Paid marketing has become an integral part of the world, but this goes beyond the idea of paid marketing to being a shameful ethical and media scandal, coming from Latin America, Colombia.
Colombia is the country that over the years has hosted the Saudi Arabia Beoutq Sports satellite, established to strike its Qatari neighbour before the siege was imposed on the World Cup host.
The media arms built by Saudi Arabia over the past years were not in vain, despite the closure of the Bout Sports satellite channel with a global scandal: promoting the fictional dreams of Neom.
People in those regions will believe what their local newspapers write about the city of dreams, the “new Dubai”.
This morning, Saudi Okaz newspaper, published news entitled “Colombian newspaper EL TIEMPO: NEOM, the city of the future dream”, by which it attempts to use this as evidence of the world’s recognition of the genius idea of Mohammed bin Salman.
However, our Latin American correspondent informed us that this newspaper works in paid marketing, including this article praised by Saudi newspapers.
The Colombian newspaper, which asks you to donate immediately after entering its website to support it and forces you to remove the ad blocker to continue browsing, published the article entitled “La impresionante Ciudad lineal que construirá Arabia Saudita”, which means “the wonderful linear city that Saudi Arabia will build.”
The article goes on to describe the splendour of the city, the rightly capital of the world, using wordings that are not journalistic or professional at all for a paid article.
Looking again at the archive of the local Colombian newspaper, we find a bunch of paid news that addresses the Latin public, as this news are not of the interest of the Western world, and it is even surprising that they are mentioned in a non-Saudi Arab newspaper.
For example, two weeks ago, the newspaper published an article entitled “Arabia Saudita presentó la Academia de Deportes Mahd”, which talks about a Saudi local project to train girls and boys between the ages of 6 and 12 in sports! A strange news piece for a newspaper that did not even publish anything about the assassination of Qassem Soleimani at the beginning of the year, and neither it nor its audience has any interest in the Arab region.
The Colombian newspaper relies mainly on content marketing, which Saudi Arabia actively and remarkably invests in it, however this time, it tried to fool the Arabic reader that there are international praises of the project, and this is the best usage of technology in the creation of a dictatorship.
