Hot on the heels of the terrifically successful, award-winning Supe-up Your Ride advertising campaign, Barbican, the region’s leading malt beverage brand, is continuing to lead the way in brand advertising. The Aujan Industries product is widely known as the youth authority brand of the Middle East but it must work hard to maintain its marketing presence in light of a staggering 45 per cent increase in overall cold drink advertising.

With the recent Supe-up Your Ride campaign, Barbican capitalized on the growing phenomenon of video sharing websites to bring consumers deep inside the brand. A heavy showing in traditional media backed up the online material, and the overall result led to Aujan picking up the 2008 Best Online Campaign Award at the GEMAS.

First aired in 2005, Barbican’s series of non-scripted TVCs continue to break the mould. Each TVC followed a unique development and filming process. For each campaign, one actor was auditioned and later asked to bring along his closest group of friends, all of whom were filmed. No script was involved so all comments were made naturally, particularly in terms of the language they used and their attitudes towards life. The filming process itself became very fluid but its technical aspect was still rather demanding for the directors.

“The Barbican campaign was a great challenge,” said Chadi Younes, the director of the non-scripted TVCs. “The thought of filming a commercial that does not feel like one was very appealing to me. This campaign involved the empowerment of youth; instead of putting words in their mouth, we set up the premise and heard what they had to say in their own words. We even gave them camcorders on set and used some of the footage they shot in the actual commercial. The result felt very real and had an immense amount of energy.”

Since there are few brands in the beverage category that advertise solely on their physical attributes – even though Barbican is unquestionable in terms of taste and quality – it was decided to highlight consumer-led insights that were of relevance to both the brand and consumer.

Chris Bell, CEO & Managing Partner of Face to Face advertising agency, says: “We’re immensely proud as an Agency to have played a part in a campaign that has struck such a chord with our consumer.”

In researching opinions, it was found that Barbican consumers all shared a desire for self-expression, regardless of their geographical location, and Aujan immediately took this on board to tap into self-expression amongst, predominantly, young men in the Gulf. With this market’s passion for friendship, bonding, fun, sport and cars, the challenge was how best to treat them; how to get together with consumers and really try to understand their lives, what motivates them and what they best responded to.

There was a continuous desire to involve real consumers into the process, to be able to recreate the magic and dynamism among friends that would be tremendously difficult to do through scripting and acting alone. In the end, though, Barbican managed to get the protagonists to speak freely and even film themselves with just a little input on how to create specialized shots with the camera.

Ralph Roden, Creative Director at Face to Face, adds: “It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of hard work and it has resulted in a campaign that has helped redefine how beverage advertising is tackled in the region.”

The result was that some truly memorable ads came out of some outstanding shooting sessions. A lot of hard work was involved, but the effort had been fun for everyone. Nobody was more satisfied than Younes, the director. “I think it is fair to say that in Barbican, we have managed to help create a brand that represents for the consumer a real and genuine means of self-expression,” he said on the release of the campaign.