Thursday, May 9, 2024

Embrace aces its new suicide prevention ads

First see the ads here and here. Well, I know what you are thinking: How difficult is it to do a suicide prevention ad? The answer: very. How come? Because to begin with, forgettable ads with corny scripting are a dime a dozen and they are as pinch-me-to-cry as anything. Embrace however (if I understand correctly these ads were in collaboration with Origin agency) managed to do the unthinkable: By resorting to real and tangible slices of life and relatable scenarios.

There's Abou Karim who obviously longs for Oum Karim who seems to be dead - he is a taxi driver who looks at lovebirds and feels extremely sad. The casting is superb truth be told. There is another story about Feryal - a couturiere and what appears to be a single mother for a small girl, also overwhelmed by the million things she needs to do daily to make ends meet. Can one ever go wrong by getting the one and only Christine Choueiri to be Feryal? She plays the character with minimal acting which makes the whole thing much more believable. OK, to call a spade a spade, Abou Karim, at his age is a bit less credible that he would call the suicide prevention line (by that I mean the number could have been included differently in the ad), it seemed a small dissonance in an otherwise very believable two ads.

So there you go, ads can still be credible - and the topic, for a population carrying cumulative and generational traumas is only too serious and needed to be talked about.