Juhayna: How To Hack Into Pop Culture
This Ramadan, Juhayna Dairy, the most family-friendly brand you can imagine, took a leap of faith into a new message. Claiming the #1 post in the Egyptian market, their messaging just got more edgy, with a taste of controversial sarcasm. It’s a well-manifested exhibition of power.
To this mission, King Tut’s Playground, Winners of Dubai Lynx 2016 Independent Agency of The Year, showed great creativity, sober branding, and deep-rooted advertising mindset. They managed to create a piece of art that sells, something you don’t see much of these days.
Juhayna offered 2 copies, one for milk products and one for oriental drinks, both with talking-babies as the main characters.
The primary reaction to these ads remind me of the renouned “Skenshayzar” of Nestlé’s Crunch (Review) in the adoption of the language and references used in the ad in online conversations, giving it a real organic reach (word of mouth) and giving rise to a punchline that would probably live with us for the whole month of Ramadan, “3ayez El Dondoo” (I need the breastmilk). More importantly, it’s crystal clear on ad copy in relation to the product, it sells well.
Hacking into and reshaping pop culture is the utmost goal of advertising
This pretty obvious statement is denied by many in the industry who are afraid to go out of their comfort zone, whether it’s clients, agencies or creatives. This mentality is expected to see from a client, if the client has any imagination, an advertiser would be out of a job, and the Egyptian ad industry weighed at $450m would go bye-bye. But there are agencies and creatives that slowly adopt this mentality out of fear for their business so they cater what the client is comfortable with, what they saw before and know that works for them. I can even envision in my mind how KTP convinced Juhayna to step out of their comfort zone and use a raunchy joke in their ads, something they never did since their establishment in 1983. It must have been a chilling experience, but they managed to do it, and do it right. The key to hacking into pop culture was simple: The brand listened carefully to conversations of consumers of their product, and tapped into them.
The champion of this campaign was the copywriter, who faced a challenge of a new brand of dairy products directed to toddlers. (Juhayna 1/2/3 & Juhayna 4/5/6) So, he imagined talking to an audience of babies, and brought talking-babies as characters in mini-skits. In doing so, he created 3 characters with conflict of interests (The raunchy, The idiot, The innocent)
The copywriter implemented the day-to-day lingo used by Egyptian common men mixed with a baby’s standard of knowledge, such a ripe ground for an original story with hilarious creativity.
No wonder they employed the same direction with the second copy promoting oriental drinks, this time the raunchy kid pokes fun at dumb mothers posing their children for Instagram likes. Brilliant.
While comparisons will be made between this campaign and last year’s “Skenshayzar” of Nestlé’s Crunch, it’s worth noting that Juhayna learnt a very valuable lesson from Crunch. Reports from last year showed that the Crunch ad fell slightly short of achieving brand recognition because of the confusion between “Skenshayzar” and “Crunch”, which they made up for in a recent campaign. KTP took care of their copywriting and made sure that it’s directly related to the product their selling, the line “You want to grow up, baby?” is just gold.
Juhayna and KTP brought us yet another example of how genuine, sober branding effort can generate a truly creative idea that, with careful copywriting, can actually sell, not just produce a film for sheer amusement. It doesn’t matter if it’s on social, digital, print, or film. If you listen to the conversation of your people, adopt a position and start acting on it, you win.
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