Creatives of the Middle East
They are more progressive than you
As I was sitting in a dark room without windows, somewhere in an upscale business hotel in Dubai, I was expecting to get pissed off.
I’m lucky to have done this exercise before…
Reviewing 2 minutes long case studies showcasing pieces of marketing/advertising. Catchy music, funny tagline. Debate. Vote. Repeat. Select the best. Award. Done. This is one of the most exciting thing to do as a creative after all. Weigh the quality of other people’s idea and be jealous of the one you wish you’d had.
And still, usually, at some point, I get pissed off. At the vanity, the objectification of women, the lack of depth or the pretend-to-care attitude. Born cynical, always cynical, maybe.
So sitting in that room, with its mushy brown carpets and freezing cold aircon, I automatically assumed that it would be same old, same old.
Add to that a good dose of cultural bias — after all, weren’t we about to judge work from the MENA region, where everything is about oil, cars, and women oppression?
Well, it’s a good thing sometimes to punch yourself in the face a bit.
During that week in Dubai, I have seen more efforts to produce work promoting equality and balanced gender roles than while reviewing work coming from Sweden. Some creative agencies in the middle-east are pushing themselves to be a progressive leading force. But how the hell do you do that when the general consensus is that oppression is part of the culture?
Relationship Status: It’s complicated
Our cultural attaché sits uncomfortably on her chair. on the screen is a campaign portraying women wearing abayas (the black over-dress worn by some muslim women in the region), posing as fashion models while sporting striking accessories.
She seems relatively bothered by the piece of work. De facto, this kind of imagery would be totally forbidden by law in Saudi Arabia. As we struggle to understand her concerns, she mutters:
“This is so offensive. This is so wrong. This is highly offensive… to men”.
So much for a piece that I initially thought as about objectification of women. Normalization of oppressive imagery, provocation of conservatives or simply a representation of what is already a reality in the streets of Dubai? There are no straightforward way of judging the cases we see.
As the days went, we reviewed hundreds of case studies where we pained to seize the depth of the taboo at play. Cancer can’t be named, hair loss is a dishonor, couples can’t tell they love each other. A succession of women and men pass on screen, brushing away domestic abuse like it’s nothing.
It’s not a glass ceiling we are looking at, it’s a panzer-grade wall of social constraints.
Some people are on a mission to get these walls down.
Culture shapes advertising, and by some alchemical reaction of giving some / taking some, advertising somewhat shapes culture back.
Often, we’re talking about some colloquial verbatim of that one-funny ad you’ve seen on TV.
In Sweden, people eat tacos on Fridays because of an 1990’s ad.
In France, people still refer to a chocolate-dessert eating goldfish named Maurice in their daily lives.
In Lebanon, they changed the age to get married due to one viral spot.
Those cases keep sprouting in regions where they are desperately needed and where their mere existence is a provocation to an established order that has (sometimes) normalized violence as part of daily lives.
But their executions trigger a lot of ambivalent reactions — it is clearly no simple feat to touch upon those topics just yet. Most branded content cases where approaching those carefully, worried, probably, to lose a big part of their consumer base. ONGs were a bit more “aggressive”.
While this campaign for UN Women Pakistan has raised a few eyebrows when it comes to the way it portrays women, our cultural attachés seemed to perceive it as only empowering. Some more food for thought about it here.
It’s hard to judge the real impact of those initiatives. But we can only praise them to try.
And then, there are “smaller” challenges .
How many times did you have to think about empowering and educating women about their health, without mentioning, let alone showing breasts?
Because we can’t talk about it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.
We are not in a life-saving business.
It’s a statement that I often use myself. The likelihood of a piece of advertisement saving a life is in most cases fairly limited.
But agencies in the middle-east are in a quite unique position. They have a choice to passively stand by and witness what’s going on outside OR they can take a stand to shake things up, to create a dent in the ongoing world-wide backwardness and push their customers ahead of the curve. They live in a structural context that might push them to become more progressive than anyone else.
Clearly, a lot of them have decided to push that button already. They might not save lives just now, but they are clearly making a difference.
And that was enough for me to get pissed off. Not at them, but at the rest of us for not doing as much.
I was appointed as a juror to the Dubai Lynx festival in 5 categories: Promo/Activation, Outdoor, Interactive, Mobile, and Innovation. The festival covers the whole of the MENA region and goes as far as Pakistan — a pretty diverse array of countries with as diverse cultures, social progress levels and underlying politics.
