Archive for June 4th, 2006
The ArabAd/IAA Kuwait advertising award ceremony for Kuwait, KREA, was hailed a success.
The KREA Awards aims to recognize excellence and innovation in the advertising industry.
A panel of nine judges, from five countries evaluated 370 submissions, with 20 advertising houses ultimately taking home awards.
At the moment, there hasn’t been a press release on the full results of the event, but stay tuned.
For now, this is a local blogger who tells the story of the KREA event very well, with a lot of pictures.
And, here’s is a press release by Memac Ogilvy on their win of 9 trophies.
The event was organized by The Communications Zone.
June 4th, 2006
Saudi Prince and world famous investor Al Waleed Bin Talal, has confirmed that he is in talks with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to sell them a stake in Rotana, his Arab entertainment firm. In fact, he even expects a deal to be done before the end of the year, when Rotana will IPO.
Everyone is talking about this potential deal and what it could mean, and bloggers have started to analyze it and its fast turning into a field day.
We, however, would like to point out that Al Waleed already has a 6% stake in News Corp.
So, it seems like a case of ‘you own a piece of me, let me own a piece of you’.
You can read indepth reports on this deal here at Reuters or here at Variety or here at Gulf Daily News.
And if you look around the web, you’ll find many more. This is, indeed, a big developing story to watch.
June 4th, 2006
Ogilvy have announced the results of an ‘evaluation’ of the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty in the Middle East.
Everyone, by now, is familiar with this international campaign which features “images of plus-size natural looking women with curves and unconventional hair texture and colour”. The idea is to challenge the standard of supermodel imagery and show that normal women are beautiful too.
In Europe, the US and the Far East images of these women in underwear were used. Obviously, there’s been a different approach in the Middle East, but it seems to have generated the desired response.
A multi-media ad campaign ran in the region starting in February 2006, inviting women from across the region to take part in the dialogue on real beauty, which resulted in more than 18,000 votes on the dedicated regional website.
The website was supported by a regional SMS text campaign and through extensive mall tours and in-store promotions in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE.
Visitors to the site answered a a series of questions accompanied by an image of a women, by ticking a box.
For example, an image of 33 year old, plus-sized Lebanese mother, Jouhayna Boudiwan, offered the visiot the choice to tick ‘beautiful’ or ‘big’. In this case, the result has been that 64% said ‘beautiful’. And so on, with a variety of images and themes.
The Campaign For Real Beauty was founded following the results of a worldwide study among 3,300 women which showed that only 2% of women were comfortable describing themselves as beautiful.
You can visit the regional site here .
June 4th, 2006
