Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Hardee's Arabo-English oddity

Image credit GM
So here's a baffling campaign. Hardee's wants to jump headfirst into the Arabo-English pool. Mashrema ma3na - says the line. Mind you the product is "mushroom and cheese" so mushroom gave rise to the verb mashrema (add mushroom to it) or it could be a very bad play on the word mashre3a (do a outing with it). Bothways, it doesn't work.
I love wordsmithing, and Leo Burnett (the man) was famous for keeping a copybook in his drawer which had new slang words for him to use in his ads. But those words were actually things people sad previously, not words he invented like the above verb. Ex, there's a "Lebanese" verb that goes "banchar el douleb" (the tyre went flat), but the word banchar comes from "puncture". So using that word would be great in an ad, inventing a new one somehow fails.
 

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