To raise awareness on the importance of including women in peace building dialogues, we bridged Lebanon’s online and offline worlds through a 24 hour stunt.
This organic campaign with digital activism at its core rests on a meticulously planned pre-seeding strategy, leveraging the engagement of KOLs
On November 15 2021, Lebanese people woke up to a different media landscape experiencing what a dialogue without women is.
Through our strategic partnership with Twitter MENA, LBCI TV and Annahar newspaper, we removed 50% of the letters from the online, broadcast, and print communication coming out of the country disrupting the media scene.
Background
For years, the fate of Lebanon and its people has rested in the hands of half of the population: men. For years, women were missing from Lebanon’s political scene. And for over 40 years, so-called national dialogues and peace agreements were carried out by one gender: men.
When 50% of the Lebanese population is not given a seat at the table, the decision-making processes put in place cannot and will not represent all the Lebanese society.
And the dialogue will be missing.
Through this campaign, UN Women Lebanon aimed to raise awareness on the importance of women’s engagement in peace and security deliberations in Lebanon.
The idea was to pave the way to ensure that women are well represented in the upcoming peace-building conversations as equal participation is directly linked to more durable solutions and sustainable outcomes.
The Interpretation of the Challenge (30% of vote)
Although Lebanese women are empowered, educated, and fit to run for political office and make a difference, they have almost never played an intrinsic role in any political and national peace-building dialogues, and have continuously been marginalized in state level decision making.
Worse, the political establishment has been perpetuating the status quo through a closed election process allowing traditional male political figures to remain in power for years while women were “allowed” to lead on secondary positions only.
Within this context, and in light of the upcoming parliamentary elections, preceding the election of a new president in Lebanon, UN Women Lebanon wanted to raise awareness on the importance of women’s engagement in peace and security deliberations in Lebanon, a goal that is particularly challenging given the very niche nature of the topic and the entrenched beliefs of timeworn gender stereotypes deeming women unfit to occupy key political roles.
The Insight / Breakthrough Thinking (30% of vote)
Studies have shown that peace agreements are 64% less likely to fail and 20% more likely to last upwards of 2 years when women participate in the decision-making process. These statistics present many possibilities, of which Lebanon is in dire need of today more than ever.
So if half the Lebanese population is women, and half the population is not given a seat at the table, doesn’t that mean the dialogue is missing? When 50% of the Lebanese population is not given a seat at the table, the dialogue will most certainly be disjointed, and the decision-making processes incomplete.
Our idea was simple: to reflect this overlooked statistic, we removed half the letters from the alphabet and launched the biggest ever media stunt in Lebanon to show that women in Lebanon are #TheMissingPeace.
The Creative Idea (20% of vote)
o Women make up 50% of the population in Lebanon.
o Yet, women have 0% participation in key decision-making
o With 50% of the population absent from the dialogue, the conversation is missing.
Our idea:
Remove 50 % of the alphabets' letters, to create a dysfunctional alphabet and showcase the dysfunctional dialogue.
The Missing Peace campaign wants to show what missing peace dialogues look like.
It’s about time to complete #TheMissingPeace.
The Outcome / Results (20% of vote)
Our 1-day campaign tackling a “niche” topic:
TRENDED ORGANICALLY #1 FOR 3 DAYS despite a cluster of bad news garnering 14.7 interactions from +61 countries
• +160 prominent celebrities/influencers/public figures engaged with our Tweet including Elissa (15.7M), Maya Diab (1.5M) and Nadine Labaki (761K)
• UN Women Lebanon Twitter’s mentions jumped from 90 to 1000/weekly (+1036%)
The conversation around women’s rights in Lebanon leveled up by 325% the week of the campaign finally putting women at the front seat of public debate
In one day in a country of 6M:
- +693M Total Impressions including a reach of 93.1M
- 650K engagements
- 68% of the yearly UN Women Lebanon mentions on Twitter
+$658K in earned media:
• Annahar: +500K website visits and 80,000 print impressions
• LBC: +2.2M views on prime-time segment with 20 minutes free airtime
-International coverage, including BBC and Period. Studio
Please tell us how disruption in your market place inspired the work
We adapted to our ever-changing fast-paced media landscape by adopting a strategic partnership with traditional and digital media platforms to fully disrupt the conversation, shake the media landscape and bridge Lebanon’s online and offline worlds.
Through an immersive one-day journey, we deployed a newspaper stunt on Annahar as well as a broadcast stunt on Lebanon’s leading TV channel. We also developed a push-strategy on Twitter, mobilizing influencers to spread the message and distorting the timeline so that everyone was tweeting in gibberish all day. And we didn’t stop there: we went on to disseminate billboards all across the city with selected tweets so that even target audience who aren’t on social media are familiar with our campaign.
Credits
Name
Company
Role
Malek Ghorayeb
Leo Burnett Beirut
Chief Creative Officer - Campaign Supervision
Nada Abi Saleh
Leo Burnett Beirut
Managing Director - Campaign Supervision
Natasha Maasri
Leo Burnett Beirut
Executive Creative Director - Developed initial idea & led overall campaign execution
Rana Khoury
Leo Burnett Beirut
Creative Director - Developed initial idea & led overall campaign execution
Farah El Beaini
Leo Burnett Beirut
Communications Supervisor - Developed initial idea & led overall campaign execution & Led Media & PR amplification
Grace Kassab
Leo Burnett Beirut
Associate Creative Director - Developed initial idea and led on Arabic writing
Carl Kaed
Leo Burnett Beirut
Senior Art Director - Design Lead & Execution
Orson Baz
Leo Burnett Beirut
Digital & Social Media Director - Digital planning & delivery/ Amplification & Analytics
Nathalie Abi Hanna
Leo Burnett Beirut
Senior Multimedia Designer - Design & Animation
Salma Bou Matar
Leo Burnett Beirut
Junior Art Director - Design Execution
Nancy Haddad
Leo Burnett Beirut
Multimedia Designer - Design & Animation
Hadi Afif
Leo Burnett Beirut
Content Manager - Digital planning & delivery/ Amplification & Analytics