The Saudi National Day has prominently leveled up in the past few years. Now it is a day off for all public and private sectors workers around the Kingdom. This has given it more important than before, hence brands have noticed the importance of this precious day in history, and need to sell and align more with this crucial event. Most brands if not all ranging from public government offices to small neighbourhood shops are leveraging this event to communicate and engage more with the public.

This is a common-sense for many marketers, yet this was not the case for a magnificent number of brands on the ground. As we have seen amazing funny and sometimes stupid ideas that either fire back or worse cause them to pay penalties for breaking some ads commercial regulations.  Here are some examples,

Examples of National day offers

Cherry and Strawberry advertisement has fired back and people have shared it with ironic comments on the vulgar use of ( where is your five) which has some bad connotations among some of the locals which involve some adultery context. So this is clearly how the brand has taken the opportunity to communicate a compelling offer as it looks, but it was not lucky in the copywriting.  This happens for many reasons, and the one that is most obvious is ad-hoc last moment reactive response to this big event. So it is like ( me too ) rather than let’s plan well so we can anticipate and produce cool stuff.

This is another case driven by the same reason, ( we can not miss this event let’s do something). This one has really received a bad reaction not only from the mass, but also from regulators, as it has received a call from the regulators for commercial ads rules, so they filed a violation against them and it was published in the newspapers and media. So instead of creating a compelling offer, it has created a devastating one. Some planning would have saved the day and made a good presence at this big local event.

These were quick examples for the Ad-hoc, last-minute approach for jumping on the trends and the big happenings in the local sense. Yet there is a scientific method to apply event and contextual marketing that clicks with the public and creates an amazing presence for your brand, and surely these examples and the like are not it. So what do you need to do to up your game and win the relevant events?

As I said before it is science and science usually means logic and numbers. The local events are usually documented in official references from the government or public wiki. So your job is to build a calendar for the important events that you want to be part of and plan backwards. The process is fairly simple, you layout a calendar with different rows for international, local and brand events. Then link them to the dates in days, weeks or months, this depends on how do you want to do it. From this plan, you can plan your marketing activities and campaigns to make sure your delivery by enough time to create amazing creative engaging ideas that click and ( do not fire back).

Share this with your marketer’s friends and Happy National Day and every day.