The Flags: Meet the world.

Icaro Doria, a 25 year young Brazilian who works for the magazine Grande Reportagem in Lisbon via FCB Publicidade (*the ad agency) created this poster campaign of flags together with Luis Silva Dias, Joso Roque and Andrea Vallenti.

The flag campaign is for Revista Grande Reportagem, and the idea is to 'bring across concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.'

The flags have hit a nerve as they've circled the earth once or twice already in chain letter emails even though they were only intended to be a poster campaign, won a well-deserved gold at the One Show, and over at Brazilian artist .net they have a short email chat with Icaro Doria where he explains that they used data from Amnesty International and the UN. Because the UN apparently keeps lists of how many Americans don't know where Iraq is.

Update: a slight change in the above text, just adding the *asterix to make it clear that FCB Publicidade is an advertising agency in Lisbon (a good and quite famous one at that).

It seemed necessary as this post about the flag ads for Grande Reportagem (Portugals "TIME" magazine) has been all over the web described as anything but an ad campaign.

It's either "art" or a "political statement" and it's even (gasp!) been fictitiously nominated as "an entry for contention in the Nobel Prize of Political Marketing." (see here). There's no such thing.

Well, kids, if it's on Adland you can be damn sure it ain't nothing but a good old-fashioned ad campaign. ;)

Grande Reportagem is the client, Icaro Doria is one of the creatives and FCB is the ad agency.

Client: Grande Reportagem
Ad agency: FCB Publicidade
Creative: Icaro Doria, Luis Silva Dias, Joso Roque and Andrea Vallenti.