Change Lingerie for Saudi Arabia

Advertising Agency: Ogilvy, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Creative Director: Mazen Hassan

Art Director / Illustrator: Yasser Alireza

Copywriters: Yasser Alireza, Fitna Nazer

Account management: Khaled Shalha

Published: May 2008

CHANGE is an international upscale brand providing quality lingerie, swimwear and homewear. The objective of the ad was to announce the launch of CHANGE, a Danish  company, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The ads' main focus is to utilize the concept behind censorship in Saudi Arabia to pull focus on the Brand's product line and to transform censorship into art. The ads are all in English, as they target an upscale bilingual audience.

The opinion of English-speaking Saudi Arabian citizen:

"First of all the ads are clever and very relevant to Saudi since all foriegn magazines get censored with the black or red markers, regardless of whether its an underwear ad or not. They see skin and they mark it up.

So using the market and the copy diverts attention to the brand directly, and its also clever way to make fun of censorship.

Using the S instead of C for censorship to imply sense "comonsense" might be pushing it. Don't get me wrong I like to give readers something to think about. But in the context of the ad itself there are already many underlaying messages to think about without adding more. So keeping it simple using the word censor as it is would be enough."

There is no doubt that Social Media Marketing is changing how company's market, and how audiences consume media.

Take countries in the conservative areas of the Middle East, and this example of a marketer in Saudi Arabia who's using local blogs to find a loophole around the censorship of advertising.

Change wanted to run ads that would be considered too racy for print media in the kingdom Saudi Arabia has the strictest ‘morality’ laws in the region.

The policy of keeping women out of public life extends even to the lingerie departments of retailers where you have the odd situation of only men being able to sell underwear to women.

So, the company via its agency Ogilvy Mather, is running ads on local blogs. It even went so far as to poke fun at the censorship laws in the region with black felt tip marks over images considered too revealing as they would be if such an ad were to print in a Saudi magazine.