Anti-Public Diplomacy Campaign | “Tweaking” the Zimbabwean Dictator

The “Trillion Dollar Campaign”–by TBWA/Hunt/Lascaris’s South African office for The Zimbabwean newspaper–was aimed at wrongs 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.The campaign was a bit more complex than a simple promo of The Zimbabwean. The newspaper is actually based in South Africa, after Mugabe exiled its publishers for exposing the corruption of his government. He then placed a 55% import tax on it, to make it unaffordable to average citizens. So the newspaper responded by trying to build up enough of a readership base in South Africa to subsidize its distribution in its home country.

From FastCompany