From Campaign Unpacked (third-party upload).
Lebanon's politicians had spent months issuing the same empty promises about forming a government, and the newspaper was printing them all faithfully.
Publish the newspaper with eight completely blank pages.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: Spending a print run, and your readers' money, on paper with nothing on it, in a country where the paper had already lost a publisher to assassination.
Smart: A newspaper printing nothing is an act of self-sabotage, until you see that printing the promises was the thing making it complicit.
Only a newspaper can make blankness mean something, because only a newspaper is expected to be full of words.
An absence is more photographable than an argument, so the front page travelled globally as an image.
That a real newspaper gave up a real print run. Mocked up, it is a design exercise; published, it is a national event.
Act-poweredIt works because it genuinely happened. Nothing as fiction. Has to be seen to work.
Cannes Lions 2019: Grand Prix, Print & Publishing. The first Grand Prix in the festival's history awarded to a participant from the Arab world.
Jury president Olivier Altmann said it took the jury roughly five seconds to award it.
Client: An-Nahar, Beirut. Editor-in-chief Nayla Tueni
Agency: Impact BBDO, Dubai. CEO Dani Richa
Published: October 2018, during Lebanon's government-formation deadlock
The work: an edition of the newspaper printed with eight entirely blank pages
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in:
Sources: Contagious, Cannes Print & Publishing 2019 · Adweek, the newspaper that printed nothing · An-Nahar's own report · Campaign Middle East, region's first Cannes Grand Prix
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