Which Arabic

I was raised in Jeddah and I live in Cairo, so I read most regional copy twice: once as the person it was written for, and once as the person who wrote it.

The second reading is louder.

A line of Arabic carries an accent the way a voice does. Written in Cairo for a mother in Jeddah, it arrives as a visitor: fluent, friendly, and clearly from somewhere else. Written in the broadcast register, the Arabic of the evening news, it arrives as a ministry, correct and addressed to no one. Written in Gulf Arabic for a customer in Alexandria, it arrives as a tourist with money. In every case the customer hears the accent before the offer.

That is the part the brief gets backwards. Teams choose a dialect by asking who is listening, and the answer is a market, so the copy is written for a market, which is nobody. The dialect is really a choice of who is speaking. A brand that speaks Hejazi to Jeddah has decided to be a neighbour. A brand that speaks the news register has decided to be an institution. A brand that speaks Cairo to Riyadh has decided to be the agency that wrote the copy.

Name the one person the line is for, the actual woman, in the actual city, with the family group she will forward it to, and the dialect chooses itself. Nobody who can picture her writes to her in the wrong Arabic. The wrong Arabic is what happens when the person in the brief is a segment.

The market does not mind a foreign brand. Plenty of foreign brands are loved here, in accents everyone can hear. What the market minds is a brand pretending not to be one, and the pretence is audible in the first line.