Hasta La Ideas

A new advertising campaign for The Zimbabwean highlights the newspaper’s role in giving a voice to the people of Zimbabwe. The posters feature images taken by photojournalists who have worked in the country over the last two years, and direct viewers to the newspaper’s website, where the photographers describe the circumstances in which the shots were taken.

The campaign is the brainchild of TBWA Hunt Lascaris in Johannesburg, the agency also behind the Trillion Dollar Campaign for The Zimbabwean, which won a D&AD Black Pencil last year, as well as many other awards.

The Zimbabwean newspaper is published in South Africa and the UK by a network of journalists exiled from Zimbabwe for refusing to write propaganda. The newspaper has succeeded in bringing real news from the country to its residents and to over a million Zimbabwean refugees in South Africa and abroad. TBWA Hunt Lascaris devised the latest campaign in response to recent events in the country, where 46 people have been arrested, detained and tortured for gathering to watch footage from Egypt and Tunisia during the recent political uprisings in North Africa.

The idea to use the documentary images in the posters sprang from reports from Harare that police had raided an exhibition of similar images as it opened late last year. An empty speech mark, in the shape of the map of Zimbabwe, has been added to the images, to highlight the residents’ lack of voice in the world. The billboard campaign has just launched across South Africa: to read more about the photographs, hear the eyewitness accounts, and also locate where the images were taken on a satellite map, visit thezimbabwean.co.uk.

Credits:
Agency: TBWA Hunt Lascaris, Johannesburg
Chief creative officer: John Hunt
Exec creative director: Damon Stapleton
Art director: Shelley Smoler
Copywriter: Raphael Basckin
Featured photojournalists: Dirk-Jan Visser, Robin Hammond, James Oatway

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