Saudi Telecom Hires ‘Content Creating Camel’ To Take Photos In Unseen Deserts
Video screenshot via Saudi Telecom
On Mars, there’s the Perseverance rover. Saudi Arabia’s equivalent is Sarha the camel, snapping photos in places no human has ever stepped foot on.
As Saudi Arabia welcomes tourism for the first time, Saudi Telecom hopes to convey the scope of its coverage by enlisting the world’s first “content creating camel” to test it out. And the verdict is in: there is network available even on untouched, unreachable turfs.
At the same time, Sarha the camel is helping out Saudi Arabia’s tourism by capturing rare, stunning photographs from vast deserts. Saudi Telecom shares that nearly half the country is uninhabited, which gives the majestic creature plenty of unseen ground to cover.
A professional camera rig system—including a laptop, solar panels, hotspot router, and cam-ranger—was strapped onto the camel’s back. Even from other parts of the world, photographers could connect to the camel’s hump and take pictures of hard-to-reach parts of the desert.
“As a photographer, I felt like one of the first astronauts stepping onto Mars. It’s just unbelievable,” described New York photographer Ben Jacks, one of the 10 international photographers invited to work with Sarha.
According to Ad Age, the campaign was a global effort. Marketing communications agency Wunderman Thompson Saudi Arabia presented the idea and oversaw the plan, Wunderman Thompson Seattle developed the technology, and Wunderman Thompson Costa Rica worked on data visualization.
Some of the gorgeous photographs can be seen on the Instagram account of Saudi Arabia’s tourism initiative, Unveil Saudi. Don’t worry; Sarha the camel is credited for those pictures too.
[via Ad Age, images via various sources]
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