RamaScoops: The Snacking Edition

By Ahmed Emad On Jun 24, 2015

With the amount of ads to discuss this year, I’ve decided to group them into logical categories. This edition of RamaScoops is all about F&B.

Nescafe

Nescafe strikes with an ad away from their core communication. While the song is great and a pleasure to hear (and watch), this is the first time we see Nescafe talk about “beginnings”.

Nescafe was always the morning companion for a fresh mind, but they never tapped into the empowerment platform. In this commercial, they’ve positioned themselves as the product to consume to give you that confidence and boost to embark on new beginnings – like performing in front of an audience, starting your own business, learning to drive a car, etc.

Perhaps this is another chapter into their brand journey, where they want to move away from being the morning companion to being an all-day weapon of choice, helping you take on whatever life throws at you.

Couple of points worth mentioning here:

Good choice of Wust El Balad, although not too relevant to the younger audience under 25. The band is a bit too old for them, an audience who is mostly beginning new chapters of their lives.

Is Ramadan really a good choice for a coffee brand? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe coffee consumption drops drastically during Ramadan. Iftar is at 7 PM with only a 6-7 hour window of food and drink consumption, so there is little time to “nebtedeeha”. Maybe they’ve chosen to air this ad during Ramadan for viewership and to announce that change in positioning from awakening to empowerment. I’m sure someone from Nestle will comment below, so I’m all ears.

Nestle seem to have some deep pockets this Ramadan, with Mega, Crunch, Nescafe & PureLife all on air both on TV and digital (their collective four million YouTube views in one week are definitely not fully organic). Happy times for their media agency, spending all this money.

Fayrouz

Building on what they started last year with their El Mo3adla El Sa3ba copy, Fayrouz continues to intrigue and entertain us with these four witty copies. Who hasn’t been in a situation where you have to be super quick and super selective with your answer or you’re in big trouble?

Funny, relevant, well cast and generally well played. However, I don’t believe they are strong enough (nor long enough, as the copies are – ya 7aram – only 30 seconds vs. the short documentaries we’re seeing this year) to stand out of the clutter and survive amongst all the rest. Time will tell.

Dorito’s

This is not really a Ramadan ad. It’s actually around a year old, but it seems they took a piggyback ride on Crunch’s success and re-ran this TVC as it contains the same cast from the Crunch ad.

The guy is pretty good at crunching snacks, apparently – that’s all he seems to do in both.

Good luck with ad recognition though, as both ads are very similar, featuring the same emotionless (sameg) model doing the exact same thing in two brand campaigns – only difference: one sweet, one sour.

That’s all for now.

Watch this space for the next edition – it’s going to be an interesting one with the Pepsi-Coke saga starting very soon.

Pepsi has released a teaser and is launching over the weekend, with Coke soon to follow.

WE SAID THIS: Don’t miss RamaScoops: Disappointing Start To 2015 Ramadan Ads and RamaScoops: Ramadan 2015 Battle of the Telecoms.