Seems like the telecom operators in Jordan are pulling the big guns, after the massive rebranding campaigns that overloaded the media with advertisements, both operators eyed a new medium, high buildings!

Perhaps some of you have noticed Orange’s logo over few buildings in Amman last summer; such as La Royal, Holiday Inn and Carrefour, it was impressive and certainly left a deep impact on the target audience. The idea was based on running a projector at night that shows various shots of Orange’s logo and greeting messages on these buildings.

This idea works only at night, and during summer the city falls into darkness around 8 pm, which leaves this idea valid for few hours only, as we all know Amman sleeps a little bit early.

Zain decided to brand the highest building in Amman, the Jordan Gate Tower. The idea is impressive as well; you can see Zain’s logo from a distance on one of the twin towers. More importantly is that this idea works all day long, ok maybe at night it’s not viewable but the daylight is more important, since it’s longer and more vibrant.

The material used in this idea is “see-through” I guess, which makes the sign look a little faded, but using a solid material will put the sign in a weak position against the wind.

Both ideas are great, each has a certain points of strength and weakness, personally I liked Orange’s on La Royal, anyway it’s an interesting new way of advertising.

I got this week’s edition of AlWaseet inside a bag that says: “Your summer starts with us”, well as a start it’s November, in other words Winter! I don’t know what does the message suppose to mean, but I’m sure it’s not a campaign for the next summer, it’s too early.

Over the past two days I’ve attended the 3rd Annual Advertising and Marketing Communication Conference “Box Basics” which was organized by IAA Jordan. Overall the event was better than last year, even that there were no topics about online media like the previous one but it was interesting.

To start with, the name “Box Basics” is better than the cliché phrase “Outside The Box”, and most importantly the conference covered basics of the industry, well not all the time, but many presentations were really good.

The one I liked the most was about copywriting, by Andy Owen, he is really amazing and I guess he is the best in this field. I liked the one by Ed Jones the Regional Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi in the Middle East; he is a mastermind. The impressive one was Chris Staples of Rethink in Canada, who presented a lot of amazing ideas on how to create impressive work with very little budgets.

Elliot Polak from Text Appeal gave some interesting insights about culture differences and how to deal with it, while Chris Savage from Oglivy PR in Australia showed a group of devastating examples of PR crisis and couple of effective ways to handle it.

And of course it won’t be complete without Zain and Orange, both kept debating who is the largest, who is better, who wants to give bags and giveaways, both speakers “Philippes” were really entertaining and funny. I liked when the guy from Zain started his presentation using the same theme of Zain’s campaign; this is my presentation, those are my friends…

At the end, Herve de Clerck from adforum.com ran a group of winning ads and TVCs from all over the world, and a collection of ads that used duplicated ideas; it was a really interesting presentation.