Al RUWAAD- A tasteless campaign

If you live in the UAE, there are chances you have seen the “RUWAAD” logo on a billboard. If you haven’t seen it on a billboard, then perhaps you have seen a Taxi carrying it. Moreover, the print media is filled with the “RUWAAD” logo.

If you don’t live in the UAE, you have missed nothing. You now know as much as a Dubai resident knows. RUWAAD, to us is an ad campaign: white background, red logo and black text.


It has been more than a month that our city is beem bombarded with this bad looking logo and meaningless text, quite disturbing to our eyes.

I tried to search the web to get some info on RUWAAD, I found nothing. I contacted the telephone directory: RUWAAD is not listed.So what on earth RUWAAD is? Is it a new property complex being built? Is it a new restaurant? Is it a new product we will be buying in the supermarkets soon? I don’t know. But who cares? You may think, I care, because I’m writing about it. The truth is that I care, because I want to learn from others’ mistakes.Billions of Dirhams (our currency) have been spent on this campaign, such a waste. It is delivering no message. An ad with no message is wrong marketing.
Perhaps they want to trigger our curiosity? Triggering curiosity? It’s a wrong thing to do. I remember a year ago the city was filled with the message “a new buzz coming to town soon”. We waited a month, and then the ad was associated with the new Burjaman “a luxury shopping mall here, in Dubai”. Everybody forgot the campaign after a while. And new shopping malls such as Ibn Battuta and Mall Of The Emirates have grabbed attentions (and shoppers). So, I’d say, triggering curiosity is not good on its own!

Timing is important according to Ana Elisa . She says :

” One month has passed... the city has talked about "what the hell is Al RUWAAD" but nothing/no one came up with an answer - with a nice replacement of billboards with the "truth", full page ads on major newspapers, or something similar. And, suddenly, the timing has passed. People dont talk about it anymore, they just moved on. The bad news for RUWAAD is that they also moved on from the "hype" around the brand and that, most probably, the level of indifference to the brand once it gets revealed will be similar to the moment of time before they went and spend all those millions spreading RUWAAD on my way to work."

If RUWAAD’s marketers have followed Ann’s advice, it would have maid more sense to me. However I still think that billions of dollars have been largely wasted on this campaign. Companies often decide the set marketing budget before calculating the ROI. If the RUWAAD campaign generates more than what the advertiser has spent, then there is a hope. But the campaign doesn’t project any brain behind it: I still believe that RUWAAD’s marketing team has done a bad job, and the ad agency has done an even worse job.