When a group of people “spontaneously” started dancing the traditional Lebanese Dabke at Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport in March, several onlookers responded in a way that is only natural these days. They videotaped the performance with their mobile phones and uploaded the clips to YouTube.
Soon the flash mob video was everywhere. Friends were sharing it on Facebook. International media outlets like the Huffington Post were writing about it. It was only around a week after the video went viral that the truth came out. The “spontaneous” party was an advertising stunt.
The Lebanon-based branch of the global advertising firm M&C Saatchi recruited the dancers on behalf of Beirut Duty Free. They rigged the airport with speakers and cameras and staged the entire performance, hoping for exactly what they got: hundreds of thousands of viewers around the world without a dime spent buying time on television.
Beirut Duty Free’s stealth commercial is a recent, successful example of a marketing trend now reaching the Middle East – viral advertising. A combination of the Internet, smartphones, YouTube and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook has revolutionised the advertising profession. Marketing is no longer confined to print media, television and radio. The adman’s audience today is global and his means to reach it much expanded.
For Jihad Bitar, Knowledge Director at Lebanon’s Quantum Communications, it makes sense that the digital age’s newest method of advertising is now hitting the Middle East. Penetration of both the Internet and Facebook are on the rise in the region and advertisers are beginning to see the potential of using these tools to sell their wares.
“Lots of viral campaigns have started in Lebanon,” Bitar said. “Lots of companies are using them, in Lebanon and the Middle East. At least in Lebanon, I have seen many campaigns, some not so successful, some very successful.”
The key for a successful viral campaign, he said, is novelty. If you’re not offering something interesting and different, no one is going to pay attention. “If you’re not very creative, people are not going to notice,” Bitar said. “Any communication is about getting above the clutter.”
Many companies, he said, are doing very well in creating a buzz for themselves on Facebook, garnering thousands of “likes” and having their pages shared from friend to friend.“This type of campaign creates awareness but doesn’t create engagement,” he said. “Engagement would be the next step, making me go click on something related to your brand, play a game with you, be part of ‘live the brand.’ If I don’t live the brand – I’m just aware of the brand – I could be a customer. [But] if I live the brand, I’ll probably be a better customer.”
One successful viral ad campaign underway in Lebanon now is being run on behalf of the local restaurant chain Zaatar w Zeit, he said. They’re running a who-dunnit mystery campaign. The company has removed all the “Z”s from its signs and e-mailed a fake ransom note detailing the kidnap of the letters along with photos of police cars in front of the restaurants and a video of the kidnapping. Updates and demands are set to follow.
“Now, all bloggers who received this talk about it. It costs the brand nothing,” Bitar said. “All the bloggers are talking about it saying, ‘Ok, we’re waiting. What’s next?’” The Zaatar w Zeit campaign is an example of a more complex viral campaign. Unlike building awareness on Facebook or staging one event, like Beirut Duty Free, this campaign will have several stages and makes use of the Internet and bloggers. Complexity will likely add to its success, Bitar said.
For advertising agencies, viral marketing presents the challenge of finding creative people to conceive of a campaign and technicians capable of carrying it out. So while the cost of buying space in traditional media does not exist with a viral ad, the creative costs associated with developing one can be high, he said.
Advertisers will also have to increasingly incorporate smartphones into their campaigns, he said. A December 2010 study by Effective Measure, a company that studies Internet use, found 45 percent of users in the Middle East and North Africa connect to the net with their phones. Any Internet ad campaign that cannot translate to a mobile phone’s browser will be missing a significant audience, Bitar said.
Bitar thinks the next high-demand job in the advertising world will be the communication strategist – someone adept at concocting the right mix of standard and viral ads. As he noted, television penetration in the Middle East is still quite high, and the medium cannot be entirely ignored in favour of the Web. “Today a communication strategist has a toolbox, which people before did not have,” Bitar said. “I have more tools to talk to my consumers. I have more tools to do it. I have mobile phones, I have blogs, I have Twitter, I have Facebook, I have TV, I have radio advertising…This is the difference.”
