GM.

One of my close friends in Egypt is a writer and director for commercials. And he is near the top of his craft and industry: his commercials tend to be particularly memorable and effective domestically, and they win international awards in places like Cannes. Some of them are filmed in Europe.

The reason his commercials are so good is that they tend to be funny, and in particular tend to subvert an existing trend. Kind of like how people actually look forward to the creativity of Super Bowl commercials, his commercial campaigns are at like that level, where they are enjoyable to watch. Some of them feature celebrities and many do not, but what they have in common is that they are well-written, funny, memorable, and position the product well.

I really like that approach; making commercials might not be seen as the most sexy profession to many people and commercials in general are known to be annoying, but striving to be at the top of your craft and seeking to elevate the whole craft is very admirable.

As an example, celebrities often appear in commercials in Egypt, but rarely participate in any self-deprecating humor and the commercials basically aren’t very original or interesting. Like the American equivalent would be The Rock surrounded by women and holding up a Pepsi saying he loves it. And on social media here, people will often say, “oh, [insert celebrity] only did it to pay for his next house installment.”

For context, with a rapidly debasing currency, real estate is the main investment vehicle here, and people (ranging from the middle class to the wealthy) will pay for them in 3-10 year installments. A celebrity will buy some North Coast mansion as his third property, and so if he appears in a lame commercial people will say he’s only doing such a shitshow to keep making his installments.

So my friend gets asked to make a commercial for a financial service app that allows for more flexible real estate installment payment timing. Not the most exciting product. So he decides to subvert this trope and make a boring product memorable. He creates a set of four commercials, with a top Egyptian celebrity as the star in all four of them. In each commercial, the big celebrity is filming some terrible commercial that he doesn’t want to do in a really funny filming situation (overtly self-deprecating humor), and his agent reminds him he has to do it to make his next installment payment. For an American equivalent, picture The Rock dressed as Big Bird in a commercial, taking a break to get a drink while all sweaty and hating his day, complaining that agreeing to this was a bad idea, but his agent reminds him that he’s got an installment payment coming up next month, so The Rock begrudgingly puts the Big Bird hat back on and waddles back onto the set. And the commercials close by mentioning the app and how flexible installment payments make it so you don’t end up in this situation. The campaign was funny, memorable, went rather viral, good for the product, etc.

So for his latest one, a big Egyptian conglomerate wants him to design a commercial for a sports club, and sports clubs are very common around greater Cairo; it’s where a lot of people of all ages do sports, swim, eat, and hang out, while they also have pro football team or some other pro athletes as well. Some of Egypt’s weightlifting and track Olympians train at this particular one, so with the Paris Olympics coming up, the conglomerate wants to make an Olympics-themed commercial where the weightlifters come on screen and say they train at this club.

My friend points out that it’ll be very hard to get the Olympians for the commercial because they are in peak training mode right now. It’s the month leading up to the Olympics. And weightlifters and track athletes are not usually very well known anyway, so their impact might be overestimated (they aren’t like famous footballers). So his proposal was to instead get a well-known funny/charismatic celebrity to come on screen and say that the club’s facilities are so good that Egypt’s weightlifting team is based out of there, and the club wanted to have them in this commercial, but is too considerate to pull them out of training for an ad, since training is the most important thing for them rather than appearing in commercials right now, and so they got him (the funny/charismatic guy) to talk about it instead and he’s sorry since he knows he’s not as cool as weightlifters. It’ll be easier to film this month and get it out during the Olympics, and will be more memorable and impactful, is his argument. The type of thing people will share on social media, like many of his other commercials.

The conglomerate thought about it but instead just wanted the Olympians. But now they are running into all sorts of schedule issues because the Olympians are, in fact, too busy with training. Some of them are even out of the country training with the best coaches internationally in prep for this. So the conglomerate is scrambling to figure out what to do about the commercial to get it out during the Olympics and my friend is like, “Gosh, if only there was some other commercial concept we could be filing about it right now…”