Category: Commercials

I haven’t posted a commercial on here in a long time but this new one by Ooredoo is pretty great and on point.

I found a ton of old ads online and decided to go through them and pick out the most memorable ones to me growing up in Kuwait during the 80s. I think the one that caught my interest the most was the Al Khalejiah Complex ad. So very few people remember that when Al Khalejiah Complex originally opened it was one large department store. The only reason I remember it is because that’s where I used to go get my Legos from so it was pretty cool finding this commercial.

The Samsung and Indesit commercials were also great finds since I used to find their tunes extremely catchy as a kid. Anyway check out the full list below of my favorites:

7up
Al Khalejiah Complex
Americana 1
Americana 2
Coast
Crest
Dalal Oil
Filfila
Fotofast
Hardees
Hungry Bunny
Indesit
Kiri 1
Kiri 2
Kit Kat
KDD 1
KDD 2
Kentucky Fried Chicken
Kitco
Kuwait Dairy Co
Like Cola
National Bank of Kuwait 1
National Bank of Kuwait 2
Pepsi
Pizza Italia 1
Pizza Italia 2
Safeway
Samsung
Shani
Sultan Center 1
Sultan Center 2
Sunkist
Tikka
Toyota
Wazza Tea
Zest

If you want to go through all the commercials and find some other ones, click here.

KDD just published their Ramadan commercial called “We Love KDD” and I think it’s great (you’re always gonna win me over with nostalgia). If you’re living in the US and want to order KDD Chocolate Milk, check out my previous post here.

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There has been a bit of a debate recently regarding the recent Chocolate Bar ads with many women calling the ads sexist and misogynistic. A friend of mine asked me what I thought of the ads and I personally just saw them as funny without thinking much more of them. But then again, I’m a guy and so I might be part of the problem here. I didn’t even know what misogyny really meant until a couple of days ago.

I like to think of myself as a feminist, so I was kinda disappointed in myself for not seeing anything offensive in the ads. But I think that has to do more with the fact I generally don’t read too deep into things. While watching the ad above all I was thinking about was the 80s aesthetics and while watching the ad below all I could focus on was the car (a manual BMW E30 Touring).

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I don’t think I’m sexist just because I didn’t see the ads offensive to women at first, but looking at them again, I can see how they could be considered wrong. I’ve had this debate internally in my head a lot, anytime I read in the news about similar issues around the world (well mostly in the States). I always ask myself if maybe we’ve become overly sensitive? or are we just more informed and aware now? Are we overdoing it, or were we not doing enough?

Do you find the Chocolate Bar ads offensive? Or do you think people are just overreacting?

[poll id=”16″]

If you skip to the 2-minute mark in the video above you’ll get to an old Showbiz ad, one I hadn’t seen before. It’s a pretty lame ad but it does have footage of the interior which will bring back memories if you ever went there as a kid. Showbiz opened up in the 80s on the Gulf Road and was a concept similar to Chuck E Cheese. It closed down and the building demolished in the 90s to make way for a new Showbiz but that project ended up getting abandoned.

If you keep watching after the Showbiz ad you’ll see an old Crush soda ad which I actually remember watching as a kid.

Thanks Janna

I rarely ever post commercials on my blog because 99.9% of the time they’re usually pretty lame. But, these new Slice commercials on the other hand are really funny. There are four videos in total and all four are in Arabic sadly, so if you can’t understand Arabic you won’t get these.

Check out the remaining two below.

A friend shared the commercial above with me yesterday and my first reaction was wtf? In the commercial, a husband walks into a kitchen and starts screaming and hitting his wife for buying the wrong honey. The wife looks terrified and is being apologetic while the husband continues to shout at her before leaving the kitchen angrily.

The commercial got a lot of negative reactions for normalizing domestic violence so I assumed the brand removed the video from their Instagram account, except they didn’t.

Last week another friend of mine shared the screenshot above on her instastory which she took from a show on KTV called “Block” where they had a blackface character.

I don’t think I’m a very PC or an over sensitive person but, I do find it disturbing how the majority of people seem to be OK with this. I’m assuming the majority are ok with it or else the commercial would have been removed and the show would have apologized or been canceled for blackfacing. Yet neither has happened but oddly enough, the commercial below for Mug Coffee House was supposedly suspended by the Ministry because they found it Masonic. So bizarre.

It’s been a while since I shared a local commercial that I liked, but I just watched the Carriage national day commercial awhile ago and loved it.

Check it out above (it’s in Arabic). [YouTube]

Back in November, local creative firm Beattie + Dane launched a campaign for Al Munayes Tea called ‘Bou Salem’. It was a hilarious campaign where they created a fake candidate for the parliamentary elections and it ended up going viral pretty much overnight.

Well yesterday, Beattie + Dane won Bronze at the Cannes Lions festival for that campaign. Cannes Lions is to advertising what the Oscars are to movies, its the most coveted and well respected festival in the entire advertising and creative communications industry. Being shortlisted for a Lion is a huge accomplishment by itself, yet alone winning an actual award.

My favorite commercial from the ‘Bou Salem’ series is the one below where he day dreams while drinking his tea, but you should really watch the case study video on top first which explains the campaign and is in English.

uBuy is a local e-commerce website and their latest commercial (above) made it onto the Reddit front page on Saturday. Not sure if it was shot locally or somewhere else but it’s a pretty funny ad.

The local Ramadan ad on top was released a couple of days ago, while the Egyptian Chipsy commercials below were released back in January. Notice any similarities?

Not only are the ideas very similar, but most of the shots are practically identical down to the props (check orange juice in the pics below). I wouldn’t be surprised if Alameed Coffee pull their commercial and then have a nice chat with their agency about this.

Zain’s latest Ramadan ad made it to the top of Reddit’s front page yesterday and the video has already garnered nearly 2 million views in just two days. The reddit post also has over 4,000 comments with majority of them being positive except for the ones on the guy that kicks the pigeon 44 seconds into the commercial. If you haven’t watched the commercial yet you can check it out below.

For those of you who don’t know what Reddit is:

Reddit is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Reddit’s registered community members can submit content such as text posts or direct links. As of 2017, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors, ranking #4 most visited web-site in US and #9 in the world. [source]

Update: I just noticed that this Zain reddit post is marked as an ad which means it might have been promoted to the front page instead of getting there naturally. Oh well..

Last September my Datsun was used in a commercial for the groceries delivery brand Baqal. They were doing an old school commercial and my car fit the theme so they paid me to do donuts in an empty sandlot (always fun). Since then I’ve been waiting for the commercial to come out so I could post about it, and it finally did… a week after I sold my car. So I guess it kinda works out as a final farewell to the Z. She will be missed.

My friends over at Beattie + Dane worked on this hilarious campaign for Al Munayes Tea called “Bou Salem”. He’s a funny character that is pretending to run for a seat in the upcoming parliament elections. There are two videos out so far, the one on top is the first video that was released in which the character Bou Salem was introduced for the first time. The one below was the second video and is of Bou Salem day dreaming while drinking his tea which made me laugh out loud when I first watched it. Kinda makes me miss not working in advertising anymore.

Note: The video on top is in Arabic

In summary, they’re all terrible with most being so bad I couldn’t even watch them all the way through. The only one that stuck out for me was the commercial above and most because it was a bit weird (and it wasn’t a musical). As of now I’ve collected 32 of this years Ramadan commercials and put them up on a YouTube playlist. I wouldn’t recommend it but in case you’re interested in watching some of them, just click [Here]