After 18 days of intense protests against Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Egyptian people succeeded to throw the president out of the government’s control. 11th February 2011 proved to be the day of celebration for Egyptians as they got rid of Hosni Mubarak. The impact of revolution can be observed in industries throughout Egyptian market. Advertisement industry played a crucial role in deriving the emotions of the protestors and created a patriotic boost across the nation.
The advertisement industry faced a changing trend after this revolution. Most advertisement campaigns were ceased to deliver the pre-revolution messages. Companies started to ask their advertisement agencies to design advertisement campaign that address to the current political situation and patriotic messages.
During the revolution, advertisers showed mixed response as it was reflected in their campaigns that the do not want to support the revolution but they do want to boost the energy level in the public. Advertisements were mainly concerned to the news programming during the revolution days.
After the revolution, Egyptian advertisers used only one theme for their campaigns, i.e. Revolution and patriotism. In their campaign, ad agencies started to honor the revolution and those who got affected because of this blood shedding revolution. The tourism industry adapted the theme in their campaign, which showed that “people in Egypt welcome tourist to a country that is peacefully revolutionized”. One more tagline states that “This is the place, where it all begins” C.
Advertisement agencies now preferring to design their ad campaigns with two different themes – one that delivers a patriotic message, in order to boost the morale of the nation, and to support their efforts to bring the nation together and rebuild it. The second theme aims at creating awareness among the audience about the CSR efforts of firms across Egypt. Presently, regular advertisements are low in frequency, while the above two discussed themes are appreciated by the audience (Wentz).
After the revolution, the advertising agency faced few obstacles as well. Firms throughout Egypt have dropped their spending on advertising by approximately 35%.
The reason for this drop in spending might be a resultant of difficult and uncertain market situation in Egypt. Ad agency’s owners are uncertain about the economic condition and they tend to put strict terms on the payment schedule, which consequently, makes organizations to cut back their spending on promotional campaigns. Due to this uncertainty, brands who can afford to advertise their products in the market are using alternate ways.
To attract customers, they are using the patriotic element in the society, and communicating the message that they can help the nation in the process of rebuilding Egypt and can bring reforms in the society. Coca-Cola has dropped its recent advertisement campaign and adopted the new campaign that states that Coca-Cola can help Egyptians to rebuild their country in order to satisfy its hope for customer value and prosperity in Egypt (Wentz).
Organizations have also increased their use of social networking sites, especially Facebook, to promote their products. Facebook played an important role in Egypt’s revolution and the number of its users increased 4 times after revolution as compare to pre-revolution era in the country. This shows how much this social networking site is famous in the Egypt and it has become an important of Egyptian culture (Wentz).
We can conclude that Egyptian market conditions are not uncertain so far for the advertisement of products, but still, the advertisement agencies in the country have played a positive and important role in deriving people’s emotions from negative to positive after the revolution.
Works Cited
Wentz, Laurel. “How Egypt’s revolution Reshaping Local Advertising.” 2011. Web.