A Priest and an Imam Walk Into an Ad

November 23, 2016

This Amazon ad is beautiful. It’s human. It’s timely. Very timely. It’s real (these aren’t actors). What more could you want in an ad? Well, for it to go viral. And this did. Probably for all the reasons stated. Human, timely, real.

Another thing the creators handled very well here: they avoid spoilers. For sure, nothing is given away in the video itself until the end—and that’s part of what makes this video so special. But also …. nothing is given away in the title, the YouTube, in the descriptions that get shared automatically across social media (this requires testing). Those are all places spoilers can happen, undercutting the impact of a piece like this before it’s even viewed. (Edit June, 2022… the YouTube video is down… so some of things I’m saying might not apply anymore… here is the ad on a non-Amazon Vimeo account).

The ad touched such a nerve, it even ended up with the protagonists being invited into Al Jazeera’s London studio to do a Facebook Live Q&A. I can’t embed the Facebook video, but you can view it here even without a Facebook account.