Tweaking a Dictator: A Remarkable Anti-Mugabe Ad Campaign

At this year’s Cannes Lions festival–the ad industry’s most prestigeous confab–the Outdoor competition had a particularly spicy mix of competitors. But the Grand Prix winner was awesome in its simplicity. The “Trillion Dollar Campaign”–by TBWA/Hunt/Lascaris’s South African office for The Zimbabwean newspaper–was aimed at wrong’s committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime. So they plastered billboards with a potent artifact of Mugabe’s corruption and incompetence: The Zimbabwean trillion-dollar bill, whose printing was the result of spiraling inflation.