INSITE OOH Media Platform

What Suez Canal Bank is doing with its most current outdoor advertising campaign is more about reinvention and less about advertising. It is more about trying to redefine what an actual bank can look like rather than anything to do with interest rates, savings plans, or transactional commitments. It is all about the complete transformation that Suez Canal Bank is undergoing in brand positioning. 

At the heart of this campaign lies an Arabic line that reads: “Your world in one place.” On paper, it’s quite minimal. On a billboard, it takes a different turn altogether. On Cairo’s roads, this turns into a statement of intent rather than a slogan per se. Instead of becoming a campaign tag that defines what it does in an advertisement setting, it ends up becoming a question in motion.

This is not a campaign that pursues aspiration in the classical sense. Suez Canal Bank’s new brand is instead rooted in tangible, relatable moments: a budding businessman sitting across from a bank representative at a café, a family gathered around their child’s birthday table, and a professional making decisions at work without having to remove themselves from their personal space.

The bank just points out that life isn’t divided into tidy little chunks anymore, and the bank shouldn’t be, either. Work, family, aspiration, responsibility, happiness − all of these things happen all the time, and the campaign doesn’t pretend otherwise.

This insight reflects the tone of their digital advertising, which eschews motivational speak in favor of simplicity, using a subtle rejection of the tired notion of balance between life and career that requires juggling. Rather, life is already well-blended, and the Suez Canal Bank is not the interruption.

From the branding perspective, this is where the rebrand is most apparent, especially compared to their last OOH campaign. The graphical identity is more minimalist and modern, and yes, much more restrained without looking cold. The blue border frames the scenes well without engulfing them, and the logos are incorporated much more like they belong there rather than being stamped there. Even the typography is given some breathing room. 

Placement is also important here. The campaign appears in the locale of actual living: in the form of highways, arterial roads, and in the space of transition from the office to home and vice versa. These placements aren't of the “statement” variety; rather, they're of the necessary, repetitive, lived-in route. The communication in the campaign doesn't require a second glance; rather, it relies upon familiarity.

This is the power of this rebrand: this campaign works because it does not declare itself as such. There is no “after,” only the “before,” the consistency, and the “is.” There is no before-and-after statement, only the gentle narrative that the Suez Canal Bank tells. 

Check out Monitoring Out of Home (MOOH), a specialist media intelligence agency and analysis system active in Cairo & Dubai, to learn more about this campaign.