Malek Ghorayeb, executive regional creative director of Leo Burnett Dubai, feels misunderstood. By other agencies. “People say you can recognize a Burnett ad. I love this line,” he says. “We hear it from other agencies. ‘[A Burnett ad] is always neat and clean and corporate.’ It makes me laugh, because people think we’re a school: very proper, very neat, all speak French. They think we’re all nice boys. Go and see,” he says pointing to his office door.
We hesitate. “What?” we ask. “They’re not nice?”
“They’re weird,” he replies. “That’s why I hired them.”
“Weird” is a fair description of the agency’s recent TVC for the Chevrolet Captiva SUV – a car Ghorayeb describes as “not a four-wheel drive, not a car. It’s somewhere in the middle.”
The agency beat out Leo Burnett’s Latin American team for the right to produce the ad, which is now running internationally.
THE CIRCUS IS IN TOWN
The ad is a big-budget (“for the region,” Ghorayeb adds) bit of magical realism in three sections. At first, the Captiva is driving through a drab cityscape. At a traffic light, the child in the back seat sees an acrobat swinging down next to the window, and the city turns into a circus. Next, the car passes through a tunnel that transforms into an aquarium. Finally a parking lot becomes a forest with deer and other woodland creatures frolicking about. It ends with the tagline: “Captiva. Takes you to a better place.”
“If you live in a dull environment, all you have to do is get into this car and suddenly you’ll see the world from a different perspective. That’s the overall idea,” Ghorayeb says.
The imagery is universal – circus, aquarium and magical forest – which is particularly important for an ad slated to run globally. “It’s in the dreams of all of us to go into a magical forest and meet Bambi and this kind of stuff,” he says.
OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Car ads normally follow a well-worn path of interior close-ups and tracking shots of the car pulling fancy maneuvers on the road. Ghorayeb and his team were adamant that the Captiva TVC was going to take a different route.
“We were trying to avoid doing a catalog ad,” he says. “Most of the time in [regional car ads], we end up showing all the details – the finger pushing the air-conditioning button, that kind of stuff. This is a conceptual car, so we wanted an idea behind it.”
The agency pushed to avoid lingering shots of the dashboard, and Ghorayeb credits the client, General Motors, for allowing this departure from convention. GM insisted on only one interior shot – to show the Captiva has three rows of seats. “We fought them not to have it, but I can understand why they insisted on it. Because it’s a small car, it’s a feature that makes a difference in this category,” he says.
And it’s not just the images that stray from the beaten car-ad track. There is no portentous voiceover proclaiming the car’s great handling or economical fuel consumption. In fact, the only copy – written or spoken – is the tagline. Instead of a vocal track, there’s just a laid-back ambient soundtrack.
The music, too, is a departure from regional norms. “Music is always a big problem in the region,” Ghorayeb says. “They’re used to things that are opera-driven, you know? The crescendo that moves you to goose bumps – Dubai Holding kind of music, versus music that will set an overall mood and ambience.” (Dubai Holding is another prominent Leo Burnett client.)
The ad does feature a smiling, wide-eyed child, but that doesn’t means it’s descended into cliché, Ghorayeb says. “It’s based on the idea that we’re all still kids even if we’re grown up. That’s why the kid is the first one who sees the circus. There was no, ‘Let’s have a kid here to make people cry or make people smile.’”
CREATIVE CONCESSIONS
Not that the agency got everything its way. The Burnett creative team wanted the colors in the final version to be more desaturated, to give the ad a more modern feel. “The overall environment is faded, so you start pinpointing stuff,” he says. “In the aquarium, everything was desaturated, but the fish were more colorful.”
GM wasn’t wild about the idea. “So we went back to more” – Ghourayeb pauses, searching for a diplomatic phrase – “client kind of images.”
The ad was shot in Budapest, and GM felt viewers might recognize the city and become distracted by landmarks rather than focusing on the car, so some of the urban landscape footage was left on the cutting room floor. “We [originally] wanted a kind of socialist environment; very grey, with those huge buildings, no soul, nothing. And in the middle you have this car and all those colors exploding around it. So you have a contrast between the city itself and this scene.”
But overall, the final version is close to the agency’s original offering. “GM is always challenging us to do things that are a little bit different from what you see in the region, which is great. Every time we receive a brief we have the guy coming and saying, ‘We hope that this time we’ll shine and we’ll be in awards.’ And they’re really excited about this one.”
Ghorayeb says he wishes more clients were like this – bucking category trends and encouraging creativity. It is then, he says, he can enjoy the best part of being a creative director: “Once you get rid of the routine, it’s incredible.”
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On the record
Malek Ghorayeb, executive regional creative director, Leo Burnett.
On poaching
It’s a huge problem here. Basically, in Dubai, the salaries aren’t following what’s happening economically. So if any agency sees a talented guy, they go to him, “What’s your salary? Okay, here’s double. Come.”
On Dubai’s claim to be the regional creative hub
I think Beirut is still the creative hub. The only problem with Beirut is they don’t have he money to produce what we can produce here. But they have nicer ideas. Cairo is becoming a hub too, now. If you look at what all the agencies are doing for almost nothing in terms of budget, it’s incredibly nice. The Cairo crowd will make a lot of noise at the next Lynx awards.
On the lack of a creative community
It’s cultural, I think. Unfortunately, here, you don’t have a lot of people who will stand up and say, “What those guys are doing is good.” It’s very strange. If you go to the IAA, it’s only suits. There’s not a single creative who goes there. Even when we meet at awards, it stays very formal all the time.
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1 Comment So Far
Hi,
May i know plz what's the name of the song of this spot, the music is fabulous
Good luck to all of u
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