> Bechara Mouzannar named Dubai Lynx Advertising Person of the Year
This is the awards’ highest honor designed to celebrate an individual who has made significant contributions to advancing the reputation and profile of the communications industry in the Middle East. Mouzannar spent 35 years at Leo Burnett, four of which were spent at Publicis Communications. Under his leadership, Leo Burnett and Publicis Groupe were elevated to new heights and the MEA region became recognised as a global creative hub. Praised for his focus on supporting the next era of creative thinkers, Mouzannar paved the way for the next generations of creatives from the Middle East and also gave a voice to Arab and Lebanese communications. Speaking about the award, Philip Thomas, Chairman of LIONS and Dubai Lynx, said: “Bechara Mouzannar’s dedication to both the region’s communications industry and to developing creativity is evidenced in the 1,000 plus awards he’s received on both the global and regional stages; including three Network of the Year titles for Leo Burnett, and Agency of the Year and Media Agency of the Year titles for Leo Burnett Beirut at Dubai Lynx. We’re delighted to be presenting him with this accolade.” Mouzannar’s career has seen him work with some of the world’s most recognisable brands. With his flair for engaging storytelling, Mouzannar has helped these brands navigate the evolving digital sphere and connect with their customers. The 36 Lion awards at Cannes Lions, including six Gold Lions, pay testament to Mouzannar’s innovative mind and creative expertise. Commenting on the announcement, Bechara Mouzannar, said: “It is both an honour and a privilege, for me, to receive this prestigious regional award, given for the very first time to a chief creative officer. I feel blessed to have partnered with several generations of amazing creative and strategic talents, with passionate, determined and inventive people, to achieving results, including all our clients who gave us inspiring brands as an opportunity to building inspiring ideas and entertaining stories, with the ultimate goal of engaging audiences. This award also comes at the very moment where I am starting a new and different venture in the neighbouring entertainment industry. I believe this is where elegant advertising will be heading. I may have missed the dawn, but I have decided to be there for the morning dew.”
Physical contact and community life are two important pillars of Arab culture that we lost touch with amid the pandemic. And while the ongoing vaccination process has not yet entirely curbed infection rates in the region, it did help ease mobility restrictions to a great extent, paving the way for some kind of return to normality. But after months of living and working remotely, will we be able to readjust to human contact like we used to or has our lifestyle and societal habits been impacted forever?
New Normal, New Me
Life in lockdown changed us in more ways than we could imagine. Instead of warming up to people, we’ve come to fear their presence. Human interaction, once a daily source of fulfillment, has suddenly become a trigger of anxiety and suspicions.
Besides the loss of physical touch, we also lost under our masks a significant part of facial expressions, which we previously relied on to derive key communication queues. And while uncovered lips and noses are not likely to reappear in public anytime soon, we can already taste and smell post-pandemic qualms. I remember reading in The Economist that the pandemic was “an exercise in subtraction” and nodding to my computer screen in agreement. After we’ve learned to let go of so much and were able to live with it, our willingness to restore time-consuming and often energysucking social interactions is up for question. So, are we ready to branch out again outside our immediate circles now that the pandemic has significantly impacted our mental health and drastically transformed our lifestyle?
Are We the Lucky Ones?
Touch is deemed the only sense crucial to human survival. Losing it made us miss out on many of the psychological benefits associated with it such as signaling trust, soothing pain and evoking compassion. We may have survived away from it but we cannot live without it.
As it turns out, some of us are more likely than others to return to pre-pandemic levels of human interaction. In fact, psychological research on catastrophic events shows that most people do subsequently bounce back. We witnessed live examples of this in countries that were able to control the spread like New Zealand, which brought back concerts to big arenas. Such restoring events are expected to occur elsewhere in the world in the near future as a significant majority of people have proven to be resilient to stress over time.
But for a minority of people, namely germaphobes or those with obsessivecompulsive disorder, social life is not as likely to get rolling. Given that pandemic lifestyle stressors tend to either trigger or worsen such conditions, affected people will probably require targeted mental health treatment to get back on track.
Back in Touch
While the pandemic proved to everyone that many [if not most] aspects of daily life can be carried out remotely, the act of existence loses its essence in the absence of human contact, in both its casual and significant forms.
Just like learning to disconnect took us time, learning to reconnect also takes time. It might not necessarily come naturally for everyone and that is totally fine. We need to understand that if we are resilient to stress and eager to come back to normality, some people around us are not and may thus require more time and support to retrieve quasi-normal social interactions.
Thriving in a post-pandemic world cannot happen without mutual support. We all have been subjected to tremendous stress and emotional baggage during the pandemic so compassion may no longer come to us naturally, yet we can still remedy the gap by engaging in acts of compassion consciously at a first stage.
Surviving the pandemic might have been an exercise of thought but carrying on with our lives afterwards might as well be an exercise of feeling.