A whole industry in upheaval
This plummeting could be best observed in the outdoor advertising business. Less than a year ago, Lebanon was a billboard jungle; any flat surface was good enough to hang ads on it. Today, billboards and unipoles are all covered in white sheets of paper or with remnants of older ads. A campaign – that used to require six hundred billboards to be visible in Beirut – could now be very prominent, comparatively, with just one. Facebook and Instagram ads are filling the void created by the fall of OOH.
Banks – usually the engine behind the Lebanese ad industry thanks to their ample budgets – all but stopped advertising, having to contend with the protesters’ (and Lebanese population’s at large) complete loss of faith in the Lebanese banking system and its players, accused of being responsible for the financial quagmire people were paying the price of. For a short while, banks tried to spin a narrative that the government “had made them do it,” to no avail. Many then reversed gears and went pseudo-patriotic: Byblos Bank, for example, released the tagline “Because Lebanon Is Our Country for Life” – a riff on their earliest selling line, “A Bank for Life” – on Independence Day; BLC used the country’s national emblem, the cedar tree, to come up with: “During Storms, Cedars Only Get Tougher.”
