Advertising Agency: Creative Circle, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
I’ll redirect our more metabe3 readers to a post I made earlier about another Saudi TV commercial for a moment. As you could’ve guessed I was less than impressed with what I was seeing at the time, and as a result FP7 Jeddah had to put up with being the butt of what promised to be a long line of Saudi ‘jokes’ on my part.
Cower no more, Promo boys. Creative Circle’s taken the weight off you.
Now I’m going to try and be objective for once rather than just reacting instinctively. There may be a few numskulls who actually like the concept of grinning well-to-do Saudis uttering gibberish to promote some mayo product, but even they would agree that this has to be done while following some kind of system. Listen closely, Creative; I’ll give you the secret. Here it is… [dramatic pause]… if you’re going to go for humorous, what really makes the approach work is HUMOR. You wanna make a funny ad, make sure it’s fucking funny! Doing it in such a robotically fake manner doesn’t count (look at the actors’ eyes and tell me that for a single moment they’re buying into this bullshit). And another tip for any kind of humor: never, EVER make your characters do the laughing for people. Here it sounds like the actors are filling some kind of void to make up for the silence coming from the audience. What’s not so humorous about that void, is that it really does need filling up.
That’s the objective view, the caring side of me that wishes to see people learn from their errors and develop… so of course it’s the more time-consuming side of me. If you want it a bit shorter then here’s the unrestricted opinion: Stop wasting money, shut your firm down and go into real estate like everyone else is. You’re obviously shit at this advertising thing.
Whew, that’s better.