Events Season

The UAE events season is in full swing, with lots of conferences and gatherings going on across the coming months. We recently visited the Arabian Travel Market at DWTC, check out our take on that here.

We have the Hotel Show, International Book Fair, Digital Marketing Expo, the Electrical Vehicle Innovation Summit, World Utilities Summit, and many more to mark in your calendars.

If you would like our support in arranging your exhibition, from content, promotion, logistics and more, see here. For how we can help you. One recent happy client we’re proud to have partnered with is the Johnson & Johnson annual sales awards gala, check out the highlights below

Let’s not forget the big one hitting the region later in the year, with the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 28, coming to town. The event is to be held at EXPO city from November 30th until December 12th. Contact us today to help plan your activations around that.

At MEDIACUBED we love great marketing. It is so important to engage your audience in the right tone of voice, and in a way consistent with your brand values. In this edition we are celebrating some great campaigns, and the lessons to be learned from them.

First up, with UAE astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi currently in the middle of his 6 month long stint in space, an inspiration for the region, we look back at how Mattel’s Barbie helped inspire more girls to become astronauts. Launching a doll modelled on Samantha Cristoforetti, the European Space Agency’s only active astronaut at the time, on the eve of the anniversary of the moon landing, The partnership is part of Barbie’s ongoing Dream Gap Project, which aims to “level the playing field for girls globally”.

Sometimes a healthy rivalry can be good for business. Iron sharpens iron, after all. Here are some great examples of challengers poking fun at their market leading rivals.

As crowds camped outside the Apple store in Singapore eager to get their hands on the newest edition of the iPhone, rival tech brand Huawei were on hand to make sure their needs were catered to.

Apple’s iPhone may be packed with many fabulous features, but lengthy battery life isn’t one of them.

With this in mind, Huawei decided to hand out free power banks to customers along with a little sign that said: “Here’s a power bank, you’ll need it.”

Burger King promoted the relaunch of its app in the USA by trolling its biggest rival, by sending Whopper fans to McDonald’s 14,000 restaurants in order to unlock a promotion for a 1 cent Whopper.

The ‘Whopper Detour’ was activated via an app that allows people to order a 1 cent Whopper if they are at a McDonald’s.

Zappos Google Cupcake Ambush

To help promote its new photo app, Google took to the streets of Austin, Texas, with a cupcake truck in tow. But people didn’t pay for the cupcakes with cash. instead, the only accepted currency was a photo taken with said app.

And really, what’s better than a free-ish cupcake? We’ll tell you what: A free-ish watch or pair of shoes.

That was the answer from Zappos, anyway. That’s why the brand playfully “ambushed” Google’s food truck experience with one of its own: A box-on-feet strategically placed right next to Google’s setup that, when fed a cupcake, would dispense a container with one of the retailer’s goodies.

The team here at MEDIACUBED have long been admirers of KFC for their customer engagement and social media handling. They have a great marketing team and showed us all that you don’t need to troll your rivals, you can laugh at yourself by calling out your own mistakes. And we love them for it…

From the image above, used when a supplier change meant they ran out of chicken?!, to a recent campaign to revamp and relaunch their fries, after lots of poor customer feedback on their quality received across social media, which they used on their billboards!

So whether be it through the use of comedy, having a vision for the future, making the best of a bad situation, or with a bit of healthy rivalry, we salute these brands efforts to engage with their audience.

We leave you this week with a final thought on the subject from the incomparable Oscar Wilde, from the picture of Dorian Gray.

And that’s all for the time being!

Thanks for reading this edition and don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and send us any questions or feedback via email.