The Spin took a spin on the Dubai Metro and came across a poster for a voice and video calling app in the UAE that now permits payment transfers, as well. The ad creative, which is culturally relevant and reads perfectly well in its original Arabic text, has been unfortunately translated verbatim to English as “Like your best friend, you can always lean on it.”
Even looking past the obvious grammatical boo-boo, The Spin read that caption several times to find context. Did the ad mean to allude to the fact the service is trustworthy; that it’s voice over internet protocol (VoIP) video and audio calls don’t face bandwidth issues? Or that payments through the app are trustworthy? Or that when residents in the UAE run out of ‘free minutes’ they can still call their friends for free over the internet?
Here’s our one key takeaway: The amount of time spent trying to figure out the banner definitely drove brand awareness, brand recall, and brand consideration for the brand. So, in a manner of speaking, the ad was a success.
Concretes
The Spin took the family to the City Centre Deira mall over the weekend, where the children passed a restaurant and decided to choose between ‘burgers, frozen custard, fries, shakes, hot dogs, and concretes’ on offer. Yes, concretes.
That word had the children in fits and giggles and try as we might, The Spin couldn’t get the kids to stop cracking jokes about turning into statues after eating a mixture of cement and water.
When the children decided to inquire at the counter, they were told that concretes are a “dense frozen custard with toppings”, but then they raised an equally interesting question: “You already have frozen custard written up there, so why would you have concretes written separately?”
The Spin smiled but didn’t get involved. All in all, the kids walked away with their first ever ‘concretes’. Once again, did the novelty of the word do its job? We might say so.
Who eats hot dogs?
Speaking of hot dogs, The Spin received a submission shortly after a rather interesting debate between US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, during which former president Trump said, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs – the people that came in” referring to a conspiracy theory about immigrants eating pets in the US state of Ohio.
Chicago’s The Wiener’s Circle, famous for its surly staff and char-grilled hot dogs, made the most of the moment to change the signage on their shop to “immigrants eat our dogs”, resulting in more customers than usual popping into the shop to say that they appreciate the humour.
‘Noice’
What better way to wrap things up than to say “noice”?
Clearly, the poster on the shop – where people constantly request ice to beat the summer heat – meant to say “No ice”, but the lack of a space between the two words penned out in a childish scrawl had us saying “noice”.
