Tis the season to buy new Underwear!
It’s that time of the year where every time you search for something on the internet or login to any of your social media accounts, you are reminded that you NEED to buy something and NOW is the BEST time to do that because it’s BLACK FRIDAY or WHITE FRIDAY for the region I come from.
The concept of Black Friday started somewhere in the USA exactly the day after Thanksgiving. Streets and shops saw a large number of bloated and hungover souls so they said to themselves “hey! here’s an opportunity to increase footfall to our stores and hopefully increase our sales” and so the concept of Black Friday was created and became the sale period where “you ought to buy something new, because I mean why not”.
Today, thanks to “digital” I don’t need to act nice or risk the chance of running into my cousin because I can buy everything online while enjoying the perks of the Black Friday.
But before I dig deeper into that subject (don’t worry not too deep) let me tell you why it’s called White Friday here in the Middle East. Firstly, in this region Thanksgiving is not so big. Secondly, Friday is a holy day for Muslims and in no way can you associate it with Black and yet hope to reap some sales. Black in this part of the world is the color of sadness and mourning. It has a bad connotation (a superstitious thing) while on the other hand white is the color of purity and peace. So Voila, White Friday was born.
One of the early adopters and probably the first but is Souq. This e-commerce platform operates in seven Arab countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the GCC and is the “Amazon of the Middle East” (source: WHITE FRIDAY: MIDDLE EAST’S JEFF BEZOS LOOKS TO CAPITALIZE ON BLACK FRIDAY TRADITION). There you can find everything from clothing to electronics and everything in between.
I remember when Souq adopted the “white friday”everyone wasn’t still so comfortable with online shopping here in this region and therefore Souq introduced the “cash on delivery” option. Later numerous platforms jumped in like Noon, Namshi and Jollychic just to name of few.
Now let’s move to the fun part!
For this article I decided to critique the White Friday YouTube ads for Souq. So, I interviewed three of my friends that work in three big multinational agencies here in Saudi Arabia and I decided to call it the “The Hangout”.
The Hangout
In today’s session you will hear opinions coming from three different people who have been working in advertising for as long as I know.
Abeer is an Irish, American, Arab…what a mix! who works for Hills+Knowlton. She spent most of her life in the US, studied there and then moved to Saudi for work just ten years ago.
Choucry is Lebanese and works currently as an Account Director at Grey. He manages F&B clients along with electronics and a few other accounts.
Karim is Jordanian and works for Leo Burnett. He manages clients like McDonalds and Zain telecom.
As mentioned previously, the subject of the discussion was to go over the Youtube ads for Souq for the three consecutive years (2017–2019) and to see how relevant it was to the Middle Easterners.
As Abeer mentioned “Black Friday had a reason it was one of the largest shopping phase of the year because its said that when you’re in the red you are in a deficit and when you’re in the black then you’re doing well. I don’t understand what happens when you’re in the white”. Choucry on the other hand said “last week I did an ad for Extra electronics and we called it Yellow Friday”
For the 2017 ads , Choucry analyzed the messaging of the ad by saying that he prefers to have different ads for different messages “don’t mix messages…the first thing we learned in advertising is to only communicate one message at a time”.
For the 2018 ad, Karim felt that this ad was more realistic and he was able to connect with it a bit more. Abeer was confused and didn’t remember the product. Whereas Choucry stated that they were speaking in English only and that all the faces were non Arabic “its very Western” so they lost their target audience “I didnt feel connected with ad”.
For the most recent 2019 ad, Abeer restates that there was no attention paid to the regionalization and localization. Choucry “I think it’s a bad ad…theres nothing Arabic about it. There was no strong aspect or element of Arabization in the ad”. Karim mentioned that although he likes that the Souq ads build on each other but this one was “too messy”.
You can watch the full interview in the embedded video below but to sum up, there were so much frustration about the ads being “irrelevant” and “non-capturing”. For a platform that is supposed to be “the amazon of the middle east”, it failed to resonate with my participants.
Although I couldn’t connect with any of the ads and felt left out I still bought myself three pairs of underwear and three pairs of shoes but obviously not from Souq. I hope that your black Friday was as white as mine and I hope that next year we see more relevant ads to make us want to add underwear to our basket.
Happy B/W Friday everyone!
source: https://www.newsweek.com/black-friday-middle-east-jeff-bezos-white-friday-sale-523959
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVpqS2usWlE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7CTxaMhMG4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7U2q2OqK9Y
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.
