Transforming the mobile festival map

Text and photos by Tarek Atia

(cairolive.com, October 7, 2001) It's an annual affair, but this year's fall mobile phone buying frenzy featured a twist -- ad mogul Tarek Nour's migration from Mobinil to Click.

Every year around this same time, both Mobinil and Click hold their annual "mobile phone shopping festivals" in Cairo and across the country in an attempt to generate a huge buzz and increased sales thanks to discounted prices on both phones and subscriptions to their cellular services.

Last year, the promoters of each fair -- the Mobile Festival and the Mobile Fair 2001-- accused each other of placing ads misleading consumers as to the locations -- the fair grounds and the opera house -- and even the existence of the other's fair.

This year customers were surprised to discover that the two promoters have teamed up, and are placing joint ads in the papers advertising both fairs at the same time.

It turns out, however, that both the opera house and the fair ground festivals are sponsored by Click -- and that Mobinil has decided to hold its own fair on downtown's Abdel-Aziz Street, famous for its endless row of electronics and appliance stores.

The twist this year was the migration of ad mogul Tarek Nour from Mobinil to Click. It remained unclear why the long-standing relationship between Nour and Mobinil had gone sour, but both Nour's company, and Click announced the new contract with full page full colour ads in the papers, while Mobnil also announced its separation from Nour's firm in a parallel full page ad.

At the fairs themselves organizers indicated that the general global economic slowdown had resulted in less customers, but still enough to make the events worthwhile.

Al-Wafd's back page cartoon on Sunday pokes fun at the mobile buying frenzy, picturing a rag-tag beggar telling a clearly shocked potential donor, "Take my mobile phone number... and if you want to donate something to me, just give me a missed call first."

At the Opera House festival dozens of stores and distributors had set up their venues in an extremely large tent. Signs were everywhere advertising every possible brand of phone and combination of payment plan -- cash, installments, new, and used. A Click representative told cairolive.com that prices had gone down significantly, in terms of the subscription to the service itself. As for phones, the cheapest models seemed to be in the range of around LE150-200. Meaning, you only had to have about LE250 in your pocket to come out of the fair with a mobile phone and number.

Meanwhile, on Abdel-Aziz Street downtown, traditionally an emporium for electronic goods and appliances imported from abroad, discounts were available, as was made clear by the heavy ad presence in the papers. The Abdel-Aziz Mobile Festival runs longer than its Opera House and Fairgrounds competitors -- and if anything, what it revealed was that merchants in a certain neighborhood with joint interests could band together for the sake of sales, especially in tough economic climates.

Overall, the frenzy only serves to increase awareness and get people talking about the fairs and the all the different mobile phone offers. On this note, an official from the telecom regulatory authority is quoted in a recent Al-Ahram indicating that the authority is making sure that both phone companies are able to sustain the anticipated increases in users of their networks, thanks to the lower prices being offered at the fairs.

The rush is to attract as many subscribers as possible before the third mobile phone service licensee, Telecom Egypt, begins to offer its cellular service in December 2002.

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