Lebanese are natural-born marketers. It’s been in their blood since the dawn of the Phoenicians who were regarded as the greatest merchants of their time.
That being the case, the highway in Lebanon is often crowded with advertisements and, of course, heavy traffic. Large billboard print ads or screens are there to keep drivers company as they wait for the cars to budge. A sign that the economy is doing alright.
Lately, however, that’s not the case, and it’s a big problem. Activist Gino Raidy pointed out that the usually ads-packed roads between Khaldeh to Jbeil have zero advertisements now.
“No one has money to put ads, no one has money to buy what the ads are selling,” he wrote, highlighting the brutal truth. It’s a cycle Lebanon is trapped in.
Lebanese are brilliant when it comes to advertisements. No wonder that major advertising agencies in the Arab Gulf countries, for example, are run by Lebanese people.
In Lebanon, we get to enjoy memorable advertisements with catchy slogans and tunes. Some billboard ads, however, we get to strongly disprove of; the ones that objectify and/or debase women.
Nowadays, the main highway is bared from all of that, the great and the fun, the silly and the irritating, and it looks strange and wrong.
Just because these blank billboards tell the story of an economy in distress.
