As the region’s biggest consumer market, Saudi Arabia is the nut every marketer wants to crack. But, the popular wisdom goes, the expats who comprise the majority of the regional advertising industry can’t understand those consumers, particularly the elusive Saudi female.
“When you come to this region, there are many things people tell you that you don’t or can’t understand,” says Hubert Boulos, strategic planning director of Impact BBDO. “There are often agencies or clients telling you, ‘This is how things are done here.’ You’ll show them great ads from around the world and they love them. But they’ll say, ‘These ads are great for Europe or America, but not for Saudi Arabia, my friend. You don’t understand. You have to go there.’
“But,” he continues, “I’ve been here two years now. I’ve been to consumers. And I beg to differ. There are a lot of misconceptions – maybe if you understand them you can actually improve the standard of advertising. You could break records if you took a few risks.”
Boulos has the research to back up his claims. Impact BBDO decided to test the commonly held beliefs that Saudi women don’t appreciate creativity in advertising, that they are too conservative to enjoy edgy humor or cutting-edge production, and that women should be portrayed in their traditional roles as providers for their family and in their traditional attire.
Armed with a selection of award-winning commercials from around the world, the team visited focus groups of single Saudi women aged 17-22 and Saudi mothers aged 23-35. The resulting feedback suggests that – although there are some differences (nudity, even partial, was frowned upon unanimously) – women in Saudi Arabia are remarkably like women in the rest of the world.
“They react to advertising like any audience of their age in the rest of the world,” says Boulos. “It’s not like they’re living in a closed country. They have satellite TV, they have the Internet.”
The favorite ad among both target groups was Wieden + Kennedy’s animated classic “Happiness Factory” for Coke. “It’s the ultimate positive ad,” Boulos says. “There wasn’t a single negative comment about it.” It’s also an ad that ate up the kind of budget few advertisers are willing to entrust to local agencies. Which Boulos believes is a mistake, as regional consumers – including, yes, Saudi women – are a lot more tech-savvy than you may think.
“The youth, especially, will judge the technical work, because they’re very aware of technology,” Boulos explains. “High production values and special effects really come over well. They love it.”
Another reason “Happiness Factory” scored so high is that Saudi women, particularly younger ones, “really love positive values,” Boulos says. Negativity is a no-no, a slight shift from their more cynical Western counterparts. One award-winning ad – an anti-smoking campaign that showed ice sculptures of pregnant women with dolls in their stomachs melting and collapsing in a city square (see below) – was extremely unpopular. And the bleak execution meant the audience didn’t identify the message clearly.
Boulos says that, unlike in the West – where consumers have been bombarded with advertising for years and become tired of product-led ads, meaning many advertisers now go for more subtle messages where the product is peripheral to the story – Saudi consumers need the product to be central to an ad’s story.
“It’s not that they’re not ‘sophisticated’ enough,” he says. “They’re just not bored enough of advertising yet.”
On the whole, though, the women that took part in the research were far from conservative in their advertising tastes. Humorous ads scored particularly high, even when they made fun of women’s traditional family roles – like a Vim ad in which a daughter tearfully expresses her love to her mother through what appears to be a prison visitor’s glass screen, but turns out to be a shower cubicle the mother is cleaning.
“Women are so bored shut in at home all day in Saudi Arabia that they’re even more open to creative, entertaining ads than Western women,” says Boulos. “People think they’re not exposed to these kinds of ads, but they’d picked up on Dove’s “Evolution,” for instance, over the Internet.”
Perhaps it’s time that regional advertisers stopped defining this demographic primarily by their nationality and started thinking of them as women first.
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