Commercial Break
Ad: Popote ulipo
Client; Zain Kenya
Zain Kenya, Kenya’s second mobile network has had to fend off many rumours in the past months about the impending sale of their African network to another telecommunications company, by their parent company Zain international headquartered in Kuwait.
Other than these rumours locally they have been working on introducing new products and upgrading their money transfer service Zap. On the advertising front, their last campaign has been for Zain Vuka family and this corporate campaign, who their bigger rivals Safaricom are accusing them of imitation.
The corporate campaign opens on the picture of a guy in a room with a big map up on a board on one side of the room. We zoom in and we can tell it’s a map of Kenya, showing different areas around the country. He picks up the phone and the ad cuts to a split screen of a guy in a Land Rover out there in the countryside. We see as he puts a pin to show a particular location.
This sequence continues as we see the guy in the Land Rover move from location to location and he continues to report back to the man with the chat who indicates those points on a board. At the very end of the ad we see the guy finish his last task in some area of land that looks to be in the middle of the mara and reports back to base. The last shot shows him at the look out point of the Rift Valley as he surveys the land and the ad ends with the line Popote Ulipo, Zain. These different locations are what Zain has used on their press and billboard campaign where they show the beautiful landscape’s with the line “Popote Ulipo” showing that Zain is wherever you are be it in the Mara or Isiolo.
I really liked the launch campaign for Zain where they were launching Zain as the new brand to take over from Celtel across Africa. As much as their ads were very South African, they were aspirational and part of every day life. With this new campaign, Zain Kenya has gone very local, very Kenyan showing the land but intertwining it with people calling from different parts of the country. Its not a new concept, neither is it very creative but it is extremely relevant and I think that factor makes the campaign gel very well with the larger Kenyan audience. My only issue though is at the very first glance, this ad looks like an ad for Land Rover, which I think inadvertently is very good publicity for Landrover Kenya.
BrandKemistry 