single outdoor asset operating within a brand undergoing structural change.
Warid Telecom operated in one of East Africa's most competitive mobile telecommunications environments. Uganda's mobile market in 2014 comprised five operators, according to the Uganda Communications Commission as cited by scribd.com, with the Commission recording approximately 12.1 million mobile subscribers across those networks, as reported by Monitor Co Ug. That subscriber base was growing rapidly: the Uganda Communications Commission reported growth from 11.8 million subscribers in the financial year 2013/14 to 14.35 million by 2015, representing approximately 21.6 percent expansion, per scribd.com. Against that backdrop, international calling rates represented a tangible and recurring pain point for Ugandan consumers with cross-border family, business, and diaspora connections.
Warid's two most significant competitors in the Ugandan market were MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda — the latter having absorbed Warid's own subscriber base following the 2013 acquisition reported by bharti.com. This placed Scanad Uganda in the unusual strategic position of creating work for a brand that was, in commercial terms, already in transition. The insight driving Sundialing was not about brand equity in isolation; it was about price transparency as a form of consumer respect. Rather than burying the tariff detail in small print or routing consumers to a call centre, the campaign externalised pricing information into the physical landscape of the city.
That strategic choice aligned with a broader lineage of culturally embedded Warid communications in Uganda. The earlier Pakalast campaign, developed for Warid by MAAD Advertising and McCann around 2011 as documented by Uaa Ug, demonstrated how deeply a Warid message could penetrate everyday Ugandan life — Pakalast reportedly entered common speech and was used as a slogan during President Yoweri Museveni's 2011 re-election campaign, according to uaa.ug. Sundialing pursued a different register — functional rather than vernacular — but the underlying ambition to make the brand genuinely useful to Ugandan subscribers remained consistent.
Creative Director Amol Kulkarni of Scanad Uganda led the Sundialing execution, according to clapboard.com editorial records. The creative concept rests on a single, elegant mechanical principle: the gnomon of a sundial, the element that casts a shadow, is oriented so that as the sun moves across the Ugandan sky, the shadow it projects falls upon a different named country on the billboard's face. Each country corresponds to a specific international calling destination, and the shadow's position at any given hour indicates which destination Warid is offering at its lowest rate during that window. The execution contains no animated elements, no digital screen, no moving parts driven by motors — the billboard's dynamism is entirely solar.
That restraint is itself a creative decision of substance. Outdoor advertising in Uganda, as across most of Sub-Saharan Africa in 2014, operated predominantly in static formats. By engineering the billboard structure rather than the graphic layer, Kulkarni and Scanad Uganda produced work that changes without any production cost beyond the initial build. The single media asset documented in the campaign archive, as noted by clapboard.com, is sufficient to communicate the full concept because the concept is inherently self-explanatory to anyone standing before it during daylight hours.
The typographic and graphic execution visible in the archived asset is disciplined: country names are legible at distance, the sundial structure is unambiguous in its physical form, and the Warid brand identity anchors the composition without overwhelming the functional information layer. There is no headline in the conventional advertising sense; the shadow is the headline. The campaign was subsequently submitted to the Loeries Awards, one of Africa and the Middle East's most respected creative industry recognition programmes, and according to olyvt.wordpress.com and Comm Ae, Sundialing received a Silver Loeries Award in 2013. Production credits beyond the creative director role are not publicly documented for this campaign.
No verified performance data for the Sundialing campaign — including reach figures, subscriber uplift, or sales attribution — is publicly available. The Uganda Communications Commission's subscriber data, as reported by scribd.com and monitor.co.ug, confirms the broader market was growing through this period, but no source isolates Warid's commercial performance in response to this specific outdoor execution. This absence is contextually unsurprising: the campaign ran during Warid Uganda's absorption into Airtel's network following the 2013 acquisition documented by bharti.com, a structural event that renders brand-level attribution data for any single Warid campaign from this period difficult to isolate even for internal stakeholders.
What is verifiable is the campaign's standing within the advertising industry. According to olyvt.wordpress.com and comm.ae, Sundialing received a Silver Loeries Award in 2013, positioning the work among recognised creative achievements from Africa and the Middle East in that awards cycle. The Loeries is a peer-adjudicated programme, and a Silver award in outdoor or ambient categories signals that the campaign cleared a high bar for conceptual originality and executional integrity, as assessed by industry practitioners rather than proprietary metrics.
Structurally, Sundialing demonstrates what advertising scholarship identifies as high encoding specificity: the information delivered by the billboard — which country is cheapest to call — is encoded in a format directly tied to the physical act of glancing at the structure, making retrieval effortless. For a price-led message in a competitive mobile market in Uganda, that structural efficiency is the campaign's most defensible commercial logic. The Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100 reflects a campaign that achieves genuine conceptual distinction within the constraints of a single outdoor asset and a brand in mid-transition.
Warid's Sundialing campaign is a 2014 outdoor billboard created by Scanad Uganda. The billboard uses a sundial structure so its shadow points toward the country Warid customers can call at the lowest rate. The campaign appeared in Uganda in January 2014 and received a Silver Loeries Award in 2013, according to olyvt.wordpress.com.
Scanad Uganda created the Sundialing billboard for Warid. Creative Director Amol Kulkarni led the execution, according to clapboard.com. The campaign was published in Uganda in January 2014 and operates as a single outdoor media asset using solar movement to communicate Warid's lowest international calling rates to Ugandan subscribers.
Sundialing received a Silver Loeries Award in 2013, according to olyvt.wordpress.com and comm.ae. The Loeries recognises advertising creativity across Africa and the Middle East. The specific category of the award is not confirmed in publicly available sources, but the Silver level indicates peer-recognised conceptual and executional strength in outdoor advertising.
The Sundialing billboard used a gnomon — the shadow-casting element of a sundial — oriented so sunlight moves the shadow across named countries on the billboard face. Each country represented a Warid international calling destination. Whichever country the shadow pointed to at a given hour was the destination available at Warid's lowest rate at that time.
Uganda's mobile market in 2014 comprised five operators, per the Uganda Communications Commission as cited by scribd.com. Warid's primary competitors were MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda. Airtel had already acquired Warid Uganda in 2013, according to bharti.com, meaning Sundialing launched during the brand's transition into Airtel's commercial portfolio.
Clapboard scores the Warid Sundialing campaign 66 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's genuine conceptual strength — using solar movement as a live media channel — balanced against the inherent limitations of a single outdoor asset deployed during Warid Uganda's structural transition into Airtel's network following the 2013 acquisition.
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