Never Say No to Panda

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About

"Never Say No to Panda" is an advertisement campaign that consists of short sketches starring a cute panda mascot doing all sorts of sinister but hilarious things to people. The series was originally produced as an ad campaign for an Egyptian dairy company's cheese product named "Panda."

Origin

The "Never Say No to Panda" ad campaign was created by Advantage Marketing and Advertising for the Arab Dairy Company and aired on Egyptian TV channels in May 2010. The "Office" commercial was first uploaded online by YouTuber zunzun82 on May 18th, 2010. Months later, a compilation of the first three ads was uploaded on September 18th, which gained more than 17 millions views in the span of 22 months. By October 2010, there were more than 200 duplicate uploads, including a dozen of uploads with more than 100,000 views.

The ad campaign was nominated for the 2010 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival and won the 2010 Silver Lion award, one of the few Egyptian commercials ever to win one of the prestigious prizes.

Spread

On May 25th, 2010, Campaign Middle East posted a blog article about Arab Dairy's advertisement campaign and the Huffington Post Comedy featured the video on July 1st, but it largely stayed under the radar for months until September when a full-length compilation video was uploaded onto YouTube. The video was featured by BoingBoing^[4] on September 20th, followed by Funny or Die^[5] on September 21st and ABC's Good Morning America^[11], Foreign Policy blog^[7] and the LA Weekly blog^[6] on September 23rd. The Facebook fan page titled "Never Say No to Panda" was created on September 22nd.