Search: “cop”

I just heard there is a lion loose in Kuwait. It seems it escaped from a Sheikhs residence in the Fintas area and now the cops are trying to catch it.

hummer15al uploaded to video clips taken by a Kuwaiti family during the Iraqi invasion. Its divided into two parts and you can check them out on YouTube.

Here are two layouts from the Young Lions competition. For those who missed my previous post, we needed to promote the WFP “Food for Education” program with our ads.

The body copy for the “I am hungary” one says:

Help educate children while providing them with nutritional meals. Find out how you can make a difference by donating towards our Food for Education program by logging onto www.wfp.org

The second layout the body copy and the headline wasn’t finalized because we killed the idea in the end. Supposedly the gold winner at the competition had a similar idea with the bitten pencil but I haven’t seen that layout yet to know exactly how close we were to winning gold.

I will be traveling to Dubai on the 1st of May and I will be back on the 3rd. I will be going there with my partner from work to participate in the Young Creatives compeition thats part of the Cannes Lions which is regarded as the most prestigious international advertising festival. The Young Creatives competition is for creatives 28 years old or younger and you enter as a team made up of an art director and copyrighter.

Last year me and my partner wanted to participate but they were fully booked, this year we managed to get in luckily because I turn 29 in August so I wouldn’t have been able to participate ever again. To get to Cannes we need to qualify and thats why we are going to Dubai. Different creatives from the Middle East will be participating in the qualification process on May 2nd with the gold winner going to Cannes to participate in the main international competition.

This is how the competition works. They put all the creative teams participating into one large room. They then bring in a client which is usually a non profit organization to brief us on the job. Once the client is done briefing us, the teams have 12 hours to come up with a campaign and execute it. Every team will have a workstation to work on, there will be no Internet access (for 12 hours!!!) and you aren’t allowed to bring in anything with you either like CDs, cameras, laptops etc.. There will be a work station usually sponsored by Corbis or Getty Images where you can search for photos but there is a list and you have to sign up and wait for your turn.

Its a very exciting event and getting gold would be amazing since it would mean me and my partner will be traveling to Cannes in June and putting Kuwait on the map. You can check out the winners from last years competition [Here]. As you can see the work from last year was extraordinary. I am nervous but it should be a lot of fun.

Q80Boy sent me an email telling me that last night at 9:30PM, Virgin in Marina Mall was shutdown because they were caught selling inappropriate movies. Can anyone confirm this? It’s confirmed!

update: I just got back from Marina Mall and Virgin is closed. There are red stickers all around the place and two A4 photocopies of the closing order which you can view [Here] and [Here]

A Chinese car maker called Huanghai Auto has copied borrowed designs from the Pontiac Torrent and Lexus RX350 and combined them to create one car, the Huanghai NCV. Should be available in Hawalli soon. [Link]

via autoblog

Yesterday I posted about the strange trying to be funny messages on the Marina Mall bins, well it turns out they actually copied it.

Thanks Mark deSouza for pointing it out.

Does anyone else find this new Burgan Bank ad cheesy? It also reminds me of the Subway “Kaifi” campaign that were released last year. I tried to find a copy of those Subway ads but I couldn’t.

Picture from ads2blog

update: here is the subway ad! Thanks conz

Subway ad taken from the Coaxial website

Yesterday I posted about how Al-Qabas are stealing pictures from local flickr users. Turns out the university magazine, Cruise Campus stole not 1 picture but 14 pictures for one of their covers!! Someone should tell them that combining 14 pictures into 1 doesn’t make a new copyright free image. Whats funny is when one of the photographers called them to complain, they told him they got the pictures from a CD which they got off Al-Watan newspaper. [Link]

Thanks to Moayad for pointing out the above.

I was at the Ducati dealer yesterday, TriStar and they had a limited edition Bimota bike on display. There are only 23 of them in the world and they were made as a tribute to the Italian soccer team for winning the World Cup.

I was kidding around with my friend who works there telling him how easy it would be to make this bike look like a tribute to the Kuwaiti soccer team by editing the Italian flag to make it look like a Kuwaiti one. When he heard that he took me to the rear of the bike where it turns out there was something that already looked like a Kuwaiti flag! I found that pretty funny.

Here is another better picture of the bike [Picture]

A friend sent me a link to the wikipedia entry for the word “Paraphilia” with a simple instruction “You gotta check the list at the end”. So I scrolled down and I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found the strangest thing. Its the “List of paraphilias” with some really strange entries, here are some of my favorites:

Acousticophilia: sexual arousal from certain sounds
Aquaphilia: arousal from water and/or in watery environments, including bathtubs or swimming pools
Coprophilia: sexual attraction to (or pleasure from) feces
Emetophilia: sexual attraction to vomit
Gynophagia: sexual attraction toward eating woman (eating as in food)
Nasophilia: sexual attraction to the sight, touch of human noses
Retifism: sexual arousal from shoes
Sitophilia: sexual arousal from food
Spectrophilia: sexual attraction to ghosts

For the full and very enjoyable list click [Here]

Link for the above video. [Link]

Here is another link to a Kuwaiti cop raving, a girl dressed in a Kuwaiti cop uniform dancing and some more Iraqi cops dancing. [Link]

Hungry Bunny is a local creation that opened up in the early 80s in Kuwait. It was inspired by a Australian franchise called Hungry Jack which was what Burger King was called in Australia back then.

In 1997 Al Homaizi Foodstuff Co. who owned Hungry Bunny got the rights to Burger King. Since they couldn’t have two competing franchises they decided to close down all the Hungry Bunnys and open up Burger Kings in the same locations.

Since then there have been copycats the most popular being “Hungry Bunny World” and “Super Bunny” which was named after the famous Hungry Bunny burger. Hungry Bunny World actually opened up a branch on the 4th Ring Road back in 2005 and called it just “Hungry Bunny”. This led to a lot of speculation and rumors that Hungry Bunny was relaunching but they weren’t true. Al Homaizi sued (or threatened to sue) so they added the word “World” on their signage.

I heard awhile back from a friend that Al Homaizi was actually thinking of relaunching Hungry Bunny but I don’t know if thats true or not. For now the only way you can enjoy Hungry Bunny is to drive down to Saudi Arabia where the franchise still exists there. Here is the link to their website: www.hungry-bunny.com

note: the above information is based on my knowledge. If there are any mistakes in dates or events I will fix them but as far as I know the above is accurate.

update: A reader by the name of HaMooR wrote the following:

Dear Mark,

Al Homaizi has the BK franchize since the first hungry bunny openned in Kuwait. and I believe it was Kaifan branch, in order for Al Homaizi to sake BK prudects at that time in kuwait. they have to change the name of BK, because BK was consider in the taboo list (boycott Isreal).

There was a big sign in kaifan branch that says all the meat prudects are BK. So when BK was removed from the list back in 97 .. and there is no reason to for them to hide the name, they switched to BK.

Seems I pissed someone off at Brainstorm the architecture firm because I said they made a mess of the new Bazaar website (they designed it). Here are two comments left by them on my blog today:

HIHI what is going on… I believe a blog for most of all should be nautral and independant. Or you can call it 248complainingandbitching…

I just checked out the Bazaar site and I think it is very coool and I cant wait to see the readable issue on site.. Because how irritating is it when Starbucks is out of copies. Now what is wrong for an arcitecture firm who also have a grapich department, doing his site….? Honestly we are all designers with new ideas.. and yours are highly appreciated, but stop using your own tast as an agenda.. The site is still under development, so give it some time and you will see. Go and bitch at others magazines who are copying Bazaar big time. That is a crime!!!!

I do not agree that Bloggers are nerds, but I do think that what Bazaar did was right, because it is the freedom of speach. And if that pisses you off so much Mark, why do you bitch and complain about others all the time. We all read your blog and we do like it, but try to be grown up enough to take some criticism and turn it in to something. If there was not a hint of truth to it, you would not react so harsh… I guess all doze long days infront of the computer are getting to you.. you should do some outdoor sport other than walking your dog…and driving your bike.. And leave Bazaar alone , he is older than you by 10 years…

Just got back from the Kuwait Advertising Arab Awards, it was better then last years event but it was still extremely poor. The way the categories were divided and the way the ads were nominated didn’t make any sense. Our agency submitted work to some categories for example but during tonights event those categories didn’t exist. I heard the same feedback from other agencies who participated, everyone was just confused to what the hell was going on. The actual presentation of the awards was also a mess, they couldn’t get the TV commercials playing right (how hard is it to press play and pause) and the woman announcer had the most cheesiest one liners. The event was also supposed to start at 7PM according to our tickets (which had a major mistake btw), but according to their website the event was supposed to start at 7:30PM but in reality the event actually started at 8. There were also less agencies participating this year probably because after last years fiasco no one wanted to be involved with the KAAA.

On a positive note the stage looked good, BUT it was a near copy of the KREA awards. Compare the picture above to the picture [Here]. Notice the starry backdrop?

Anyway my agency ended up collecting the most awards (I think), with a total of 12 bronze, silver and gold trophy’s but it really doesn’t mean much since the KAAA doesn’t have any credibility internationally. One of my favorite TV commercials ever which was created by our Beirut office won a Gold in the food category. The version of the ad they played wasn’t the one I liked though, it has a different soundtrack and editing so I figured I would share with everyone the version I like which I uploaded to YouTube a while back. The commercial was for the product Zwan, if you haven’t checked it out you can by clicking [Here]. And thats it basically, I got to see a lot of old friends and I got to wear a suit so everything else didn’t matter much. Hopefully next year I won’t go.

update: here is another review of the event [Link]

update2: Just found out that they canceled one of our categories because we were the only ones who entered it. So according to the KAAA logic if you are successful and have no competition you can’t win. Now lets play along with that for a moment, how about you call us and tell us that you canceled that category, at least then we could have told the client not to come to the event. No professionalism whatsoever.