Branded Content may be the new buzz word at the moment, but its practice has been used in the Middle East for many years. Especially in Egypt, where people are entertained by ads and talk a lot about them. Perhaps that's why many brands are still hungry for the big selling advertising message in any content they create, no matter what the medium is or how inappropriate it appears.

Advertising is evolving, and in the fastest growing social networking region in the world, brands in the Middle East are only spending 3-4% of their total ad budgets on digital. Old habits die hard, and it's exhausting convincing clients to invest in well produced online content. It's even more tiresome convincing them that the most effective way to sell your product is not to sell it.

Thankfully they are starting to understand, and those that have ventured into the realm of Branded Content have reaped the benefits of better relationships, positive sentiments, increased brand awareness and most importantly sales.

With regard to restrictions in the Middle East, there are generally none as long as the content isn't directly talking about sex, politics, or religion. Each country differs slightly in how they handle cases that do, and some are more lenient than others.

We knew not everyone would relate to a personalized song that wasn't about them, and so we decided to invest most of our tiny budget into something they would care about.

Two weeks before Valentines, we released a music video on Facebook and YouTube asking fans to share with us details and stories about whom they’d like to ask out for Valentines. The video quickly went viral because of the song's catchy melody, simple lyrics and unorthodox humor.

We recruited some of the most talented underground songwriters in the Middle East, and every weekday we would choose a fan story, transform it into a quality song from the guy to the girl, and release it instantly as a music video.

Our goal was to get our fans to generate content we can use to write songs with, and so we promoted every music video only to our fans, which paid off big time drawing hundreds of song requests on Facebook.

The campaign was intended to run in Egypt and the Gulf, but due to the political circumstances in Egypt at the time, could only be launched in the Gulf. Nonetheless, Axe Wingman has been hugely successful, not only because of the unprecedented positive feedback from the fans, but also from major blogs and magazines around the world.

The Axe Middle East fan page grew by 20,000 fans in 2 weeks, but what was most significant was that rather than spending most of the budget on media, we invested it on producing personalized quality content, and it really paid off. The fans loved the content and shared the videos with their friends, and with every new video release, more people wanted in on the action.

In the 2 weeks leading up to Valentines: We received more than 200,000 views on Youtube - over 70,000 unique users engaged with us on Facebook resulting in a viral reach of over 1.3m impressions. But the best result of all was that we managed to hook up 8 of our fans with the women they loved on Valentine's. And their reaction to the songs was immense.

Because Unilever believes in the power of the idea, Axe Wingman will continue to grow year after year while hooking up fans with the people they love.