Thursday, November 18, 2010

Mix and match from around the city.....




So here is a small round up of what is going on in twon:
The Tapirama ad which can be translated into "an offer to roll the red carpet for" is by far the winner of the lot, especially that - to begin with - Tapirama sell carpets! Actually, they have an offer whereby you win plenty of prizes by purchasing their marchandise.
Dar Al Aytam al Islamiyya, came up with "marha marha bel haj w bel adha" for the Adha feast (where it is a tradition to offer orphans lambs to be slaughtered - mind you Adha refers to the sacrifice that Abraham was about to when the hand of God stopped him). It is a far cry from their brilliant ad they did for their fundraiser of Ramadan which was so direct it was a beauty: "Beddak ta3ti lal aytem? Rou7 3a dar el aytem!" (Want to donate to orphans, go to the house of the orphans (which is what Dar al Aytam means anyway!))...
Bank of Beirut, just like Blom bank through their Blomshabeb website, want to ride the bandwagon of youth.... At least visually, they manage to captivate it more than Blom did. However for both of them, the move is so clumsy and gauche - after all, if you can't talk to the youth in their own language, why pretend to be hip and young and cool when you're not? Frankly, I am fed up with banks playing guardian angels, and here I go back to that oh-so-lovely selling line of BNP Paribas (which they used between 1974-1980): "Pour parler franchement, votre argent m'interesse." (to be honest, I am interested in your money).
Which brings us to the next banking blunder. Federal Bank of Lebanon has this two-visual campaign - neither of them work though. Pictured is the cell phone execution. "I'm sorry... I found the bank of my dreams" is a text message addressed to his previous bank account... Great, now what's missing is to find the advertising agency of  one's dreams! Because this one obviously does not work.

1 comment:

Danielle said...

Yeah I'm not liking the youth bandwagon everyone seems to be jumping on these days..A space 4 you, a space 4 youth? Lame. I went to the website, just out of curiosity. First of all, the website doesn't even come up unless you type in the www, that needs to be fixed from a development standpoint. I just think that whoever is behind this campaign is a bit too hopeful that a couple of billboards will successfully drive people to the website. I have seen nothing about it online ANYWHERE. I don't know, I just think it could have been better executed.