You could be excused for thinking that Saudi Arabia is one of the richest countries in the world! With a GDP per capita in the Top 50s and estimated cash reserves of over $500 billion at the end of 2010 prove this! Add to that the news of Qatar being the richest nation in the world on the basis of GDP per capita, the image of this regions riches is further perpetuated. What if I were to tell you that this is only half the story? And the other half is a complete paradox of what most would expect about Saudi Arabia.

Did you know that in a nation of 27 million only 10% of the population is making more than $4000 per month? With people in a government job making less than $1000 a month and those in a private company making about $2000 a month. This shows the great divide between the rich and the poor. The situation gets even worse when one looks at the impending real estate crisis prevailing today. On one hand we have some families who own more land than anyone can imagine and on the other there are thousands if not millions struggling to own a home. For perspective the Kindgom needs about 2 million new housing units over the next 10 years but the government is unable to do anything about it apparently because there is no vacant land available. There has been a royal decree to build 500,000 housing units with no project end date in sight. Why? The land owners have no incentive to sell. For a city like Riyadh, 50% of the land is vacant and unused. We are talking about 800 sq. km. of prime real estate laid to waste. With more demand and an artificially created shortage of land the average Saudi is forced to not only forget about ever owning a home (with a basic apartment costing about $150,000) but pay about $8,000 to $10,000 in annual rent on an income of about $24,000 per annum.

Add to this a bustling youth population of 5 million in the age bracket 18-30 with about 10% unemployed. We can expect one half of this segment – the men looking to marry and hoping to save about $20,000 as dowry. When you look at the complete picture the equation simply does not add up. Either they are going to be homeless or single! This is one aspect of the paradoxes that prevail in Saudi Arabia. A paradox that has been captured on film and recently exposed through social media. One is the short film “Monopoly” – an inspiring dark comedy made to raise awareness about the impending real estate crisis . The film was produced and directed by Bader Al-Hamoud. So far it had received over 1 million views (1.46 million to be exact!). You can check out the film with English subtitles here.

The other is a series of short films titled “”Mal3ob3lena”by Firas Bakna, a Saudi Blogger who went out to the poor districts of Riyadh to give the “have’s” a true picture of the “have not’s”. The total views on his YouTube channel for all “Mal3ob3lena” related videos exceeds 3 million. You can check out the film with English subtitles here (the video is blocked in Saudi Arabia).

What is the key learning? The paradoxes that exist across all aspects of Saudi life are not as apparent and this is something we as marketers often tend to overlook. If these paradoxes are real and deeply rooted then FMCG companies, for example might have to rethink all the key elements of their Marketing Mix. We have seen Hindustan Lever in India realizing this fact and customizing their SKU’s to meet the needs of the rural customer. They started using sachets as a big volume driver and at the same time have been engaging poor rural women as a network of saleswomen to not only drive product sales but be a source of employment for them as well. Similar kind of approaches might be be needed for Saudi Arabia as well that reflect these prevailing paradoxes. It could prove to be a win-win for both parties.

I originally wrote this post for the PDDB Blog – reposted from here!

I could not believe the impact the news of Steve Jobs’ death had on me. I had only known him as an iconic public figure like so many of our time but his passing felt like some dear relative had been taken away from me. I am simply overwhelmed and furthermore surprised to know that I am not the only one. The impact he had made through his vision, his passion and his humanity is far greater than anyone I have known in my lifetime. His work was nothing less than revolutionary but it was HOW everything he did at Apple embodied this spirit and perhaps it was this spirit that drew us all so close to him.

This September I completed my sixth year of working in Saudi Arabia as Planning Director for DDB. Through the years I have come across many different perspectives and researches on the country and it was not so long ago that I tried to assimilate my learning and chalk out a point-of-view. It was triggered by the need to give an “outsider” – a client based out of Saudi Arabia an inside scoop on the market. The presentation was never made for whatever reason. Not seeing any use for it just lying around offline I decided to put it in the public domain online and share my perspective with the world.

Simply stated I believe Saudi Arabia is a very distinct country from a social and cultural context. It is unlike any other society where there would be minor extremes on both ends with a large majority in the middle. The parameters could be anything like the divide between modernity and tradition, rich and poor, from being culturally exposed to being culturally deprived etc. to name a few. For simplicity however, let’s just say that white is on one end, black on the other with gray in between. To my mind Saudi Arabia is one of those unique places in the world where there is a large white and a large black on either end, with a small gray in the middle. This is what makes Saudi Arabia a society of paradoxes, a society with extreme opposites co-existing together in large numbers. I cannot say if Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world which is so but I can surely say it is one of the few!

Below is my effort to put this perspective in a presentation form with supporting facts. Hope you find it both interesting and useful.

Creativity is a strange thing! It’s elusive and daunting but at the same time it is so easy to find senior creatives living with a false sense of greatness, believing that every piece of work they create is God’s gift to the planet. Yet when you see creative brilliance the end product seems so simple nevertheless. As a strategist, there is a parallel between what a planner would do and what a creative does. Both need to take a leap – one takes a strategic leap the other a creative leap. The question is how?

There are obviously many ways, tools, thinking frameworks, stimuli, processes, disciplines etc. that the best creative minds in the world have devised which can at least enable creative brilliance if not ensure it. One thinking framework is a media-neutral mindset. Before the digital era came upon us there was a time when “Integrated” and “360 degrees” were the buzz word in marketing communications. That time was not too long ago but it was an era when the worst form of integration was simply adapting a single idea, mostly led by the TV commercial, and pasting it across media, usually in the form of static media like print, outdoor, retail and your occasional web banner ad. On the other hand 360 thinking at it’s best was to come up with a “Big Idea”, a media neutral thought that can be scaled to any level where each media would play it’s unique role to carry the message forward both independently and as part of the larger story.

Somewhere in between these big ideas are those one-off brilliant (dare I say small) ideas. I often wonder what was the starting point for such creative brilliance. Have a look at these two examples:

IKEA “Curtains” – Cinema Ad

3M’s Post-it Super Sticky Notes  ”Train”

The question is! What are these ideas a product off? Is it simply great media-neutral thinking focusing on the key message and coming up with the best media to communicate the idea? Or is it a creative leap on a media decision that was already made? Why the doubt? Well for one on an everyday basis client briefs tend to have already taken a media decision. For example, in the case of IKEA the brief could have been to do a cinema ad. The creative team in this case took the leap and came up with the idea of using the right moment before the movie when the curtains are drawn to place their message.

Similarly, what about the 3M Post-it Super Sticky Notes on a train? Was the starting point media neutral? Suppose on the one hand the brief was to communicate the strength of these Super Sticky Notes most probably through a conventional media campaign but the creative team believing in media neutral ideas came up with a live demonstration of the product strength “What if they can be stuck on a high speed train and if none of them come off by the end of the journey then this is an undeniable proof of the product benefit?” Or the brief itself required a non-conventional media solution to demonstrate the product benefit and the creative were put in that mindset to think out of the box from the word go and so they did.  I would like to believe this is truly great media neutral thinking at least in retrospect. But then again perhaps not! What do you think? Have your say in the comments section below.

I am probably very wrong but in my opinion there is a huge downside to Web 2.0. Despite the numerous tools and filters available one can easily get carried away in this vast ocean of knowledge and data that is sweeping at currents faster than those that flow beneath Antartica!

Why do I say that? For the last two years I have been swimming in this ocean supposedly prepared. As a strategist it’s critical to keep a lookout for all the trends that could shape our future. Around 2002, we saw Web 2.0 emerge through tools like weblogs (commonly known as blogs) and RSS. Social Networking sites like Orkut and Myspace began to spring up as well. People could now engage in a dialogue, broadcast their point-of-view to the world and create their own content like any publisher. This was also the time when BlackBerry made email access ubiquitous and the buzzword of this era was “Information Overload”. In early 2009 Clay Shirky, a new media professor at NYU described the phenomenon not as a case of Information Overload but as a failure of filters.

Triggered by this thought I began my journey through this vast mountain of data. I setup Google Reader for my RSS feeds, neatly creating folders for all my topics of interests, from advertising and branding to telecom and trends. I searched the web for leading content across all Web 2.0 channels and over the years built a rich feed of content. I was an early adopter on social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook learning to divide and define the use for each. Joined the bandwagon of the “One with the Most Followers on Twitter is King” and soon realized the fallacy of this notion. Used Twitter lists to filter the relevant stuff again dividing them by my topics of interests and context – from family and friends, news, celebrities to my professional lists focusing on branding, planning and telecom to name a few! With the iPhone things became even simpler (or more complicated depending on how you see it!). After trying out a plethora of apps for feeds and tweets I settled with a few, checking in at least once every hour across platforms. I lost many followers as I would overtake the feed of newcomers by tweeting at a rate of one tweet a minute, sometimes even more! Eventually I learnt how to space out and manage tweets more professionally by using platforms like HootSuite.

The end result! I felt great. The dopamine kept kicking in. I felt like a guru on everything! From the latest news around the world to all those crazy memes taking over the web, I was in the know. Be it technology updates to what was happening in the ever-evolving world of social media to blog posts on all topics related to marketing and brand communications. I was smoking away on this illusive and addictive drug called “knowzac” (not really but you get the point). Having abandoned passive media like TV and newspapers, thinking they were for old timers and geeks I was riding the new media wave, feeling cool that I was in full control of what I consumed and when! (Or so it seemed…)

Then it hit me! I had cascaded from a being a content creator to a blatant consumer of content, sucking on everything that came my way taking out no time to analyze, think or contribute an original perspective. I learnt that even in the world of information and knowledge the plague of consumerism is a force to reckon with. My openness to consuming content from a wide variety of sources was driven by this belief that creativity is best enabled through a rich and diverse base of knowledge. If an idea is simply a fresh connection of two or more known thoughts then the depth of the pool is likely to create bigger, fresher ideas! What happened on the way was a halt to content creation and very limited critical thinking. I was reading more than I ever did in my life but I simply was not thinking enough because most content was very short and too diverse to really make sense of as a whole. However the satisfaction of reading lots of things and then sharing them online kept me away from doing the stuff that really counted.

How will I change my behavior going forward? I will try and do the following:

• Focus More: I see two ways of going about this. I would have to curate my lists and feeds even more and get rid of anyone or anything that is deviating me from my subjects of focus or make a mental note not to get carried away with interesting but nonconstructive blabber at least from a professional standpoint (not always easy to do though).
• Be Proactive: Choose a topic, dig deeper and explore enough to be able to come out with a distinct point of view. Be the one choosing what to read and get further into rather than vice versa.
• Think More: Even if serendipity is allowed whatever that comes across should be thought over, reflected upon and then internalized through a point of view. There should clearly by some thinking done after coming across anything new and interesting rather than just reading through it just for the sake of it.

I believe perhaps that by keeping the above points in mind I would be able to better utilize my time to not only gain knowledge but also to apply it meaningfully to my work. Hope this helps you too. If you have some learning and experiences of your own that you would like to share I am all ears (or eyes in this case!)

It’s amazing how a powerful story can be told in just under 60 seconds. In fact sometimes it can be done in as little as 30 seconds. This is truly a masterful achievement. This is when advertising transcends from blatant commercialism to a higher art form. The way a poet manages to say so much while saying so little. The best advertising aspires and in some cases achieves to do the same. Anyone can throw an endless tirade to make a point but only a genius can make a point in the fewest of words.

The beauty of this is further magnified when what is created also delivers on what it was commissioned to do. In the end all advertising is paid for by a client to achieve and enable a business result and therefore there is an ethical obligation for it to deliver on the objective and not be an art form that is an end in itself. The challenge therefore is double. Not only has advertising to deliver on it’s commercial purpose but it has to be done in a way that exhibits all the passion and effort of an artist who creates his subject purely for the love of what he is doing. That indeed is a tall order since an artist chooses to create as he pleases when he pleases. An advertising creative has to deliver on whatever they are assigned in a preset time and both are not always their choosing. They usually would have very little control on what they can work on and by when.

When I come across this advert (I will not reveal the name and let you find out for yourself) I felt this was another case of beautiful storytelling. When a simple product message gets delivered in a way that is memorable and central to the story and at the same time captures the magic of what makes movies and films great then that is indeed something worth celebrating. See you for yourself!

The simplicity and surprise is outstanding. A simple product truth gets delivered through a powerful and captivating story. Kudos to the creative genius behind this and to the client for approving such a simple and bold piece of communication. Great work!

The world is moving at a zipping fast space. While you read this post the world have tweeted away at about 2200 Tweets per second,  Tumbled (is that what it’s called?) about 333 posts per second, Facebook’d about 12,000 status updates per second and sent about 280,000 emails per second. Not that these are a REAL measure of the pace of things but they sure are indicative of the life we live are embracing with each passing day.  The real question to ask at this point….does the world need to slow down?

I don’t know if it does but it clearly is feeling the need to. You often hear people complain that life is moving too fast and that time is passing by very quickly. So I decided to do what any savvy marketer would do, conduct some solid research and put an end to all the heresy. I went on Twitter to do my research and here is what I found. A New Jersey Girl, a Las Vegas dude, a Singaporean God Lover and a politician from Kosova all saying the same thing. Yes my dear readers this phenomena is truly global!

Is it time to slow down? If people from three continents are saying the same thing then it better be true! Right? I mean these people represent a good three-fourth of the world population don’t they? Isn’t this how we do research these days?!

Looking at a more expert perspective (yes I looked into those as well, I don’t call myself a strategist for nothing eh!) Carl Honore wrote a book on the subject “In Praise of Slow, How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed”. Speed is not always a bad thing I mean some places could really use speed like certain Government Offices that I have come across not pointing fingers or anything (Did I tell you I work in Saudi Arabia?).

But by and large ‘Time Poverty’ – the inability of a large number of people to embrace the present and optimize their experience at that moment has inspired what is known as the ‘Slow Movement’. Even a mock organization – the International Institute of Not Doing Much (IINDM) has been setup to champion this cause. It is a huge philosophy that encompasses many dimensions of our life from Slow Food, Slow Parenting, Slow Travel to Slow Art and beyond!

Being an ad man I guess I notice and look up only when something has implications on branding and advertising. They say advertising is a function of and is inspired by popular culture. It seems “Slow” is becoming the new BIG even in advertising, if not globally then at least in Australia. It’s either that the ‘Slow Movement’ has gained momentum to the point that it is spilling over to brand communications or it’s just some creative guys taking random inspiration. Whatever the case, seeing some commercials inspired by this idea is enough for me to see smoke even when there is no fire. I am sure the flames are not far behind! Check out the videos below to see my pick of ‘Slow Advertising’:

Enjoy the Ride! – YouTube Video Link

Experience Human Flight from Betty Wants In on Vimeo.

Coca Cola continues to spread happiness through everything they do. We still see many ‘Buy 1 Get 1 Free’ offers as we scan a supermarket aisle. They are mostly faceless promotions purely driven to push product down our throat (or wherever else) with no brand building or engagement at heart. And here we have Coca Cola creating a spin on the same old same old.

Cocal Cola uses a bit of creativity to turn a Buy 1 Get 1 free promotion into a branded experience using a simple vending machine. The idea was to create a taller than usual vending machine that can be used normally but with the help of a friend can get you two cans for the price of one. What do friends need to do? They need to help each other reach the top of the machine where they can click the button which dispenses two cans. Alone this button would simply not be reachable.

The idea is wonderful at many levels. Besides the immediate impact on sales Coca Cola has created another on-ground experience which leads to genuine ”happiness”, this time between two friends. By capturing those moments on a video the same can and is being amplified in a big way online. This has turned a small scale brand activation into social content which is likely to go viral and further contribute to building the brand. Check the video below. The results are spectacular!

YouTube Video Link

Pepsi takes the lead with a cutting-edge innovation using IntoNow. What is IntoNow? It is an iOS app that does to TV what Shazam did to music. It can listen to a clip of any TV show live as it happens and tell you the name of the show and the specific episode. Plus it can do that for any show for the last five years. Amazing in it’s own right!

Now Pepsi has managed to pull off a breakthrough using this technology. Users who tag a Pepsi MAX commercial as it airs get a digital coupon redeemable for a free Pepsi MAX. A brilliant idea that has some profound implications. For the first time ever technology has enabled linking a TV commercial message with a real world action. This idea opens up a world of opportunities. The dynamic can be applied to develop many ideas that combine live TV content with real world action – from a promotional offer, to an experience that continues in the real world to something that unlocks exclusive access to a desired product or service. The possibilities are indeed many.

Another aspect of this idea is it’s ability to bring the analytics of digital to TV viewing. It is now possible to determine exactly what was the profile of the people who tagged the TV commercial. Of course, this could bring about privacy issues and I am not sure if such data was shared by IntoNow but even if broad demographic data is shared it is of great value to a marketer.

I think this is part of a larger theme of real time marketing enabled by mobile technology connected to the digital world. We have seen KLM deliver surprises in real time using location based applications. Here Pepsi is offering free product based on an event based application. This merging of the real world with the digital world is something of a trend that is expected to become more common in the days to come. A proof of it’s potential is the fact that Yahoo! bought IntoNow for a reported $20-$30 million dollars according to estimates by TechCrunch. Not bad for a service that has been running for only about 12 weeks. And this was announced days after the Pepsi MAX execution. It seems this was the final clinch to the deal. Watch this space! More real time marketing to come…

Seriously! If you are reading this then somewhere something inside of you made you question ‘what if this is true!’ Most of you are feeling very skeptical I am sure, but the curious ones amongst you wanted to find out more. Well I have good news…your curiosity is about to be rewarded! This is for real.

The all new Lamborghini Aventador was launched at the Geneva Motor Show last month. OK! So what? Except for those extreme car enthusiasts most of us did not hear about it and will not hear about it unless you see it in a movie or something. More importantly most of us will not be driving one of these unless we are the chosen one! So why should we care? Well the official film has just been released and it has blown me away! WOW! is the word. I have to say this is one of the most awesome car commercials I have ever seen. But then I say this about every Lamborghini commercial.

Why is this such a big deal? Simply because of the fact that this car is a 700hp V12 beast with the highest power to weight ratio compared to any car in it’s class. Which is really a big deal! (By the way I learnt that fact after seeing the film). So what then! Why did this video excite me more than the rational information about the car itself. Well they say a picture is worth more than a thousand words and this video really captures the sheer performance, power and handling of this raging bull in a way that is simply superb! It evokes emotion with every frame!

Trying to decode my own reaction and what you are about to experience in a bit I remembered a concept I had read about in Buyology by Martin Lindstorm. The concept of “mirror neurons”. The idea being that when we see something like an action, our mind replicates and exhibits the same energy and activity of someone who is actually experiencing the act. So for these next three minutes because of the way our mind works, we feel like that driver who is smoothly drifting and cruising through earthquakes and armageddon! So when I said drive the new Lamborghini Aventador NOW I really meant it. At least in your mind! So without any further delay I proudly present to you an experience in the Lamborghini Aventador – the newest bull from Italy. Check it out!

YouTube Video Link