The Middle East Explained
The National
Issue 62 | March 2022
Agency
MRM UK
Creative Team
Chairwoman Europe & CCO UK Nicky Bullard Executive Creative Director John Treacy Associate Creative Directors Michael Poole, Andrew Pogson Art Director Magda Gosek-Kyprianou Copywriter Gavin Daniel
Production Team
Editor David Hunt
Other Credits
CEO Chris Pearce Digital Planning Director Mike Krzyzanowski Global Managing Partner Karim Slim Business Director Charles Eddy Senior Account Director Varsha Nursimloo Client Head of Marketing & Communications Mireille Puskulian Marketing Lead Duaa Zietoun
Date
January 2021
Background
The National is an English language Middle Eastern news publication. It offers a Middle East viewpoint intended to counter negativity outside of the region and to offer a news source outside of locally-controlled news channels.
Idea
‘The Shocking Percentage’ campaign shines a light on the tiny percentage of news stories from the region that are covered by the rest of the world’s media.
The idea was to build a bespoke ‘Ratio Engine’ that analysed stories from western media news outlets across 7 topics over 30 days, giving us the statistics visualized.
The ‘aperture’ design was created to be pixel accurate to the percentage being portrayed.
Results
Target: 12,783,167 impressions. Actual: 16,292,070.
Target: 79,137 clicks. Actual: 100,311.
Click through rates 0.9%. Double average.
And there was 128% spike in site visits.
Our Thoughts
If there’s a theme to this issue of Directory, it is that my fellow Brits have not always had a wide and tolerant world-view. In fact, there’s every indication that the UK is becoming more xenophobic and narrower in its perspective despite all the talk about a global village. That narrowness of vision is the creative idea the agency has exploited.
And it is shocking that the UK media is so consistently biased in the stories it does choose to report. Take women. The average man in the street seems to assume all Muslim women wear the burqa and are second-class citizens. (They may actually even approve of this!) Oh yes? There are seven female racing drivers in the region.
Algeria has four women in its army who are generals. Bahrain has a female fighter pilot.
Haifaa Al Mansour has produced award winning feature films. And so on and so on.
If this campaign can widen understanding, so much the better.