direct from Beirut’s Madison Avenue

Hezbollah continues its propaganda campaign, this time in French:

Lebanese workers hang an advertising poster showing Hezbollah fighters launching Katyusha rockets, with the French words reading: ‘Divine Victory,’ at the highway of Beirut international airport, Lebanon, in this picture taken on Aug. 18, 2006. Even Hezbollah has joined the advertising blitz. The guerrilla group paid a public relations firm US$140,000 (euro 111,358) to design a campaign called ‘Divine Victory.’ Hundreds of billboards have sprung up across the country in Arabic, English and French _ glorifying what many in Lebanon see as a Hezbollah victory over Israel in the 34-day war that ended with a U.N.-brokered cease-fire on Aug. 14.(AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The billboards didn’t exactly “sprung [spring] up across the country.” They are part of a massive PR campaign. The incredible details are here, in Newsweek. Reprinted below is the professional advice offered to Hezbollah by the PR firm it engaged for the campaign:

Lower your “message density”: Islamist propaganda was once known for its densely impenetrable Arabic, peppered with quotes from the Qur’an. But Kawtharani says that in this campaign, Hizbullah has made an effort to get “straight to the point” with its slogans. The international public “expects a clear and single message,” he says. “That’s the language of the media these days.” So Hizbullah settled on the simple and catchy “Divine Victory” slogan, and repeated it over and over.

Speak in the lingua franca: One of the striking things about Hizbullah’s campaign is that many of the billboards around Lebanon are in English, crafted explicitly for foreign TV cameras. Some of Hizbullah’s six-man creative team, like Kawtharani himself, studied at the American University of Beirut and are fluent enough to employ a more subtly effective English idiom—the MADE IN THE U.S.A. banners, for example.

Employ irony: Some of Hizbullah’s most common ads use a tactic that Kawtharani calls sending “double messages.” One example: a red banner featuring the slogan extremely accurate targets! juxtaposed against the rubble of Beirut’s southern suburbs. “In advertising, irony is part of the modern style,” says Kawtharani. “The audience will receive the double message.”

Sanitize the images: Conventional wisdom holds that Hizbullah gained sympathy throughout the war by circulating graphic images of Lebanon’s dead, often in e-mail chain letters. But now that the war is over, says Kawtharani, publicizing what he calls the “more aggressive” visuals can be counterproductive. Some of Hizbullah’s ads thus feature symbolic images of the killing—bodies wrapped in blankets, for instance—but avoid the most horrific scenes. The West already considers Hizbullah a “bloody party,” Kawtharani acknowledges. Continuing to publicize carnage would reinforce this image, especially among foreign audiences.