I Watched 100 Tunisian Commercials and What I Found Will Surprise You

 

I have a theory about Tunisian television advertising, and like all properly interesting theories, it came to me sideways, through a circuitous route involving pregnant women, Finnish birds, and Renaissance Florence.

For the longest time, I watched Tunisian ads with a nagging sense that something was off—rather like when you meet someone at a party and can't quite place why they seem familiar, or when you taste a dish and know something's missing before you can articulate what. The psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz wrote about this phenomenon: your mind detecting an implicit pattern before you have the words to make it explicit. A woman knows she's pregnant with an idea, she noted, before she can articulate it. The unconscious knows before consciousness can explain. You feel the presence of something forming, growing, demanding attention—but you can't yet name it.

I knew these ads lacked tension and clarity, but I felt and this is the crucial bit that it was more than that. The idea was gestating, but unborn.

Then I stumbled upon Orlando Wood's work, and suddenly the fog lifted in that delightful way that only happens when someone gives you the conceptual vocabulary you've been groping for in the dark. The idea was delivered.

The Bird Who Knew Too Much

Orlando Wood's eureka moment came from an unlikely source: Iain McGilchrist's tome on brain hemispheres. Now, at first blush, neuroscience seems about as relevant to advertising as ornithology does to investment banking. But Wood, bless him, dug deeper into how attention works in the two hemispheres and found something rather brilliant.

Consider the Finnish bird (and do bear with me here, this isn't a digression, it's the whole point). The left brain, controlling the right eye, is constantly scanning the ground in a narrow, goal-oriented fashion, looking for grains. It's abstracting, identifying, categorizing. "That's a grain. That's also a grain. That one's not a grain." Meanwhile, the right brain controlling the left eye is looking around in broad, vigilant sweeps, making absolutely certain our feathered friend doesn't become someone else's lunch.

Two conflicting modes of attention. One focused and analytical. One contextual and alert to danger.

And here's the thing: this isn't just birds being peculiar. It's mammals. It's us.

The Tale of Two Hemispheres (Or: Why Your Brain Is Having an Argument With Itself)

The left brain is narrow, goal-oriented, abstract, categorical, explicit. It adores cause-and-effect, repeatability, rhythm, language, signs, symbols. It's literal. It likes breaking things into smaller parts because it absolutely cannot deal with ambiguity. Everything must be true or false, black or white, A leading inexorably to B.

Language is its primary weapon of choice.

The right brain, conversely, is broad and vigilant. It understands context, sees wholes rather than parts. It reads people ,their body language, gestures, intonations, accents. It grasps implicit communication, the things that happen between the words. It's open to novelty and contradiction, which means it understands metaphor, humor, and art.

Jordan Peterson offers a useful analogy: the left brain is interested in order; the right brain in chaos.

McGilchrist argues ,and I find this rather compelling that at certain points in history, the left brain gets a bit carried away with itself, and we see a cultural shift toward left-brain dominance.

The evidence? Look at medieval art. Utterly flat. No proportion, no perspective. People sized according to status importance rather than naturalistic scale. It's all about power and control, which the left brain prizes above all else.

Then came Renaissance Florence in the 15th century, and suddenly: depth. Perspective. A shift from left-brain to right-brain culture.

Measuring the Unmeasurable: What 100 Tunisian Ads Reveal About Our Medieval Moment

Now, having learned about Wood's framework, I did what any self-respecting obsessive would do: I decided to build a scoring system and analyze 100 Tunisian TV commercials. Because if you can't measure something, you can't improve it, and more importantly, you can't bore people at dinner parties with precise statistics about it.

I identified 10 right-brain features and 10 left-brain features, drawing from Wood's research and my own observations of the Tunisian market.

Right-brain features include: clear sense of place, scene progression, characters with agency, implicit communication, dialogue, distinctive accents, wordplay or language subversion, period settings, cultural references or pastiche, and music with discernible melody.

Left-brain features include: flatness, abstracted products or ingredients, abstracted body parts, word obstruction (on-screen text dominance), voiceover, monologue or testimonial, freeze-frame effects, audio repetition, high rhythmic soundtracks, and this one's crucial ,story while singing.

Each ad gets a point for every feature present, resulting in two scores: a Right-Brain Score (RBS) and a Left-Brain Score (LBS), each ranging from 0 to 10.

Then I created what I'm rather pleased to call the Left–Right Brain Index (LRBI):

LRBI = RBS − LBS

This gives you a range from −10 (pure medieval control) to +10 (pure Renaissance narrative emergence).

The beauty of this system is its brutal honesty. An ad can't hide behind production values or celebrity endorsements. It either trusts the audience to interpret meaning, or it doesn't. It either allows narrative to unfold, or it explains everything to death.

I then sat down and scored 100 Tunisian TV commercials from 2019 to 2025. Every single one. Systematically. No favorites, no exceptions.

The results were, shall we say, clarifying and rather depressing.

Tunisian advertising isn't chaotic or creatively weak. It's highly structured and overwhelmingly left-brain dominant.

Across the entire corpus, 72–78% of ads are left-brain dominant. Only 5–8% can be classified as right-brain dominant.

Let me put that another way: if Tunisian TV advertising were a democracy, the right brain would have lost its deposit.

The category breakdown is even more revealing:

FMCG & Telecom: Average LRBI of −5 to −7 (high control, zero narrative trust)

Retail: Average LRBI of −4

Finance: Average LRBI of −2 to −3

Automotive: Average LRBI of +3 to +6 (the only category that trusts stories)

The extremes are particularly instructive. Tata Motors 2025 scored RBS 9, LBS 3, giving it an LRBI of +6 character-driven, strong sense of place, progression, dialogue, implicit communication. It's practically a short film that happens to feature a vehicle.

At the other end: Kaiser 2021 scored RBS 1, LBS 9, for an LRBI of −8. Purely instructional. Voiceover, flatness, repetition, product abstraction. It's less an advertisement than a mnemonic device disguised as thirty seconds of television.

What this scoring system reveals is that there's an inverse correlation between how much an ad trusts the audience and how effective it's likely to be. The more you explain, the less you persuade. The more you control, the less you connect.

And yet the industry has spent six years doubling down on control.

The Grammar of Flatness

Visually, flatness dominates. Most ads avoid depth, progression, or any sort of cinematic ambiguity. Flat compositions, static framing, freeze-frames, on-screen text—these aren't stylistic quirks, they're tools of control. They reduce interpretive risk. They ensure the message lands exactly as intended.

Look at Kaiser (2021), Délice (2022), Danette (2021) the image pauses repeatedly to accommodate slogans, product shots, verbal emphasis. There's a profound distrust of the image's ability to communicate on its own. When meaning feels uncertain, language steps in to stabilize it.

If Tunisian advertising has a center of gravity, it's audio. Repetition, rhythmic soundtracks, voiceovers. These ads are designed to be heard before they're watched. Music doesn't build narrative or emotion ,it glues attention and improves recall.

And here's something fascinating that the data made visceral: the rise of what I call "story while singing." Campaigns like Danette (2025), Tunisie Telecom (2025), Trio d'Or (2025) replace narrative causality with rhythm and repetition. It feels emotional on the surface, but cognitively it's a left-brain device. Singing compresses story into mnemonic structure. It increases efficiency, not ambiguity.

My data shows that 'story while singing' emerged as a dominant format post-2020 and strongly correlates with declining LRBI scores. It's a left-brain mechanism disguised as emotion and it allows repetition without dialogue, reduces character agency, and replaces implication with mnemonic control.

True narrative progression remains vanishingly rare. Most ads unfold in a single scene with little transformation. Characters lack agency. Implicit communication is scarce. Dialogue tends to be functional rather than relational.

When telecom brands like Ooredoo or Orange flirt with dialogue and humor, they quickly revert to freeze-frames, voiceovers, textual punchlines reasserting control. The system favors saying over showing, explaining over suggesting.

The Five  archétypes : A Taxonomy of Tunisian Advertising Archetypes

After scoring 100 ads, I began to notice something rather like what a lepidopterist must feel when cataloging butterflies distinct species, if you will, of creative execution. Not infinite variation, but a remarkably finite set of templates, recycled with the ritualistic devotion of a medieval monk copying scripture.

I've identified five dominant archetypes that Tunisian agencies return to with almost religious fervor:

The Flat Rhythmic Musical Comedy : This is perhaps the most insidious because it masquerades as entertainment. Bright colors, bouncy music, people doing a sort of vague choreography that suggests joy without quite committing to actual dancing. The rhythm does all the heavy lifting. The visuals are merely decorative. It's advertising as jingle delivery system, with humans as colorful props. Think of it as Bollywood with all the narrative excised, leaving only the musical interstitials. Average LRBI: −6.

The Flat Descriptive Bad Poetry :Oh, this one pains me. Someone in the agency has decided that product attributes sound more compelling when delivered in tortured rhyming couplets over slow-motion footage.

Or Its basicly a message with a bunch of poetic arguments  "Warda hya lm7aba , hya il benna li matanseha , hya lititdhakrek ki dinya  tos3ob alik , hya libmatkhalihech bik" . It's a brand poetic  sheet that's been mugged by a rhyming dictionary.  Average LRBI: −5.

The Problem-Solution Narrative While Singing :A peculiarly Tunisian innovation, this. Someone has a problem (hunger, thirst, boredom, the human condition), and rather than, you know, acting to solve it, they sing their way through the entire narrative arc. Problem identified in verse one, product introduced in the chorus, resolution delivered in verse two. It's extraordinarily efficient and utterly bizarre like watching someone sing their way through minor surgery. And here's the thing: it looks right-brain because there are characters and a story, but it scores heavily left-brain because the singing eliminates genuine dialogue, reduces character agency, and replaces implication with mnemonic control. Average LRBI: −4.

The Explanatory Musical Monologue : Similar to the above, but without even the pretense of conflict. A personusually positioned centrally in a flat, colorless space simply explains the situation while singing. "I'm at the supermarket, and I need quality!" they warble, as if the entire universe were a musical and grocery shopping were an aria-worthy activity. It's advertising as sung PowerPoint presentation. Average LRBI: −7.

The Nostalgia Reference : Ah, the refuge of the creatively exhausted. Someone remembers childhood, or traditional values, or "the good old days," always in soft focus, always with sepia tones or washed-out colors, always with a knowing wink that says "Remember when things were simpler?" The product is positioned not as innovation but as guardian of memory. It's less about the future and more about amber-preserved sentiment. Quite effective, actually, but deployed so frequently it's become wallpaper. Average LRBI: −3 (slightly better because nostalgia requires some sense of place and time).

What's remarkable about these archetypes isn't that they exist , every advertising market develops templates but that they're all profoundly left-brain. Every single one prioritizes repetition over novelty, explicit messaging over implicit suggestion, rhythmic memorability over narrative progression.

They're not creative strategies. They're cognitive shortcuts that have calcified into industry standards.

The creative department isn't really creating anymore. They're selecting from a menu of pre-approved formats, like ordering from a restaurant where you can choose your protein and your sauce, but the underlying structure of the meal never changes.

The Exceptions That Prove the Rule

Not all categories behave identically. FMCG is the most left-brain-heavy dairy, snacks, household products optimized for memorability rather than narrative depth.

But automotive and financial brands tolerate more ambiguity. Higher price points and longer decision cycles allow for silence, atmosphere, progression. Tata Motors (2025) relies on implicit communication and sense of place and scores vastly higher on right-brain features.

When right-brain elements do appear ,clear sense of place, silence, unspoken glances, character agency ,they feel immediately distinctive. Ads like M'y B'iat (2023) stand out precisely because they allow scenes to breathe without constant verbal supervision.

The data suggests something counterintuitive: moving an ad from LRBI −5 to +3 dramatically increases perceived quality and memorability. Not because right-brain features are inherently superior, but because they're so rare in the Tunisian context that they create genuine differentiation.

When everything is shouting, a whisper becomes deafening.

Why This Matters (Or: The Expensive Mistake Nobody's Measuring)

Orlando Wood and System1 Group analyzed 100 UK and US ads and found that the greater the number of left-brain features, the less likely the ad achieved strong business results.

And here's the uncomfortable truth: Tunisian agencies have gotten away with it because companies don't track ad effectiveness. They're not looking at the right metrics. If they were, I suspect they'd question every single ad.

There's also a peculiar asymmetry: Tunisia produces talented new cinema graduates every year who will never work in actual cinema, so they get sucked into the communications world. Agencies now possess high technical capacity but comparatively weak storytelling capacity.

The result? A standardized creative process that defaults to these five archetypes, executed with impressive technical polish but narrative poverty.

Perhaps most tellingly, the underlying grammar has barely shifted between 2019 and 2025. A Monoprix ad from 2019 and one from 2021 may differ in execution, but they share the same structural reliance on voiceover, repetition, flatness.

Innovation happens inside familiar formats, not at the grammatical level itself. The system tolerates moments of meaning but resists sustained meaning.

The Medieval Present

We've created the advertising equivalent of medieval painting flat, abstract, obsessed with control and categorization. We've somehow convinced ourselves that in an age of unprecedented audiovisual sophistication, the way to sell yogurt is through rhythmic chanting and freeze-frames.

The irony is delicious: we have the technical capacity for Renaissance-level depth and nuance, but we've chosen medieval flatness. We have cinematographers who could shoot the next great Tunisian film, and we're having them point cameras at people singing about dairy products.

The Finnish bird, at least, has an excuse. It genuinely might become someone else's lunch. But Tunisian advertisers? We're so terrified of ambiguity, of letting meaning unfold naturally, that we've trained an entire industry to do the cognitive equivalent of pecking at grains while never lifting our heads to see the landscape.

My scoring system reveals what we've intuitively known but systematically ignored: silence, place, and progression are the biggest untapped creative assets in Tunisian advertising. They're rare, fragile, and consistently neutralized by left-brain scaffolding.

And that, I'd argue, is the real pattern my brain detected all along: an entire advertising ecosystem that has forgotten how to trust the right hemisphere's way of seeing the world.

The question isn't whether Tunisian advertising is effective within its own logic. The question is whether that logic ,narrow, controlling, suspicious of ambiguity is the right one at all.

I suspect it isn't. But then again, I would say that. I'm thinking with the wrong hemisphere.

Here is my data : 1 and 2 .