Lebanon is often labeled the most progressive country in the Arab world, a place where – almost – anything can be said, done or shown. But when it comes to the portrayal of women, it seems the country’s advertising and communications industry is split between two simplistic clichés: the traditional housewife fretting over her dishes and laundry, and a human Barbie doll out to arouse and seduce. With nothing much in between, the image of women is stuck in a curious limbo.
Along the highway into Beirut, numerous jeans and lingerie brands praise the merits of their products on dozens after dozens of billboards. They differ in size and shape, but all show close-ups of female bottoms clad in blue fabric, or of generous bosoms draped in lace. Once in a while, an incongruous ad for ham interrupts the lines.
Not that a surplus of clichés and stereotypes seems to matter much to either the brands or the public. In today’s Lebanon, advertising rarely portrays or addresses women in a manner that isn’t awkwardly related either to looks or, at the other end of the spectrum, to motherly function. In both cases, “creativity succumbs to facility,” says Alain Brenas, director of ALBA, the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts.
TARGET PRACTICE. Richard El Hachem, business director at Memac Ogilvy in Beirut, agrees. “Many like to say that Lebanon is a very open country,” he says. “But Lebanon is also a heterogeneous society, displaying wide cultural and social gaps among the population. A majority is still deeply rooted in the region’s culture. Many conventions and traditions prevail and most Lebanese women see themselves in the role of a housewife. If people were thinking differently, we’d have more women elected to Parliament. So ‘mass communication’ implies that we talk the language of this majority.”
Only a minority in Lebanon doesn’t believe raising a family and tending to her household is a woman’s primary role, adds El Hachem, so the cultural gap between the liberal few and the conservative masses is well expressed in advertising. Mass products such as laundry powder and milk keep being promoted with a traditional tone, whereas fashionable items such as branded clothes or lingerie – targeting niches – theoretically allow for more liberty.
Unfortunately, even these products don’t seem to inspire much creativity and often remain focused on stereotypes. “Nowadays, in order to sell female-oriented products, women are presented as showcase dummies,” says Brenas. “They don’t wear any expression on their face, they’re not in any kind of action and they’re not even sensual or sexy. They just pose in a lifeless and dehumanized fashion and, more often than not, the product isn’t even shown; what is presented is a woman’s buttocks. It is quite surprising since in most other – more liberal – countries, lingerie is seldom advertised on four-by-three-meter posters such as the ones we see in Lebanon.”
Nor is dumbing down necessary, says Brenas. “The public can understand and appreciate subtlety,” he says. “These ads are not even inviting. How many such campaigns are launched and how many of them are remembered?”
The few women-centric campaigns that have made a strong impression have targeted specific niches of consumers. For example, Leo Burnett’s campaign for the Crepaway diner network unabashedly invites its core target, westernized students, to “Come as you are,” by showing a young woman who has evidently just had a nose job, and another whose makeup is smeared from crying. Exotica flower shop’s “Balconies” ad, also by Burnett, displays a woman wearing a bra made of flowers, and targets high-end consumers living in or close to Beirut.
THE EASY WAY. Work such as this is the exception to the rule, though. Most campaigns for local products are based on a catalogue effect, instead of addressing women with a concept or a message. Their point is generally to sell, rather than build brand loyalty. “Local jeans brands, for example, don’t care about their image,” says El Hachem. “What they want is to sell off stock. And their core targets – 14- to 35-year-old women – buy these products regardless of the quality of the ad.”
“Almost systematically, end users ask for the exact product that is displayed in the ad,” says Brenas. “Eventually, it may lead to a snowball effect, with consumers discovering the brands’ other products later on. But still, that’s no reason for not presenting the product in a minimally intelligent context.”
Creative teams should shoulder part of the blame, says Brenas. “Due to new computerized tools such as Photoshop, and to stock image libraries, creation is no longer based on finding a concept and then a way to visualize this concept,” he says. “Today, the contrary is true. A picture is picked from stock images and a concept is developed around it. Digital retouching allows us to make women look perfect. But it hasn’t made them more attractive.”
Clients and Lebanese society itself must also shoulder their share of the burden, says El Hachem: “Why should creative teams bother if nobody drives them to excel? Why would they go through the hassle of being creative when the client doesn’t want anything that might be considered sophisticated, and when the public is not asking them to? It’s not the job of brands to educate the masses anyway, especially if nobody complains about this. Where are the NGOs, the women’s lobbies, the public awareness campaigns?”
SMART TALK. One such campaign was launched in December. Although it’s a long road to changing habits and modifying behavior, that’s what Leo Burnett Beirut’s “Khede Kasra” (Take a kasra [an Arabic accent placed below a word to address it to women]) public awareness campaign for the Hariri Foundation tries to do. The integrated campaign consists of three television commercials, a radio spot, press ads, posters and interactive billboards. “Our brief was simple: to push for the integration and participation of women in all aspects of the Lebanese society,” says Nada Abi Saleh, deputy managing director at Leo Burnett Beirut. “It is not about aggressive feminism, but is to help Lebanese women understand what their rights are and to encourage them to take action.”
The creative twist is based on the systematic use of the masculine in Arabic grammar. Critics say this encourages gender discrimination. But the practice can be modified just by changing one of the inflection signs, the kasra. “Kasra” also means “habit” in Arabic, so the campaign not only tells readers to change the place of the kasra, but also to change their habits with this small gesture. “The idea was simple, and so was the execution,” says Abi Saleh. “And it’s addressing everybody, regardless of gender, social status or location.”
The two-year program is expected to create awareness and, hopefully, to modify the dominant mindset. Already the “Khede Kasra” integrated campaign has won big both at the MENA Cristals and the Dubai Lynx Awards, and public reaction has been encouraging. Abi Saleh is hopeful that this acceptance may prove that somewhere deep inside, Lebanese women yearn for a change. And, surprisingly, the campaign has attracted men too; Burnett says it wasn’t just women posting links on Facebook or adding kasra stickers to billboards in the streets.
“When the message is genuine, all clichés crumble,” says Abi Saleh, adding that clients can be very responsive to creativity. “For the Taanayel Farms ad [that displayed an elderly Lebanese grandmother going through Canadian customs with dozens of labneh jars], for example, we haven’t been afraid of using not only a woman, but an elderly one. And she turned out to be more successful than a top model [see Communicate.ae].”
There’s probably a middle ground yet to be found by many advertisers and clients in Lebanon, in order to steer away from
the two extremes used to present and address women. It may require patience and motivation, though, and both qualities are in short supply after three years spent on the brink of civil war.
But for the sake of Lebanon’s advertising industry, renewed creativity may become a necessity since, as Brenas says, “at the end of the day, it’s not the image of women that’s damaged when they’re not even portrayed as human beings; it’s advertising itself that’s hurt.”