Ads out and about

 What is it that puts me off in those Pepsi ads? It is the fake understanding of the slice of life? Is it this inability to capture what their audience wants? It is the duplication of a formula which worked wonders in the 70s? "Yallah Now" (yallah, is Arabic for "come, let's go")... Bah! There's really no call for action here.

The Free Patriotic Movement is launching a book "the impossible absolution" - which threatens in Numbers to tell the story of everything that was (most likely) stolen or mismanaged. See this as the first advertising blitz for the parliamentary elections of 2013. Line says "now it's time to ask for the check" - I am taking a rain check this time around!

 Sure, I hated their original campaigns, and not all the visuals of this one work, but the above "some mistakes are too fun to make only once" seems to strike a point. So let's give them a bit of an encouragement.

Total, is managing to give consistently nice ads. This one is about the diesel oil which the ad says "correct diesel" (mazout mazbout) which is very nice and cool looking in Arabic. Actually, I fell in love with the sub-line "from trusted sources" (min masdar mawtouk) which is an expression frequently used by Lebanese media when indicating info from anonymous but reliable sources. I wish that was the headline, so cheeky!