By: Nermeen Bedeir, Chief Client Officer, Egypt, Insights Division, Kantar
Co-authored by: Rana Mokhtar, Brand, Media and Communication Director, Egypt, Insights Division, Kantar
At Kantar, we love great creative and the role it plays in building extraordinary brands. We love it even more when that creativity is harnessed to deliver against brand and marketing objectives. At a digital event held on Thursday, 10 June, Kantar revealed the 10 best ads of Ramadan 2021 in Egypt.
Even more so in today’s challenging times, creating distinctive, meaningfully different ads drives a huge competitive advantage and helps sell products in the short term and build brands in the long term. Kantar’s 10 best ads of Ramadan celebrate the great creative that does just that, and have been chosen by the Egyptian audience, whom we believe to be the most important critic, the person who ultimately chooses to buy your brand or not.
These are the ads that caught the nation’s attention as being the most engaging* and came out tops for doing so during the holy month.
The 10 best ads of Ramadan 2021: The Egypt edition
The winning ads created an emotional connection with the audience, featured loads of celebrities, and were amplified by great music. At Kantar, we know people feel first and think second, and ads that are creative and emotionally engaging tend to work better and build memorable and lasting impressions.
This Ramadan, as a nation, we’ve moved beyond the initial sense of panic and confusion of Ramadan in 2020, and our advertising clearly reflects this. So much so that the dip in marketing communication spend from when we entered the pandemic last year has normalised, with key features of Ramadan advertising keeping their space in consumers’ hearts and minds.
To delve further into what got ads noticed by this year’s captive audience, we married our copy assessment knowledge – developed from testing over 200,000 ads across the globe, effectively testing an ad every hour – with our extensive brand tracking partnership. This means our holistic creative assessment of Ramadan communications via Kantar’s ad-testing platform Link revealed not only likability and enjoyment of ads based on the viewing audience in Egypt, but also the meaningful impact of the advertising on the brands behind it.
The five habits of effective advertisers: Creative Learnings for Egypt
We also gain global resonance when we tie in these learnings with the five main elements that develop strong creative content, as identified in our Creative Effectiveness Awards earlier this year. While there are many routes to creative effectiveness, the most successful advertisers have a way of working that starts long before the ad is produced. They build on consumer insights to identify a creative territory for the brand that becomes the foundation for ads that run across channels, markets, cultures and time. Effective advertisers have also developed several habits to ensure that once individual ads are created, they will deliver for their brand, in both the short and long term…
Habit #1: Be distinctive
It’s not easy being noticed and remembered amongst a profusion of ads, as your brand is effectively competing not only in its category, but for attention against the world. You therefore need to stand out from the category as a minimum. This highly correlates with involvement and grabbing the audience’s attention. In Ramadan 2021, the elements of distinction used by more than half of the ads ranged from creative and distinct scenes to threads of humour pulling the storyline together, as well as the element of surprise and, of course, engaging music.
While music has always formed the basis of marketing communication during the holy month in Egypt, songs that resonate strongly with the audience go viral on social media, boosting the brand’s profile and awareness. Celebrities have also traditionally featured in Ramadan ads and we’ve noticed an increase in this over the years, with 83% of the ads we tested this Ramadan using celebrities. Emotional and fun scenes of connection and gathering with friends and family finding favour in 75% of the ads we tested, as a reflection of our wanting to feel a sense of normality again.
Habit #2: Branding intrinsically
Smart marketers know attention won by their ad works in the brand’s favour, with higher branding scores relating to an increased likelihood of seeing in-market sales effects. But our tracking research shows that on average, only 32% of target viewers who are aware of an ad can link it back to the correct brand. And no brand means no impression – the remaining two-thirds either don’t know what the ad promotes or misattributes it to a competitor.
Get your branding cues right by playing on your brand’s distinctive style and keep it consistent with your other campaigns’ mood and tone.
Habit #3: Be meaningfully different
To grow market share or defend premium pricing, you need to fulfil consumers’ functional, emotional, and social needs in the category, while also illustrating your uniqueness compared to the competition. Being meaningful means fulfilling the consumer’s needs in the category, while being different is about being unique in comparison to other brands. Both can be functional, but nowadays, brands need to go beyond the product message to meet emotional and social needs.
Habit #4: Trigger an emotional response
The uncomfortable truth is that people generally don’t care about brands or ads, so their brains filter them out. Ads that engage people creatively and trigger an emotional response, making the viewer feel something, win engagement for the ad and bypass the natural tendency to screen out advertising. Our Link database proves that emotional ads have higher impact not only on consumers, but also on brand equity, driving more sales for the brand. Little wonder then that nostalgic and heart-warming ads featured strongly over Ramadan in 2021.
Habit #5: Talk with your consumers
The world’s most successful advertisers talk to their consumers. They do this by testing their ads, because often, they are so close to the brand, that they don’t see advertising in the same way as their target audience. So, to check that the tactics they’ve employed in their creative deliver against the habits of distinctiveness, branding intrinsically, meaningful difference and triggering emotion, they test their ads to make sure they land the story to leave a lasting impression.
Intrigued?
Contact us to schedule your free demo of Marketplace, Kantar’s automated market research platform designed for insights professionals, marketers and agencies who want to test, learn and move faster, and talk with your consumers so you can develop ads that help sell product in the short term and build brands in the long term.
*As per Link’s KPIs. Link is Kantar’s proprietary creative and effectiveness tool, and the learnings generated enables us to give advice based on media and local cultural contexts, what makes the ads great, and shares inspiration for future creative. Learn about Link ad testing on Kantar.com.
Nermeen Bedeir
Nermeen is an accomplished consumer knowledge and insights professional with almost two decades of experience in the Africa and Middle East markets.
