Hasta La Creative!

Only a true and honest friend will tell you if you have bad breath, but they are seldom seen. So, we made a magazine print ad and a bad breath detector in one. The Print Ad’s true message will only be revealed if your bad breath is bad enough.

McDonald’s, Lebanon’s leading fast food retailer, wanted to promote its new Chicken Wraps. But towards the end of the year, budgets were typically low and competition was high. So, we used radio – a cost-effective mass-media channel in Lebanon.

Conventional radio wouldn’t be enough. We needed to disrupt the radio ads that people heard in their cars, at homes, or in their offices, making them pay attention to McDonald’s Chicken Wraps. We chose a popular music genre in Lebanon: Rap music. And created “The Chicken Raps” to promote the Chicken Wraps 😉

3 unexpectedly delightful rap songs – titled Soul Chicken, Old School Chicken, Dead Chicken – disrupted the category and the radio ad apathy, earning attention for McDonald’s Chicken Wraps from all listeners across Lebanon. And as “The Chicken Raps” were hummed by everyday people on the streets, the Chicken Wraps became the hottest selling item from McDonald’s during the campaign.

A PETA campaign about abuse that occurs behind the scenes in animal circuses. The campaign, led by Fuller House star Juan Pablo Di Pace is titled “Extinguish Circus Cruelty.”

Meet Mashrou’ Leila. An independent Lebanese band whose songs take on socio-political issues affecting the Arab World. But, their messages don’t travel as much as they should. With their new album’s launch, we were tasked to get the band and their messages more exposure internationally.

Instead of promoting the album with a traditional campaign, we identified an unreleased song, composed 3 years back, about “Betrayal”. Taking the lyrics of that song, called “Roman”, we gave it a dual meaning – to address the global socio-political trends against Arabs and Arab Feminism. The western media’s narrative of feminism and women empowerment, does position itself as incompatible with Islam and the Arab world. And with Islamophobia rising in the Western world, Western media does not fairly showcase the progress by women in the Middle East; instead, exploiting the cultural and religious prejudices that people and governments are using to victimize Arab women. We wanted Arab women to take back that narrative. And create a new narrative.

With an Arab woman director, we created a music video featuring Arab women (doing things one typically sees Western do in a music video – dancing), disrupting the global narrative of Arab feminism – and importantly, that of hyper-secularised (white) feminism, which increasingly positions itself as incompatible with Islam and the Arab world. Instead, the music video celebrates the various modalities of Middle-Eastern feminism. The music video treats oppression and stereotyping from the West, not as a source of victimhood, but as the fertile ground from where resistance can be forged, through music. “Contains anger, sorrow, accusation, and resignation, without losing control or force: the calm simultaneous with the storm.” (Jessica Doyle, Western Listener).

The video self-consciously toys with the intersection of gender with race by celebrating and championing a coalition of Arab and Muslim women, styled to over-articulate their ethnic background, in a manner more typically employed by Western media to victimize them. The video purposefully attempts to revert the position of the (male) musicians as the heroes of the narrative, not only by subjecting them to the (female) gaze of the director, but also by representing them as individuals who (literally) take the backseat as the coalition moves forward. So, while the lyrics of the verses discuss betrayal, struggle, and conflict, the video revolves around the lyrical pivot in the chorus: ‘aleihum (charge!). “Life-affirming and joyous rather than the timid, “oppressed” vision the West is used to from media reports.” (Alex Clifton, The Singles Jukebox). The song has also featured in the band’s concerts regionally and worldwide, taking the message even further.

AN AD CAMPAIGN ABOUT BLIND PEOPLE FOR THE WORLD TO OPEN THEIR EYES

“Models for equality” is an initiative of the Rehab Center for the Blind of Lima (CERCIL) to raise awareness of optical businesses and eyewear brands in Lima. The campaign aims for these organizations to hire 5 of CERCIL members as the perfect candidates to become new eyewear models since they have wore them all of their lives.

The campaign developed by the agency LOTO, aims to address an issue few people want to talk about: discrimination in the work environment. Blind people experience barriers when trying to find jobs for themselves, mostly because people take their usefulness for granted, a myth that the campaign is attempting to debunk