Dubai Radio Ads

This is not a radio ad, but only marginally less annoying.

This is Cynthia Dreamy Whingy Breathy Voice. Come to extravagant opulence, indulge in timeless elegance and experience sumptuous flavours from the mystical past of a bygone age. Be the person you always knew you could be, share the finest things the world can present to you on a golden platter bedecked in shinies. Otiose effulgence, pastoral impedance and acrostic tintinnabulation await your very fulfilment in a symphony of exotic flavours and oubliette laden senescence. While away the evening and taste asparagus as you've never tasted it before at Pinglies, the new signature destination from the Wawawoo Resort and Spa in Satwa, the new face of Jumeirah One.


Dynamic Simon? Hi, it's Drippy Pete. How are you?
Hey! I'm Great Pete! Good to see you! And, yes! I'm Dynamic Simon Alright!
I was wondering, Simon. What makes you so much more dynamic than me?
Well, Pete! Good Question! I'm Dynamic because I Brush with Sploid!
Brush? With Sploid? What's that?
It's the New Minty Fresh Breath Oral Health Solution From Organon Labs! Here!
What's this?
Your Own Tube of Sploid to Try Free of Charge!
Free of charge?
Yes! Free Samples are Available From Branches of Plaster Pharmacy!
Wow! I can't wait to try it!
You'll Love It, Pete. Or my Name's not Dynamic Simon!
this ad is regulated by the ministry of health and a baby racoon called dennis and contains no promise of future investments going up or down all situations portrayed are purely hypothetical and do not reflect reality perceived or promised. terms and conditions apply


WEEOOOSCREEEE! GNAAAAARRRRR! WOPWOPWOPWOP! WYEOW WYEOW! SHNIIIIISSSSTTTTTTOOOOO! WOOOOOARRRRGH! SNEET! SNEET! SNEET! SNEET!
Did you hear that? That's the sound your back makes when you sit at your laptop every day. Did you know your desk could be killing you? Avoid splayed prostate syndrome and the awful bone crushing side effects of bad posture by sitting on Dr Foster's Orthopedic Cushions. Sweat absorbing, hygienic and available in a range of coruscating colours including Windows 10 wait state blue.


Sorry. I forgot to turn the radio off after the news this morning and ran into the ad break. It was almost over before I realised and switched off.

Press Release: The Fear Returns

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The #UAEPR hashtag on Twitter was started by @theregos back in the days of yore, as he and I were swapping tales of woe from our experiences at the hands of the UAE's public relations practitioners. I had forgotten and thought it was me, @mrtompaye or @dxbmaven wot done the dirty deed first - but it would appear not.

#UAEPR is amusing; a sustained howl of pain from various media and bloggy types sharing the abuse we are all subjected to by the sort of drooling idiots who think sending breathless blipverts about car washing 'solutions' to people with absolutely no interest in car washing is a beezer scheme. That businesses are actually paying these clots to irritate an audience that buys its ink by the barrel is a source of never ending, childish wonderment to me.

It is from this stable that this week's highly popular press release about Bapsy's Brilliant Books came, a communication that ticks every box in the multi-layered mixed metaphor that is the Mille-Feuille Of Wrong.

And it is from this - gloriously Augean - stable also we are gifted with the following, sent to me on Monday of last week.

Dear Alexander,

I hope you are having a lovely week.   

It is with great excitement that we share the news of Coca-Cola Egypt's  Ramadan Charity Campaign #ثانية_تفرق, set to dominate social media platforms in Egypt and beyond.

This festive season Coca Cola is giving back to the Egyptian community by replacing their always hotly-anticipated television ads with a unique campaign against prejudice rolling out exclusively on digital media. Their TV ad budget is instead being poured into their  project of developing 100 villages. In recent days they have also galvanised Egypt's digital population, pledging that for every post featuring a finger raised against prejudice (symbolising one extra second) they will donate one additional pound to their project.
Kindly find below the press release for your reference. Please do let me know if you need imagery or any additional information as it would be a pleasure to assist.   I look forward to hearing your thoughts!   

Warm regards,  

Kristina

Fascinating, indeed. A press release - naturally packed with highly assertive language - that begs more questions than it answers. The 'press release below' was just an Arabic version of the above text and some YouTube links to Arabic language videos about people with disabilities drinking brown stuff. I naturally shared my thoughts with Kristina in the form of some questions about Coca Cola Egypt which her email to me raised:

1) How will the campaign dominate social media platforms in Egypt and beyond? What sort of metrics are you using for this goal and what will success look like for you? 

2) How are Coca Cola's TV ads hotly anticipated? Do you have any statistics regarding consumer reaction to the ads and how anticipated they are? 

3) What is Coca Cola's Ramadan TV ad budget for 2015? Is this the same as 2014? Can you confirm this is all being spent on social good programmes this year? 

4) I'm not aware of Coca Cola's programme to develop 100 villages? When did it launch? With what goals? What form has it taken in the past? What has it achieved so far? What villages, in which regions of Egypt, are being assisted? 

5) What will Coca Cola be doing for these villages in 2015? 

6) How has Egypt's social media population been galvanised? Do you have figures of posts, engagement, reach to substantiate that? 

7) The raised finger in a selfie signifies one extra second of what? 

8) A finger raised against prejudice in Egypt is interesting. Which prejudice in particular, or all prejudice? Can you confirm that Coca Cola's definition of prejudice includes prejudice against gay and Lesbian people? 

9) What is Coca Cola's existing donation for Ramadan 2015? Is there a cap on how much it is willing to donate as part of this campaign? What is the maximum Coca Cola will donate? 

10) How does Coca Cola think this campaign will benefit its brand image as a purveyor of soft drinks?

It's nearly a week now and I haven't heard back from her. I'm sure the team has been beavering away gathering proof points that will back up the bold assertions in her email. Or perhaps I got caught in her spam filter, which will be doubtless more efficient than mine - which appears to have ceased to work for some reason.

Mind you, it's possible she wasn't being sincere when she said she was looking forward to hearing my thoughts. But I can't quite believe that.

It was clearly such a sincere email representing such a sincere campaign...

Wakeboarding On Cranberries

Now here's a thing you don't often see me sharing on the blog - a piece of video. I happen to like this video very much for a number of reasons and consequently thought it was worth sharing.

Have a watch. It's a little over 8 minutes of HD fun. Come on back when you're done.

Wasn't that fun? I've long been a fan of Red Bull's communications: they must stand as one of the first brands - perhaps the first brand - to understand the world's changed and it's no longer all about them. Red Bull creates great events, great content, great stories about people and their achievements and takes a back seat as it does so.

Sure there's branding in there, but it's not about Red Bull helps wakeboarders perform better or indeed all about them at all, the branding's usually pretty subtle. From the now famous 'Flugtags' through music events like the Red Bull Music Academy (reported on here extensively by Hind Mezaina) taking place this week in Dubai to sponsoring extreme sports, Red Bull has worked to foster and build communities and take its place in those communities as a welcome participant - a respectful participant in the conversation.

That's an amazing thing to do. IBM did it by spending $10bn on supporting Linux, transforming itself from being the 'Blue Meanies' in developers' eyes to being a respected member of the Linux community. Red Bull has done it by working with communities, creating great events and building streams of cool content out of that work.

The video's voice over, you'll note, is the cranberry farmer explaining how cranberries are grown and talking about his business. We focus on a guy who makes boarding ramps. Nowhere in the video is a shot of Red Bull cans or cheesy shots of young people snarfing Red Bull and having a great time. A logo on the wakeboard, one on the ramp and the titles. That's it. Nobody says how much they love Red Bull, nobody points at or drinks from a can. They didn't even brand the damn cranberries.

And I love it...

Sold Out

Mars (chocolate bar) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What?

Have I sold out? What's going on? Adwords on Fake Plastic Souks? What kind of swine would keep his blog ad free for five years and then sell his soul to Goog?

Me, that's what kind of swine. I've been playing around with Google AdWords quite a bit lately and thought I'd do some experimenting with the other end of the horse.

There's very little money in AdWords for yer average blogger, so I'm not about to give in the day job (in fact, it's the day job that's driven much of this interest) - with my traffic, I might buy a Mars Bar every month out of it if I'm very lucky. But I'm interested in the dynamics of things. And sometimes the only thing to do is pull the tyrant's nose and see what happens.

If you really want to know when I've sold out, it'll be when there are Amazon affiliate links on here to buy my books...

Liars

The Interview (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am never at my best in job interviews. I’m a disastrous candidate (I was once stopped in the middle of an interview to be told my ‘interview persona sucks’) and even worse as an interrogator. Never a great lover of formality, I find the stilted nervousness appalling.

The other day a candidate asked me what was the difference between PR and advertising. It struck me as an odd question to ask in an interview for a PR job, but I did my best to answer it. And my answer boiled down to this.

Public Relations - as I see it - is the communications discipline. It is about driving structured, benefit-led change. In my professional career, fifteen years now, in public relations I have never told a single lie. Never.

But advertising is all about lying. It's what they do, constantly. What amazes me is how we put up with it, consigning it to the dump bin of background noise when actually we should be protesting it. Look at HSBC's most recent radio ad in the UAE. "At HSBC, we believe that..."

No you don't. That's simply a lie. You do not collectively believe in personal loans with 'keen' (6.5% is competitive, apparently.) interest rates. It's not a corporate value. In fact, your offer is not driven in any way by a "belief", other than a commercial imperative. So why do you find it appropriate to so glibly misrepresent yourselves in this way?

Axe does not make men attractive. Oh, sure, it's an amusing way to highlight the 'brand essence' of the product. It's also a lie. It smells like toilet freshener. I have yet to meet a woman attracted by the smell of toilet freshener. Pantypads don't make you a more successful mum and microwave dinners don't mean more time to enjoy the family. Famously, I would contend a Mars a day doesn't really help you work, rest and play. It just tastes nice and is bad for you. There's no medical evidence to support the unsupportable claim.

It has long been a catechism for me that assertion without proof is a lie. And yet this is what advertising does constantly. Feel the radiance warm your skin, taste the joy of the open road. Dare to dream the dream. Oh, and while I'm at it, why does the 'Hundred reasons to buy a BMW' radio ad only ever feature reason 82? Do you think they even have a list of 100 reasons to buy their blasted cars?

And on and on we go through a litany that touches pretty much every commercial we see. A constant barrage of the untrue, indefensible and mis-characterised. And we let it wash over us rather than pushing back and asking brands to kindly just stick to the facts, the truth.

Which is what you have to do in public relations. Because if you don't, you'll get called out. In public. It used to be by journalists, now it's by every mobile phone in the country.

I can't say the interview was a great success. It contained some very long silences...

The Definite Article

English: The first Qatar Airways Cargo Boeing 777F (A7-BFA) in Frankfurt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The is the definite article. It is used in front of definite nouns, for instance, the world. So if you want to be known as the world's five star airline, you need a definite article.

Someone forgot to tell Qatar Airways. Which is a shame as every night I try to catch the news on Sky before going to bed, my only regular TV consuming habit as otherwise I tend to shun TV like a rabid dog. And every night the weather sponsored by Qatar Airways plays out some cheesy image of someone being unfeasibly cosseted together with the tagline, "Qatar Airways. World's Five Star Airline."

I find this annoying. Not in a life-threatening call the anger management guys he's about to chew off Akbar Baker's face sort of way, but in a sort of itchy animal bite sort of way. I do often wonder if the ad agency responsible are client doormats or simply stupid and incapable of stringing together a five word sentence. Alternatively, I suppose, they might think it's clever or in some way 'disruptive' to intentionally mangle the sentence. I can actually see some pony-tailed, yo-yo toting cretin presenting this new way of getting the consumers' attention. It could catch on. Imagine: "A Mars a day helps you work, rest and marmoset". See? Disruptive to the max, baby.

And then in today's Gulf News I spot an advertisement for Qatar Airways to Perth. And lo and behold, the headline's RIGHT! "Fly to the capital of Western Australia with the world's 5-star airline" it says.

I bet someone's gonna cop it for that one.

"You're sacked."
"But it's right!"
"Yes, that's what's wrong. It's not supposed to be right."

The Death In Advertising

Image via Wikipedia

For some reason, the people at Dubai-based document imaging company Xeratek think using the sound of an ECG flatlining followed by someone wailing 'Nooo' in their advertising is a smart idea. I'm probably over-reacting here, but I really, really take exception to having the sound of someone's death forced on me during my morning drive to work.

I have moaned before about the use of unpleasant sounds in radio ads, the National Bonds campaign used a woman suiciding, a couple arguing and so on. I've posted about the awfulness of radio ads in the past, too. Nobody's ever popped up to defend any specific ad or, indeed, the industry in general. Oh, now I tell a lie. Some blithering idiot from Kellog's ad agency tried astroturfing this post, resulting in this act of SEO-driven revenge.

Much of the awfulness is mired in agencies trying to use 'picture power' to make the ad stand out and help it get its point across. I can see them in my mind's eye, clustered around the client (a small, fat balding man in a suit, somewhat hapless looking and a little off-colour) urging him to take their advice and illustrate the product, make it come to life for the listener. This is what they call 'the creative'. Let's take a concept and put it into living sound in the most imaginative and attention-grabbing way, really disrupt the listener and then get our message across, they babble excitedly as Mr Klienman looks uncertainly at them (he's actually wondering if he remembered to feed the dog and if Pauline would notice again. Damn dog's her pride and joy, loves it more than me, he's thinking as he watches the people from the ad agency work themselves into an evangelistic frenzy. One of them has fallen on the floor and appears to be having some sort of seizure.)

I don't doubt that a calm, factual announcement wouldn't work as well as a colourful, illustrative and entertaining treatment. The trouble, I suspect, is that the advertisers so constantly fail to provide the latter. And then there's the issue of what concepts you actually pick to illustrate your company's products and services. Those concepts are associated, after all, with the brand you're promoting. So the sound of death, the ultimate worst fear of the human race, the cessation of our time on this planet, is perhaps not the smartest idea. Someone just died. Yay. Buy our product.

Hey, it's just a joke though, isn't it? I'm taking it all too seriously, it was just meant to get the ad running and bring a smile to people's faces, surely? I don't remember what the punchline is, though. I was too busy being unsettled by the sound of a death.

Klienman is looking doubtful as the exec on the floor starts to shout in a strange voice, semi-words that sound English but somehow don't make sense, like a Sigur Ros vocal. The account director whips out a pen and a sheet of paper and Klienman, remembering now that he hadn't put water out for the stupid mutt either, signs distractedly. His mobile rings and, sure enough, it's Pauline who's come back to the house and is shouting at him about mistreating the dog. Miserably, he watches the account director licking his lips and folding the paper into his pocket as the creative team help their spittle-flecked colleague up. They've won and the client agreed to the death concept. Kleinman watches them bundle excitedly through the door as he realises Pauline has just told him she's leaving him.

The Worst Radio Ads In The World

Image by bunky's pickle via Flickr

I'm not sure what made the marketing team over at the UAE's National Bonds corporation think people wanted to hear the sound of women committing suicide, couples arguing bitterly or men drowning but that's certainly what their new radio ads present to listeners. I may well be totally alone in this, but I find it unbelievably unpleasant and invariably turn the radio off when these ads come on. There are a number of other ads which trigger the same reaction in me. This is becoming increasingly a problem for my radio listening life, as I often forget to turn it back on again - and I generally enjoy listening to Brandy and Malcolm talk business and bicker on the radio during my drive to work.

I have railed against the awfulness of Dubai's radio advertising before. (for instance, take this example of egregious sexism from LG) I'm sure I will again. I am assured that it isn't an issue unique to Dubai, that radio ads all around the world are also completely pants, but I can't help but feel we're in a league of our own. Of course, in my own weekly forays to the studio, I can't switch the damn things off and have to sit, tied down to the squeaky high chair, and listen to them. One day I'm sure the mic will go live as I'm in the middle of one of my not infrequent 'I hate all radio advertising' rants at hapless co-host Desley.

So are we really being subjected to the worst radio advertising in the world today? Mark Makhoul over at Kuwaiti blog 2:48AM thinks he's got the world's worst eample, linked here. It's certainly special.

This one from a company called 'SuperScreen' in the UK is pretty dire, too. The last, triumphant call of 'free parking!' rounds it off nicely. Here's another contender, a radio ad that can only have been produced by a group of people incarcerated in a highly secure institution for the long term mentally challenged. This one (the one at the top of the search) is introduced by advertising commentator Dan O'Day, and features a burger and a sausage being burned to death. What's remarkable (and the reason I included a whole search for Kingsford Charcoal's advertising) is that it is by no means a standout moment of fail for the company's advertising - it's all utterly woeful. Take a look at the third one down and then the seventh if you really want to wallow in other people's total failure to communicate at any meaningful level beyond deep irritation.

This ad from the UK's Flintshire Motors takes it to a new level though. This is nothing less than the product of an incestuously conceived drooling nincompoop with a mental age of six who has been given a massive dose of LSD. I couldn't even finish listening to it. It's contagious - your draw drops and you start to shake your head and wail as the insanity infects you. It is undoubtedly the worst radio spot I could find on the Internet.

What worries me is it wouldn't stand out if you played it on radio here. None of the ads linked above would. They'd just sink slowly into the puddle of odiferous mediocrity with a viscid 'plop' and never be seen again.

'Misrata Devastation'

This is the front cover of today's Gulf News Paper Edition. You may notice that instead of the expected devastation captioned above, we have a bright yellow sticker advertising Nestlé bottled water. Only when removing the sticker can you see the front page headline picture.

I have railed against this before. I simply can't see how it makes sense for any of the three parties to the transaction. How can it make sense to Gulf News to sell its most valuable editorial real estate like this? Removing the sticker also removes the newsprint below, leaving the image degraded. The message is so far at odds with the content, it's almost ludicrous. This is where the second party to the transaction comes in - how does Nestlé Middle East or Nestlé's agency honestly think it effectively positions the company's brand to have it so strongly associated with negative headlines and editorial connotations?

I have spent years dealing with advertisers who want to promote their products only within the context of the best, most positive and relevant editorial environments, and yet here's Nestlé gladly occupying 'Misrata Devastation'! Are they mad? The irritation provoked by the daft placement of the message, let alone having to remove it, has had nothing but a negative connotation for the Nestlé brand for readers, as far as I can see.

As it happens, this particular example is, I would humbly submit, worse than usual. Do you really want your brand linked to the (appalling) devastation of Misrata? Or the terrifying and saddening events in Syria? But it's never going to be good - front pages are sold on the basis of negative news. When was the last time you saw a pregnant panda leading the news*? It's a no-brainer, surely. The front page is negative and the front page, if the editor has done his/her job, the news we really, really want to see. Not have stickered by inane advertising.

And now last, and I suspect least, we come to the third party to the transaction. The hapless reader/subscriber. In having to remove this silly sticker in order to view the front page of the newspaper, I have been presented with a momentary irritation. I could understand in these internet days of 'freemium' models if I had accepted a downgraded experience in return for a free product, but I didn't. I paid for Gulf News.

And yes, thank you, I do feel better now.

* A caveat to that point is provided by the newspaper that thinks a small boy getting his private parts stuck in his zip is a news story. Perhaps interestingly, the same reporter contributed, seven days earlier, "Emirati Bobbitised by Bangladeshi". It's just the way news breaks, folks. It's not an indication of any sort of fascination...

Sloganeers

Image by Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL) via FlickrI have always been fascinated by the Situationists, the revolutionary crypto-anarchic collective that sloganeered their way through the Paris student revolution of the late 1960s. My personal favourite is "Art is dead: do not consume its corpse." Now that's a slogan!

The Situationists were to have a seminal influence on the punk movement around which a deal of my adolescence was constructed. They were, as eny fule no, just dead cool.

There's a tremendous power to slogans, a way of condensing and simplifying thoughts that can become catchy, even thought-provoking. The wonderful world of advertising obviously became a very early adopter, two that I'll probably never shake (because they've been drummed into me through massive repetition), 'A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play' and, more recently, 'Al Futtaim Motors, we care and it shows'.

Do they? Does it? Doubt it, but the slogan's etched on what passes for my brain, for what it's worth...


BMW's advertisement on Dubai's Sheikh Zayed Road has a slogan. Oh yes. "Joy leads; others prosper" the advertisement thunders - like Situationist slogans, often deliberately provocative and wilfully obtuse, the advertisement attracts attention by its seeming simple meaning. Unlike the Situationists, it's actually not very clever.

It actually means absolutely nothing whatsoever. It's just mindless drivel constructed by mediocre intellects, an unwelcome flashback to the constant blare of 'Dare to Dream' dross that characterised the Dubai Property Boom (see yesterday's post). Does it intend to characterise Joy as the ownership of a BMW? I'd rather prosper, thanks. Or perhaps it's saying that other cars are Joy and BMW owners are prosperous. Perhaps someone called Joy has bought a BMW? But then who's prospering? The guy that sold it to her made commission, I suppose...

Yeah, I know I should drive past and ignore it. But it's like a grocer's apostrophe. It niggles...

On Your Bike

Image via WikipediaIt’s always a delight when a new radio advertisement appears that stands out in the awful sea of half-baked drivel that punctuates the stuff you actually want to listen to. My delight is only enhanced that the latest piece of drooling, witless buffoonery originates from those admirable fellows at HSBC, the bank that likes to say 'Is there anything else I can do to help you?' at the end of calls where they have been signally useless. This is just one of many endearing habits, but I shall not allow myself to be sidetracked. Back to the radio spot.

The script goes something like this:

"In Beijing a bicycle means transport, in London it means recreation while here in Dubai it means working out in the gym. We understand the world so give us your money."

For a start, as both a consumer and business customer, it’s always reassuring that one’s bank can demonstrate a clear understanding of world bicycle usage trends. There are few aspects of the global financial services market that occupy me more.

However, the fact that the insight on offer from HSBC is clearly based on mildly egregious generalisations and actually represents absolutely no insight whatsoever may be a worry to some. For instance, some Chinese people may (I know this is hard to appreciate, but bear with me here) actually use a bicycle recreationally or may even visit a gym. Londoners certainly use bicycles in the gym and many use it to get to work. This even in the city of London where you would expect people to be somewhat more advanced than those amusingly manual slanty-eyed coolies pedal pumping across the rutted tracks over in Chinkyland.

And here in Dubai, while I’m sure we’d all like to take comfort in the image of a city packed with successful young executives working out before a day of glorious triumph over world markets in their globally aware organisations, I’m afraid it doesn’t quite do justice to reality. In fact a bicycle to me rather evokes the gentleman in a grubby shalwar khamees who comes by our dumpster every day and picks out the cardboard to add to the tottering pile strapped to the back of his bike with a threadbare bungy.

But I’m cavilling, I know. It’s just an advertisement and not meant to represent the reality of the situation at all. It’s meant to increase my awareness of my bank’s global insight and the bicycle thing is just a sort of metaphor. Or to old fashioned moralists, simply a lie. What's tragic is that it's a badly told one...

Why Online Companies May Need To Think Analogue

Image via Wikipedia

I was drafted in to run the panel session on the effectiveness of online advertising at the excellent Digimedia conference wot took place in Dubai last week (lots of speaker videos here if you want to catch up on some of the excellent and thought provoking types that were there). Moderating panel sessions on topics about which I know very little indeed always brings joy to my heart, but as it turns out I had a question I wanted to ask in order to satisfy my own curiosity. And that question kicked things off very nicely indeed, thank you.

I'd sat through a presentation by Yahoo! complaining that only 1% of Middle East ad revenue was going to online sites, while print and TV still comprise the lion's share of advertising revenues. This despite the tens of millions of people in the region who are actively online, the 10 million-odd people on Facebook, the thousands of blogs and the popularity of online forums and social sites (portal Jeeran, for instance, pulls some 12 million unique visits per day - that's over ten times the circulation of the region's biggest selling paper, Egypt's Al Ahram).


The online industry complained that they are infinitely measurable, they can show click-through rates, measurable routes through content, response rates and activation rates - they can tell you who's where, how long for, where they came from and where they went to, what they watched, liked, responded to. And yet they're only 1% of the overall.

Which brings me to the question. If the publishing industry can go to an advertiser with nothing more than a basic audit (ABC or BPA) or even no audit at all and still sell them advertising in, say, 'Motorsport Today', what's the problem selling audiences of millions with virtually infinite measureability?

The answer, according to members of the audience, is that online companies in the Middle East aren't selling. They're behaving like online companies - 'the content's here, so come and get it'. But the advertiser base thinks like offline companies do - 'I'm here, come sell to me'.

And I can see how that disconnect could have crept in - I remember travelling to the Gulf as part of a sales team in the late 1980s to find that we had 16 people in Saudi Arabia at that time - all having flown out on 3-4 week advertising sales trips. A huge sales force, but one that was pulling in huge revenues. At the time we were just at the end of the era when the GM would pull out the company stamp and stamp the order there and then (legendarily, some would even open desk drawers and give you the cash!). It was good, old-fashioned sales - AIDA, DIPADA and all that. And it worked.


Advertisers in the Middle East have always bought a product that they can pick up and understand. They have bought a product intended for a target market they have in mind and want to reach. Car companies like car magazines and supplements, technology companies like technology publications. The online companies aren't selling the emotional appeal of specialised or relevant content plus reach - they're just selling data. They're investing in analysis rather than in teams of hungry young suits facing clients with compelling sales propositions that show how the market can effectively reach a given target audience for less than print or TV with content that makes contextual sense to the advertiser.

It is, of course, highly likely that I'm talking complete crap. But it didn't half get the panel session going!

Cereal Killer

Image by Sam Cockman via Flickr

The post I put up on Tuesday was at least partially influenced by a chat I was having with Dubai-based personal trainer Kai Mitchell in a few off-air moments during a Dubai Today radio show I co-hosted a few weeks ago.

It was Kai’s discomfort with the practice of selling people content-free breakfast cereal based diets that turned me on to the whole issue in the first place – and it was Nestlé’s atrocious ‘pull pull’ radio advertisement that pushed me over the edge into Tuesday's wee slice of grumpy bloggery suggesting you might like to eat paper instead of breakfast
cereal products as part of your new dietary regime.

You can only imagine my delight when the blog post attracted a couple of anonymous comments. I'm not a big fan of  these as they're often used to express negative sentiment without the grace of culpability.
Anonycomments can also come from people working for companies who are trying to influence debate without being open about who they are. This is infrequent precisely because it is widely considered as dishonest, egregious and stupid behaviour. And, as eny fule no, you can be traced even if you’re ‘anonymous’. I have written about this in the past, offering guidance to companies engaging with blogs.
Anonymous comment one came at just after 11am. I haven’t (obviously) edited it:

before you go ahead and diss ads make sure you know which is which :)

the tasteless "pull pull oh my god my fat thighs into a dress is worse than labor" is a Nestle Fitness ad,the 2 weeks challenge is a Special K line that has nothing to do with Nestle..
and ps. two totally different cereals, and at least they are promoting a relatively healthy weight loss program,as opposed to the other crazy fad diets out there

In this case, the comment was saying I had mistaken one ad for another, which I did not do. I also didn’t mention Special K or, indeed Nestlé. I purposefully referenced ‘the breakfast cereal people’ and not those nice, searchable brands Nestlé and Special K, let alone the Special K two-week challenge. Special K is a Kellogg's brand.  You know Kellogs? The breakfast cereal people represented by advertising agency Leo Burnett in the Middle East?

The second comment came 14 minutes later. Having obviously reconsidered the original response, ‘anonymous’ added (again I haven’t corrected the text) this:

You know i agree that that particular radio ad was HORRIFIC. And i would probably NEVER buy that brand. But not all low-fat cereal brands preach "get skinny by eating our brand."

Some brands, specifically the ones that offer the 2-week diet, target people who have unhealthy eating habits. The are not talking to the kind of people who are already health conscience and eat organic-type food. And in order to break any habit you need to have a disciplined amount of time doing the opposite. Why do you think there are a minimum of 21 days for rehab? Becuase research shows that it takes 21 days to break an addictive habit such as alcoholism. Similarly, 2 weeks is enough to get you off of junk food/fast food AND offers you an incentive (a little weight loss) to START leading a healthier lifestyle. And im sorry but at least THIS diet is healthier than starving yourself!
Plus,cereal is MUCH better food then the greasy crap people are used to eating now a days. It probably has more vitamins than they know existed!
So the ad you mentioned really does degrade other cereal brands that are honestly trying to help women become healthier.
Lastly, please don't take my comments personally. Everyone is entitled to their opinions but i believe that informed opinions are worth listening to more.

Of course, both comments – posted as ‘anonymous’ come from the same source: a place SiteMeter identifies only as 80.227.101.130 (Leo Burnett Middle East).

Now don’t get me wrong. The commenter may well not work for Leo Burnett. The IPs could have been mixed up or the commenter might have been a random, albeit arrogant and illiterate, visitor to Leo’s offices ‘camping’ on their wireless. I mean, we don’t want to jump to conclusions now just because some dribbling idiot has wagged their fingers at us in a mildly offensive and patronising manner, do we? So let’s stick to the facts.

As a direct result of these two comments, it is now likely that any number of search strings with permutations consisting of either of these two brands and questions regarding diet will bring this post (and therefore the original one linked again for your convenience here) relatively high into Google search results. That has the potential to drive thousands of people to read my little nag about the attempt to foster the uptake of breakfast cereal diets of questionable nutritional benefit who otherwise would never have bothered.

What do YOU think? I’d be particularly interested in your views if you are employed by the Kellogg Company, the world's leading producer of cereal and Kellogg's convenience foods, including Kellogg cookies, Kellogg crackers, Kellogg toaster pastries, Kellogg cereal bars, Kellogg fruit-flavored snacks, Kellogg frozen waffles and Kellogg veggie foods. You might have concerns regarding the whole Kelloggs two-week challenge promotion, or have worries about sugar levels in Kelloggs’ foods, the use of high fructose corn syrup as a cheap sweetener in breakfast cereals  or even iron content (for instance the Danish government’s 2004 ban on Kelloggs products because of the high added vitamin content and, apparently, non-dietary iron added to its products).

If you do, you might like to add a comment. I’d really prefer it if you could do so only if you are prepared to put a name to it. If you work for an organisation with a vested interest, perhaps you’d like to declare that – or just wait until you get home so that your IP doesn’t track straight back to your company’s network and expose your idiotic attempts at corporate mendacity by proxy.

The Paper Diet

Image via Wikipedia

One of the most annoying radio ads currently is the awful Pull! Pull! Ad. You know the one:

Pull! Pull!
Arrrghhh!
Come on, pull! You can do it! Pull!
Arghhhhhaaauuuuuugghh!
Zzzp
Ever felt like getting into your dress is getting into labour?

Gratingly idiotic, annoyingly voiced, unpleasantly connoted and insultingly mindless, it's not just an awful piece of advertising (and let's face it, it's gotta be pretty awful to stand out in the circus of misbegotten creative maladroitness that is Dubai radio advertising), but it's promoting an awful little scheme, too.

The breakfast cereal people have come up with a great idea: diets that are based around eating their virtually content-free product twice, instead of once, a day as part of your weight control/loss regimen. It’s brilliant – how to double sales by preying on people’s desire to lose weight.

This stuff is worthy of Edward Bernays, the 'father of modern PR' who hooked America's women on smoking by having them light their 'torches of freedom'.

The idea's nice and simply. All you have to do is eat a bowl of puffed rice and/or wheat crackers with low fat milk for your morning and lunchtime (maybe with a little naughty fruit!) and then have a meal at night. Together with increased exercise the result is, hey presto!, weight loss in just two weeks!

Two weeks?

Yes, two weeks! That's all it takes!

Let me save you some money as well as having to ingest GM ingredients processed with high fructose corn syrup, artificial ingredients, palm oil extracts and flavourings. Eat a sheet of paper with a cup of black tea in the morning and one more at lunchtime. You can put some milk in the tea. Have a normal meal at night, but walk briskly for at least an hour. You can use cardboard boxes if you like, but try and cut down on the total surface area, perhaps A5 size.

You'll lose weight in no time!

Tantalise Your Tastebuds!

Image via Wikipedia

Yet another mindless radio ad has joined the throng of blithering blipverts, this time from the Meydan Hotel. We’re told their brunch consists of a range of ‘signature cuisines’. I would love someone from the agency to explain what a signature cuisine is because, of course, there is no such thing as a signature cuisine. It’s just something they made up to try and make yet another brunch sound different.

This idea of ‘yet another brunch’ is actually quite important. Resorting to empty, mindless phrases such as ‘signature cuisine’ and ‘tantalise your tastebuds’ (Let alone the awful and much-used ‘satisfy your senses’) tells us that we have here a product with absolutely no differentiation whatsoever. Differentiation is a key competitive concept. At the very definition of a given product, let us say a brunch, the first question to ask is ‘how is this different? How does this give us a competitive edge?’. If the answer is ‘it isn’t’, then we obviously have a problem, Houston. No?

Let us imagine the conversation.

“Boss! I’ve got a great idea! We’re going to do a brunch!”

“Good idea, Carruthers. That’ll use up the Thursday leftovers. How are you going to make it different to the other 250 brunches in Dubai Brunch City?”

“It’s going to be an international buffet, boss.”

“So are all the others.”

“With beverages.”

“All the others do ‘beverages’, Carruthers. That’s why the city fills up with over-dressed, pissed goons in flowery shirts and under-dressed pissed chicks in Coast frocks every Friday afternoon.”

“It’s going to have dishes from all around the world!”

“Yes, but how’s it different, Carruthers. Why should I come to this brunch rather than all the others?”

“It’s going to tantalise your tastebuds, boss! Satisfy your senses! It’s a whole world of cuisines on your doorstep including beverages to delight the whole family! And there’ll be face painting and loads of fun for the kids including a cleaner who’s been forced to dress up as a clown on his day off!”

“Oh, why didn’t you say that in the first place? Brilliant scheme! Approved!”

The problem here is that Carruthers’ whole product is boring, yet another brunch at yet another hotel. If the brunch is unusually good value and offers unusually good food, word of mouth (perhaps supported by some smart PR) will ensure that the brunch becomes popular. But declaiming its merits by squawking the same tired epithets in a fake-excited voice on the radio will not guarantee popularity, let alone raise any level of interest. Much as I’d like to blame the agency, I can’t. It’s the product that’s at fault – unless their brunch is truly, brilliantly differentiated and well positioned within its target market, in which case the agency needs to be shot because its work has failed to communicate one iota of that potential.

A good example of a differentiated product in this sector is the Westin Hotel’s ‘Bubbleicious Brunch’, which offers a package of all you can eat plus Laurent Perrier champagne at Dhs495 a head. I happen to dislike the Westin in a mildly cordial sort of way (I find it hard to get past the architecture, to be honest) and I don’t ‘do’  brunches as a rule, but even I’ve got the message on that one.


By the way, I do happen to believe quite strongly that any copywriter that even considers using the phrase 'tantalise your tastebuds' should be pilloried, flogged and then (but only then) sacked and deported. As should any client weak-minded enough to let them get away with it.

PR, Advertising and Damn Lies

Image via Wikipedia

I occasionally appear as a guest lecturer at EMDI, the Insititute for Media and Communication. This gives me the chance to rage at classes of stunned-looking students, somewhat in the manner of 'Hitler discovers public relations', for a good couple of hours. It's not unusual for me to see them looking like they're about to reach for the mace but don't want to be impolite. I usually work with the PR stream, but have also talked to the events management bunch and also the advertising lot.

It was when talking to the advertising stream that I was asked the question, 'Yes, but isn't public relations just lying?'

The question stopped me in my tracks, I can tell you. I realised that standing there in front of the class just looking like an electrocuted guppy at the girl who had asked the question was beginning to look rude and pulled myself together.

My answer was something along these lines. In all my time as a public relations practitioner, I have never told a lie in my professional life. I have told the truth from all sorts of angles, have highlighted the positive at the expense of the negative and have generally promoted the bejaysus out of all sorts of things, but I have never told anyone an untruth. I have never made a claim I cannot demonstrate or an assertion without proof.

PR cannot function on untruth. You have to have fact - incontrovertible, provable, demonstrable fact to back up your assertions and arguments. If you say you're the market leader, you have to be able to prove it. If you say this product has positive medical benefits, you have to be able to stand them up with research, expert endorsements and the like. Without the facts, PR falls down - publicly, embarrassingly and disastrously. That's one of the reasons we have journalists - to test this stuff and make sure that it passes a standard that our public can accept. Believe me, there's nothing a journalist likes to find more than a PR pushing a lie.

And yet this assertive question comes at me from someone about to embark on a career in an industry that is based on direct lies, telling absolute untruths and misleading people as its most fundamental tenet. The sloganeering of the advertising industry, the use of deliberately misleading images, words, phrases and ambitional role models has never been less than mendacious.

A Mars a day helps you work rest and play. Remember that one? Does it? Really? Or does a Mars a day slap your waddling, sedentary body with 245 calories and a fat content of almost a quarter of its overall volume?

What about Axe? (Or Lynx in some markets) The clear inference is constantly drawn in its campaigns that using the product will pull you chicks. It's so clear that an Indian man is suing Unilever because he's been spraying himself with ammonium skunkate or whatever the stuff is made out of for seven years and hasn't pulled. It's a clear lie - a deodorant won't pull women or make them go crazy. Oh, sure, it's ironic and created for purposes of amusement only. It's playful! But your job isn't amusing, people it's selling. And you're playing with a product benefit that doesn't exist - it's not provable. Show us that 9 out of 10 women find men who wear Axe are hotter than men who don't and you're home and dry.

Or what about all the 'feminine products' that let you be the woman you are? Or the antibacterial airfreshener that makes you a better mum? Or the cheesy Italian stereotypes that punt their animated schtick to pimp a tomato sauce with an Italian name that's made by a British corporate to a recipe conceived in Australia? Wear the Dolmio smile? My butt. What about the yummy seafood for cats that has barely any fish in it - a great case study of how image and language are combined in advertising and product definition to wilfully and knowingly mislead consumers? Or the hair products advertised by a celebrity wearing a wig that looks better than her real hair? Truth?

I'm not going to get bogged in examples - there are a million of them out there. The fact is that advertising has held the megaphone for so long, it is no longer able to see the growing tide of consumers unhappy with being screamed at with slogans that we know don't reflect reality. But consumer voice is growing even in the Middle East, let alone in markets such as Europe (where consumer voice tends to be stronger, oddly, than the US).


We have become used to accepting that companies make claims in their advertising that are simply unsustainable. However, more and more consumers are unwilling to meekly accept those claims - the number of visits to this blog alone researching Pringles and their contents as well as Aquafina, the tap water that would like you think it was natural - are testament to that. And now I'm getting hit after hit on American Food is Crap. People are waking up to this stuff - and to the fact that they're being sold a pup by the advertising industry.

Do PRs tell lies? No, they don't. When they do, they get caught and exposed - and quite right too. Now what's happening is we're starting to apply the same standards to high street brands and, yes, to advertising. We are starting to demand more honesty, more transparency and better standards of accountability.

I'm not saying we should take the creativity out of advertising and promotion. Far from it. But I am saying that you need to base your creative treatments on the truth and not unsustainable assertions - or lies, as I prefer to call them.

Windows 7 Barf

Image by Esparta via Flickr

I almost managed a week without posting, thanks to Phillipa, but now I'm blowing it.

Twitter has been a-tweet with disgusted tweets linking to a very odd thing on YouTube - Microsoft's 'Host a Windows 7 Party' video.

It's linked here. Watch it before you read on, I would. Get it over with. Content warning - it's very, very, very crap - so don't say I Rickrolled you or anything.

Done? Fine, get your breath back, there's no rush.

Now it might just be that this is a really smart, post-ironic teaser that's going to lead to a really hip Madison Avenue type 'We woz just leading you on' follow-up. If it does that, Microsoft has lost my custom, because I'm really not in the mood to be messed around with by smartarses using social media to prove they're cleverer than I am. Right now, I want brands to start behaving better because I've had enough of being fed bullshit by corporations and just want honesty, integrity and straightforward communication. You jerk me around, I'll invest time punishing you. That's the new deal, guys.

Alternatively, this could just be an unbelievably turgid dollop of woeful, mind-numbingly asinine and utterly inane idiocy of appalling proportions. It could be the most ill-conceived, zeitgeist-missing 'campaign' of all time. Comments have been disabled on YouTube, which is not a good thing as Microsoft would quickly have seen that this was the daftest idea since someone decided to design a car called 'Edsel' - whether it's a 'smart' teaser or a genuine, epically misguided, attempt to get Middle America to hold spontaneous 'fun' Tupperware party style events across the nation.

Hey! Coool! Softerware! Like Tupperware! Why didn't we think of that before? Awesome! Good jooob!

End result? I truly think Microsoft has lost the plot. Marketing was the only thing it did superlatively well.

Where do you want to go today, Google? It's your world, now...

PS: I hated Vista. I wanted to believe in Win7.0...

The Du Fail

Image by Fenchurch! via Flickr

A wee while ago I posted a grumpy response to the campaign being run by the UAE’s second favourite telco, Du, which targeted ‘smart people’ using social media tools, including Twitter and Facebook.

As I said at the time, and yes I do know that quoting myself is dangerously close to bloganism, “The first problem with this whole thing is that you need to be UPFRONT if you're a company using Twitter and other social media. There's no point in being coy - and you're just going to annoy people if you hide your identity and purpose.”

There was quite a lot of negative comment generally about the campaign, particularly on Twitter.

The campaign didn’t actually last very long. In fact, it looked like this:

Smartpeople follower stats

31 March - FB 46 members (13 admins), Twitter 81 followers (following 192)

6 April FB 116 members (13 admins), Twitter 127 followers (following 226)

13 April FB 184 (15 admins), Twitter 138 (226)

14 May - Twitter 152 Facebook 250

18 May - Twitter 152 Facebook 252

Last Tweet from @smartpeople was 19 April

Last post on Facebook page by 'Albert Edison' was 12 April


One can only assume that at some stage, someone smart pulled the plug. But then if there were actually smart people at Du, you’d have thought they wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

You’d be wrong.

Du’s new campaign, Be Heard, is similar to the last effort in that its ‘social media’ platforms are being heavily supported by traditional advertising spend. The drive to get you along to the beheard.ae website included emailers as well as muppies (the street advertising thingies).

When you get to beheard.ae you get asked to answer a load of questions of the ‘empowering’ nature: you know, ‘Do you want better value?’ ‘Do you want to save your time?’ ‘Do you want fries with that?’

The website is basically a ‘bait and switch’ advertising-led concept, getting you to visit a website ostensibly to ‘be heard’ when the objective is actually to position Du as cool and ‘with the kids’, to collect email addies and ‘profiles’ of people.

The site tells you how many people voted yes or no to each of the questions. With an attempt to build a Twitter following and an add to Facebook button, the whole thing could be termed an attempt at building ‘social media’ in that it fakes the egalitarianism of asking people’s opinions and letting them share the feedback.

You get the option of adding your own question for people to answer. Someone I know added ‘Don’t you think this whole dumb campaign is a waste of time?’ but I haven’t seen that one displayed on the site yet. So much for the democratisation of being heard.

The feeling of mildly frustrated emptiness that is the end result of going through this process is a little like going out for evening drinks with friends except you have to mime drinking instead of having real drinks and you have to bray like donkeys instead of actually talking.

There’s an ‘about’ button on the site. Once again, as with the failed Smartpeople campaign, that button doesn’t actually say that the campaign’s being run by Du.

The conversation about this campaign on Twitter has either been breathless endorsement (by the people behind it) or irritated commentary. Few managed to voice their irritation as well as advertising website AdNation:

“This one actually manages to be worse than Smart People – at least that had some kind of gimmick. Beheard.ae seems to just be a rather fatuous series of questions, which offer no real insight into anything.”

So again, we have an anonymous site that pretends to be social media and simply isn’t – it’s a company behaving dishonestly and completely misreading the sentiment of the target audience it’s addressing. It’s a company trying to use ‘social media’ but from an old school advertising standpoint, informed by the belief that the job of an advertiser is to shout slogans at people and the role of the consumer is to be the helpless victim of the sloganeering.

The site asks a range of questions, but that’s as far as it goes. They’re not discussed, they’re not part of a serious feedback scheme or the basis for a conversation. I can’t wait for the press release which I am sure, with a crushing sense of inevitability, will be sent out with the ‘results of the survey’.

The result of all this money and effort is that consumers (particularly the Twittering ones) have been actively sniping at the campaign, mildly irritated by it or simply untouched by it.

I believe passionately that we should all make mistakes. Like some geezer said, ‘If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not innovating’. But repeating dumb mistakes, particularly when people actually explained the mistake and why it was a mistake, is a worry.

These two campaigns have arguably done more damage than good to the Du brand.

What's next? Will it be strike three?

Be honest with consumers.

Talk with people, not at them.

Stop shouting and start listening.

Get the message, Du?

(Thanks to CJ for obsessive monitoring & input)

Ford Fiesta - Online Fail?

Not enough bloggers in region to drive campaign, says Ford

Do they, indeed?

The excellent Dima Hmadi in today's Emirates Business 24x7 reports on Ford's international campaign to launch its new Fiesta model by getting 100 bloggers to test drive the car that shares its name with one of the London Rubber Company's finest products.

According to Hmadi's story, young trendsetters will 'live' with the car for six months, travelling as 'agents' on 'special missions' who'll report on their experiences using a variety of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Fiesta, says the story, has more than 300 fans on the Fiesta Movement Facebook page and over 600 followers on the @FordFiesta Twitter account.

Gasp! 600 followers on Twitter? What an international runaway success! Er... not.

The story goes on to outline how Ford has been 'innovating' in the Middle East, with an auction of 24 specially painted Fiestas taking place on souq.com. The auction attracted an overwhelming 70 bids which, according to a 'well informed observer' was seen as a very good response.

70 bids for 24 cars? That's 2.9 bids per car. A good response? Er...not.

And then the story goes on to make the statement that got my little goat: "Bloggers invited to offer their inputs from around the region, however, generated no response."

The Ford spokesperson goes on to waffle dramatically about online media in a terribly authoritative way, including Ford's 'non-traditional approach' to online promotion. This included a Social Media Release (SMR) that "contained Special Edition Fiesta information, special video content, images and press releases targeted to key print and online media."

Wooooaaaah there! A "social media release" was targeted at "key print and online media"???

Aren't we missing something here, Ford?

"The SMR received extensive coverage within the online community" apparently, although I can't recall anyone posting about Ford Fiestas and, in fact, a Google Blog Search yields zilch from Middle East blogs. And so does a Technorati search...

The banner advertising generated 16.7 million impressions, though, prompting over 30,000 click-throughs for more information on their homepage - and the emailer campaign generated approximately 1,700 consumer responses and another 5,000 consumers were sent "racing" to souq.com.

So, Ford sent out some emailers, put up some banner ads, sent out an 'SMR' to the wrong people, generated a woeful response to an auction, a sad Facebook membership and a tiny Twitter following.

Did Ford or any of its representatives contact anyone out there about this campaign? Bloggers? Did you "fail to respond" or did they "fail to contact you"???

If they didn't, as I suspect, contact a single damn blogger, then it would be the final nail in this woeful and mendacious account of a campaign that wasn't a social media campaign or an innovative online campaign at all.

It was a fail.

Some US reaction, from the first page of Google blogsearch results, to the campaign, BTW - because I couldn't find any Middle East coverage online beyond AME Info. Perhaps someone from Ford could put me right...

http://blogs.edmunds.com
"Ford's idea for a video contest to pick the winners was brilliant, but the entertainment value of the videos, pics and tweets that will emerge over the next several months is questionable. I mean, as nice as the Fiesta may be, it's still just an entry-level economy car."

http://toughsledding.wordpress.com
"Fiesta Movement is, at its worst, payola. Or if you prefer, blogola. And it’s the same sort of blogola that’s created huge dust-ups back in ‘07. For some background, try here, here and here. Simply put, by offering a free car, free fuel and free insurance to the agents, Ford has co-opted its agents’ messages. The moment these “socially vibrant” influencers took Ford’s booty, they became paid shills."

Advertising Agencies Tell The Truth

The excellent AdNation website carries the story, based in parts on quotes surfaced by Gulf News on Friday, that now another client is disowning the work submitted to the Dubai Lynx awards by large Middle East agency group Fortune Promoseven - in fact by the group's Qatari operation, FP7 Doha.

If you haven't been following the Lynx story, you can catch up with it on AdNation or Campaign Middle East's blog. Basically it turns out that agency FP7 Doha entered award-winning work that turns out not to have been commissioned by Samsung, which was embarrassed by the work (Depicting, amongst others, a scene of Jesus photographing nuns that resulted in a national outcry in election-tense Lebanon) - from an agency that wasn't even the company's agency!

The Lynx jury is now widening its investigation into the disastrous 2009 awards to look at other agencies' submitted work.

A massive embarrassment for the advertising industry as a whole, this year's awards have made the widespread practice of entering 'fake' work for awards excrutiatingly public. By 'fake' I mean entering advertising campaigns that have not been created for clients, approved by clients or even run in media that clients have paid for.

It all boils down to the advertising industry's unhealthy obsession with awarding 'creativity' rather than real-world campaigns that achieve results for clients. I don't know whether that is a Middle East phenomenon or a global thing, but I can tell you that watching UK advertising over the past couple of days has hit home to me just how 'creativity' is totally lacking in the Middle East's advertising. I'm looking at truly creative, clever advertising that connects with people and is entertaining, challenging and clever - and it's made me appreciate how bad the advertising I see back in the UAE every day truly is. (This point was actually made by a high profile Dubai Lynx judge on his blog - and subsequently sadly retracted).

Of course, it's only FP7 Doha to blame. The rest of the Lynx awards entries will be cleared by the investigating judges because no other agency would have entered work that hasn't run, hasn't been comissioned by clients, approved by clients or even produced for clients that are clients.

Carry on working as usual. There's nothing to be concerned about. As long as agencies have been honest about their entries and put forward 'real' - valid - work.

You have all been honest now haven't you, chaps?