Women's rights are a contentious issue in the Middle East, where ancient Arabic customs often come into conflict with Western attitudes.
Funded by the World Bank, the Hariri Foundation implements the "Women Empowerment Program" which fights for the legal and social rights of women in Lebanon. The foundation engaged Leo Burnett Beirut to come up with a campaign that would raise awareness about equal gender balance, with the ultimate goal of introducing changes at a national level in existing concepts and policies that discriminate against women in society.
The campaign was built around the "kasra", an accent symbol that appears above or below a word, denoting its grammatical gender. Most printed media leaves out the kasra altogether, which implies the masculine gender. Kasra also translates as "habit", so a campaign was formed around the Arabic phrase "take the kasra and place it below the word", which also translates as "Take the habit of getting things moving". When these phrases are combined, the final understanding reads: "You can change things with a small gesture".
A multi-visual campaign was devised, using the words "willpower", "responsibility" and "right". When the kasra was added, they became messages addressed to women reading "your willpower", "your responsibility" and "your right". In addition to the TV and radio campaigns, sticker sheets were distributed, allowing participants to add a red kasra to magazines, newspapers, road signs and even graffiti. Red kasras were soon a prominent feature on the streets of Beirut.
By the time of International Women's Day in March, the campaign had gathered enough momentum to be adopted by prominent female and male TV personalities, who appeared on screen wearing red kasra lapel badges in news programs as well as lifestyle and political talk shows.
The campaign won a gold Lion at Cannes, 5 gold and 2 silver awards at the Dubai Lynx Festival, and Grand Prix at the Cristal de la Mena.