Quote of the Moment

ليت الكلاب لنا كانت مجـاورة               وليتنا لا نرى مما نـرى أحـدا
إن الكلاب لتهتدي في مواطنهـا             والخلق ليس بهاد شرهـم أبـدا
فاهرب بنفسك واستأنس بوحدتها           تبقى سعيداً إذا ما كنت منفـرداً

الإمام الشافعي

Quote of the Moment

“Procrastination is my sin. It brings me naught but sorrow. I know that I should stop it. In fact, I will – tomorrow!” – Gloria Pitzer

Power to the people!

Earlier this week, I posted about Vodafone Ad showing a distorted version of Abbas Ibn Fernas (check it here). Finally today, Vodafone issued an apology on their Facebook page. Not exactly what I was hoping for, but they are promising to stop airing it on TV, too, soon (I won't listen to the "conspiracy theory" roaming in my head now).

Some people suggest that: nobody really watches ads on TV any more. But I'm kind of reluctant to accept it. Many "regular" people, who aren't familiar with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc (my dad, & granddad generation, also, people with less education/social status) usually depend heavily on TV as their main source of entertainment.

One last thing, I just realized I didn't publish an important link on the last post, which was really the main pillar behind the campaign, this is vodafly.tumblr.com. Actually I'm very eager to use tumblr for similar stuff, it allows great collaboration for similar usages.

THANKS FOR STANDING TOGETHER, GUYS!!

Vodafone Egypt #FAIL!!

Today I came a across a video shared by @MostafaNageeb on Facebook. The video is a part of Vodafone ISP ads campaign, the one with the three guys from “سمير و شهير و بهير”, the movie. I didn’t watch the movie, and I’m a (kind of) loyal customer of Vodafone Egypt, but I find the video pretty offending and ignorant too.

The video show Abbas Ibn Firnas, [a polymath: an inventor, engineer, aviator, physician, poet, and musician], as a maniac who would throw oneself over the edge of a cliff just for fun, mistaking him for the Greek fable of Daedalus and his son Icarus.

After sharing the video with a couple of links about who is really Abbas Ibn Firnas, and reading a couple of comments on my post on Facebook, I realized that some people were really anxious that they filed complaints to Vodafone Egypt about it on their Customer service complaints page, even more: some complained on the phone! The reply was: it depends on the volume of feedback they get, whether they will take it down or not. On YouTube, Vodafone replies (through the comments) is pretty mild.

Already, the ad on YouTube is getting lots of dislikes, so if you can, add yours too, there. If you find it that irritating, you might file a complaint too (find the links below).

One last note, Abbas didn’t get killed from that experiment!!

 

UPDATE (14-15/11/2010):

The ad video I mentioned above (which was "disliked" a lot on YouTube, also had many negative comments), was removed earlier today (14/11/2010) which made may people cheer about it. Only to find it republished under another name (Browser), a couple of hours later.

I was starting to feel that people were (kind of) exaggerating about the ad (even thought about re-blogging about it). But, now, that feels pretty sneaky of Vodafone, as if the people's feedback doesn't really matter, why are you doing ads for in the first place!? More over, were the marketing guys thinking that the (angry) users won't find out they did the republish!? Dah!?

 

UPDATE (17/11/2010):

We almost made it!! Read this post about it..

 

References:

The second ad republished, Browser [Arabic]

A video about Ibn Firnas [Arabic]

Wikipedia page about Ibn Firnas [English]

Vodafone Customer Service [English Complaints page]

Vodafone Customer Service [Arabic Complaints page]