Advertising Charter
The Israeli Ad Industry
Issue 44 | September 2017
Agency
BBR Saatchi & Saatchi
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Idan Regev Creative Director Kobi Cohen Creative Concept Dorit Gvili Creative Team Avner Rassel & Shiran Damari
Production Team
Production Producer Manager Bosmat Ben David Creative Coordinator Eva Hasson Traffic Director Ronit Doanis Directed and edited Or Ron
Other Credits
Chief Executive Officer Yossi Lubaton VP Content & Production Dorit Gvili Supervisor Strategic planning Zemer Doron Account Executive Mor Aharon
Date
July 2017
Background
Israel was a melting pot, a country of immigrants who came from many different parts of the world.
It was a place where East met West, where Ashkenazi Jews (from western countries), Sephardic Jews (from Arab countries), Ethiopian Jews, Arabs and Christians lived side by side.
Yet in Israeli advertising, the white Caucasian, blond, blue-eyed stereotype still reigned supreme.
Portrayals of single-sex families were rare and glimpses of black Ethiopian kids even rarer. Arabs were usually shown in various unflattering roles.
The way BBR Saatchi & Saatchi saw things, the industry had a proactive role to play in levelling the playing ground, abolishing prejudice and blowing up the glass ceiling.
Idea
Israel's President, Mr. Reuven Rivlin, was enlisted to help promote the advertising industry's first 'Advertising Charter".
This was inaugurated at Israel's annual advertising awards show with a new category award for all-inclusive advertising.
To raise awareness of the initiative both within the advertising community and beyond, a video was created in which the President showed a group of children images of people and asked, which one is the poet, which is the lawyer, which one is the government minister?
Each time, the children chose a white-skinned, European-looking person rather than the actual, darker-skinned poet, lawyer and minister.
In a bold move spearheaded by Baumann Ber Rivnay / Saatchi & Saatchi,
Israeli President Mr. Reuven Rivlin together with children puts the Israeli advertising industry's
typecasting practices to shame and urges it to change for the benefit of all Israeli society.
Results
The advertising community were shamed by their typecasting practices and all major companies signed up to the charter.
Our Thoughts
There has been a lot said about diversity and inclusively in advertising but progress is still lamentably slow in some markets.
In the UK, no-one would dare say, as a CEO did to me, when I wanted to use a piece of music created for us by Masai tribes-people, "I'm not having that (delete word for which he would be prosecuted now) music in my advertising."
Yet stereotypes still abound.
So, these days a popular strategy is to go to a key influencer and get them to deliver the message for you. Now, seriously, you can't get more influential an influencer than your President, can you?
There have been other campaigns in other countries with similar ambitions but this seems to me to be an agency setting out to solve the problem rather than setting out to do an award-winning piece of advertising.
Bravo BBR Saatchi.