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Ad Blitz Satirizes Lebanon's Divides
Reem Kotob, left, Manal Naji, and Yasmina Baz conceived the anti-sectarian campaign in the Beirut office of the ad agency. It has been met with mixed reaction.
(By Anthony Shadid -- The Washington Post)
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"Something is about to explode, unfortunately," he said.
Added his colleague, Kamil Kuran: "If we keep thinking like this, the future is going to look like this."
The inspiration for the campaign came almost by coincidence in their cramped offices, its walls cluttered with ads for L&M cigarettes, a poster for the film "Reservoir Dogs" and memorabilia from last year's protests after the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Those protest signs appear a little dated; "Independence '05" and "All of us for the nation." On one window hangs a handwritten quote: "The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability."
Manal Naji, a 27-year-old senior art director, had glanced at a résumé tucked underneath another piece of paper. "Christian," it read. "We were so shocked," she recalled. In the end, it turned out it was the name of the applicant's father, but it gave Naji an idea. "What if it actually existed," she said. "What if it reached the point of putting it on your job application."
"We wanted the same shocking effect," added Reem Kotob, a 25-year-old member of the creative team.
This weekend, the two sat with another member of the team, 26-year-old Yasmina Baz, in the agency's conference room, looking over the ads they designed in a burst of energy on that first night and a later session at a nearby bar, Club Social.
One is a doctor's plate: "Dr. Mohamed Chatila, Muslim Sunni." Another is a three-story banner that reads, "For Druzes, Building for Sale." A license plate is pictured: "A Shiite car," it says in Arabic, "Shiite" in English. And an ad for a car: "2000 model, in near perfect condition. Owned and maintained by a Maronite. Never driven by non-Maronites."
The team took the ads to Amam 05, a grass-roots group that grew out of last year's protests. The name means "ahead," an acronym of the Arabic for civil society. It states its mission, admittedly ambitious, as "a modern, sovereign state built on non-feudalism, non-confessionalism and non-clientelism." But even its leaders admit to being a little glum, given today's crisis.
"Very frustrated," said Nicole Fayad, one of the activists.
The original idea was to actually hang the signs in the city: "Maronites only" in a parking lot, "For Druzes" on the side of a building. But when Asma Andraos, one of the group's leaders, approached the owners, they cringed.
"They called me back, and they said they loved it, that I was crazy, and that there's no way they could do this," she recalled. She shook her head. "If I had a building, I wouldn't have done it, either," she said.
They went instead to newspapers, placing the ads in eight papers for two weeks this month. One printed them for free, the others at a 50 percent discount. A billboard agency agreed to post 300 for free for a week. In all, it cost the group $40,000; Mouzannar estimated it would have cost more than $500,000 commercially.
