Al Rifai promotes new packs

Al Rifai promotes new packs

By Admin I : It is always a delight to spot a campaign with some good amount of guts, or what we call “ballvertising” (it might sound sleazy but who cares, we felt like inventing a word!). Al Rifai decided to redesign their packs, a design process to be discussed later in this post, but what is mainly “in your face” in this ad is the wit. Intermarkets is definitely an agency that knows how to juggle Arabic copywriting, overdone and tacky sometimes but spot on and very clever most of the times especially when going informally Lebanese. To promote the new packs the campaign took two tangents. One focusing on the fact that the packs were newly released and the other still highlighting the high quality of the blends; there’s an almost “bullshit” phase in advertising where they assume a product has reached a maturity level, but ironically, the most successful campaigns are generated by going off that phase and flattening pretentious marketing strategies to bring back the close brand-audience communication tools.

Al Rifai went the opposite direction featuring the product as perceived by competition, applying their “competition went nuts!” concept using a witty play on words “el sou’ ma byettekal” to reinforce their confident presence in the lebanese market dropping all sorts of food advertising cliches (yes, a post without the word “cliche” cannot exist!). There’s no fake “yum-orgasm” moment, no slow-motion shiny bigger than usual nuts and certainly no fake promises. One aspect that puts a damn edgy full stop, ending competition.

On a design note, all food packages are currently going through a lifting process to fit some new design/marketing rules. It’s all about a more subtle minimal visual approach with a focus on typography. Al Rifai is still very recognizable keeping a link with its audience (especially the not-so-delicious looking nuts picture) but totally lost the tacky shiny material and the gradient hues. It’s slick, matt using 3 solid colors, a deep red, a yellow-orange and a black keeping a somehow useless gold line yet staying in total harmony with the balls they flashed earlier in their campaign.

No “La vie en rose” track playing, no unappealing violet packages, just mere attitude!

Cheers to ballvertising, just don’t give a nut about it! (gawd those are two successive cheesy expressions!)