By Akram Medhat
The Egyptian Tourism Promotion Authority, in partnership with the global CNN network, has launched an advertising campaign aimed at introducing tourists to Egypt and its various tourist destinations and urging tourists from around the world to visit it.
The advertising side of the campaign includes data and information crafted into creative content designed primarily to reach the target audience of young people as well as families, so that they learn about the leisure, cultural and other types of tourism the Egyptian tourist destination offers.
The partnership began with the Egyptian Tourism Promotion Authority sponsoring the weather report broadcast daily on CNN International in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The broadcast includes the campaign's promotional logo and various images of the Egyptian tourist destination, and the advertising extends to the channel's websites, where the authority is the exclusive advertiser on the digital weather page outside the United States.
Building on this partnership, a team of officials from CNN's advertising company will soon visit Egypt to produce an advertisement promoting tourist areas to be shown on the channel, and another advertisement to be broadcast on its websites at the end of this year, to promote the Egyptian tourist destination to the channel's audience looking for family trips.
In this context, Minister of Tourism Yehia Rashed said this partnership helps achieve part of the international promotion strategy through a powerful window to the target audience.
For his part, Rani Raad, head of advertising at the global CNN network, said the Egyptian Tourism Promotion Authority has been a trusted partner for many years, noting that the timing of the campaign, with its distinctive content, comes at a time when Egypt is opening its arms to the whole world as a unique tourist destination offering multiple and highly attractive products. He stressed that the authority's choice of the weather report to promote Egypt was a good one, as the report is broadcast at peak times on the channel and is of interest to website visitors looking for places to travel to.
On another note, JWT, the company in charge of Egypt's international advertising campaign, said the aim of partnering with the global CNN network, especially the weather report, is to draw its large audience's attention to Egypt's mild climate all year round, as a country's climate is one of the most important tourist attractions that tourists consider before visiting. The advertising material being broadcast, which focuses on Egypt's warm weather, will therefore certainly be a factor in attracting Western audiences to it, especially in the winter season. The company also pointed to another agreement to produce advertising material about Sharm El-Sheikh to be broadcast on the network to promote the city and attract tourism to it.
Diverse Mechanisms to Promote Egypt
It is worth noting that the Egyptian Tourism Promotion Authority has begun a series of agreements and partnerships through various unconventional mechanisms to promote the Egyptian tourist destination globally, most notably with Egyptian squash player and world number one Ramy Ashour, who takes part in 15 tournaments around the world annually, as well as singer Hakim during his concerts on the most famous and largest stages in 3 European countries over the past two weeks.
