The Annoying Vodafone
Advertising is changing in Egypt, we’ve seen it last Ramadan in the rise of digital campaigns, modern definitions of branding in the social age and renovated visual identities. There were still remnants of the “the good ol’ days” phase, to which a lot of advertising executives and creative experts raised huge red flags. This season, it appears that brands are moving forward to a new step of how they manage to cut through the cultural clutter of Ramadan and do effective communication. Except Vodafone, Vodafone is moving backwards.
In this massive, 11-superstar-packed, flamboyant orchestra, Vodafone attempts to amaze, again. A parody of the infamous musical “El Leila El Kebeera” (The Big Night) gathered the celebrity pack to celebrate the holy month. This year, however, it offers is a mix between their last year’s family copy mixed with Pepsi’s visual palette of Ramadanic nostalgia of 2013, 2014 and 2015. Impact BBDO, the agency that brought us Pepsi’s marvelous films that achieved the peak of how to bring the past into the present took the same brief that Vodafone pushed last year to JWT and did what they do best.
It’s a drawback for Vodafone’s Ramadan brand because the ad brought a dying trend to a repeated message and put an amazing film on it, at least last year there was something funny about the parody. The collective of the effort will be Vodafone Egypt, as a brand, standing still. Standing still in the fast-paced age we live in means moving backwards.
Don’t get me wrong, though. This video will be super-hyped. People are going to love it and share it till it takes over the internet and get all the views. The well-selected crew of superstars is great effort to cover as much fan-territory as it can. Remember, we’re talking to a widely diverse mass audience here. They’re all together, in red, singing and taking selfies in an artistic setup.
I’m not sure if this is it and we’re stuck for good in Vodafone’s vicious circle of nostalgic dreams, but what I’m sure of is that Vodafone Egypt, as a brand, just turned from being repetitive to being annoying. This makes me a little bit sad, because if Vodafone can achieve what it aspires to achieve with this limited mindset, imagine what can be done with the true creativity and artistic magnitude buried in our agencies. Vodafone, as a brand, needs to mature from the unhealthy psychology of denial and nostalgia and start meditating the present and lead the masses forward into the future.
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