The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

We’ve all been in love, we are all familiar with how newly-formed relationships can leave us feeling overwhelmed, happy, and super detached from any aspect of negative reality. A testament to this is the fact that when we see someone feeling exceptionally happy, our go-to punch line is “Eh dh bt7eb gdeed wala eh” (What’s the matter? Are you newly in love or something?). Punch lines aside though, Vodafone Red’s new advertisement is going viral, for three main reasons: it’s relatable, classy, and it allows viewers to re-live what it is like to experience that “honeymoon” phase of any relationship.

The ad, which stars Egyptian songstress and influencer Lara Scandar (who plays a girl called Nada), is mostly filmed in black and white. The entirety of the ad contains voice-over narration of text exchanges and phone calls with a new love interest (Marwan), with all the flirting, the text exchanges, the video chats, and those chimes of a new incoming message from the man she is in love with. The plot twist at the end, of course, is the fact that due to all this texting and these video calls Scandar’s love interest runs out of data. The advertisement then ends with the following line “when you are focused on something good, you tend to lose track of everything else.” The ad then proceeds to announce Vodafone Red’s customisable additional data plans.

Social media users have been going crazy over this ad, with some commentators pointing to the fact that it does not try too hard, and other commentators applauding the advert for its relatability and its promotion of a positive message of love and romance. Other commentators started hilariously asking if there is a follow-up advertisement to help us keep up with this relationship, and where it is going.

We are super proud to see the Egyptian content creation and creative industry (of which we are a part) produce material of this calibre.