Design of the times
Advertising is no longer a simple process of enticing users to obtain a product
When you walk into a communications agency in Beirut, you know it. Dark wood paneling and bookshelves lined up with tomes in historic succession, a vault with a time lock on every floor, picture after picture of lovely high rises, or a garage-door-sized executive desk in mahogany. Think law office, bank headquarters, property developer, or (self-) important manufacturer. For an advertising or communications outfit, think open floor space, unconventional accessories (from basketball hoop to marketing murals), roughly hewn looks of concrete and glass or sometimes limestone on interior walls, communicative courtyards, and lots of alliterative post-its sticking to every conceivable (and inconceivable) vertical surface.
In short, if it trumpets creativity with notes of purple berries and minty hints of chaos, you are standing in the office of a Beirut advertising firm. This is the Lebanese industry that has been leading – and indeed supplying – the entire region with communications talent, creative talent, and design talent for at least five decades. It is an industry whose self-perception of being creative means that it is pregnant with new designs in every campaign, every pitch, and every presentation down to its office walls. The only design related questions of relevance here are: is design everything, is everything design, or both?
With so much design competency it has become clear that the advertising and marketing communication minds of Beirut don’t have a single answer about the nature and importance of design. Ask them and they spawn a whole library.
Firstly, design is nigh on impossible to define as a concept and the industry has a grip on this fact. “Design is a broad concept under which you can align life itself,” says Omar Nasreddine, vice president for Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa for global advertising agency Grey Group, a unit of world-leading marketing communications conglomerate WPP.
Life, thankfully, is beyond commerce. Adding measurability in form of marginal utility or market value then is key for getting design to work for the benefit of its author or intellectual owner. “In a business context, design is twofold: first it is design that we do, aesthetics, from packaging to artwork to ideas, and [secondly] there is the strategic bit which is all about how you design your own company, your own business strategy, your expansion,” Nasreddine differentiates.
While cautioning that he is not comfortable with restricting the design discussion to strategic design, he continues, “But for the sake of making the discussion easier, one common denominator that defines all the ways in which you strategically design things, be it products, services, concepts, or structures, is optimization. The only reason why strategic design exists is to optimize anything – from a person to a product to a structure to an ideology, and if you do not apply the law of evolution to that design, it might as well have not been there.”