With regards to those empty billboards. Whereas it is January that is considered the dead month in advertising, considering companies spent their marketing budgets on Christmas and New Year's, and they are coming up for new strategies and budgets, it is actually February that hit the mark in Lebanon. It is strange to see billboard after after billboard with torn ads, revealing previous incarnations, some of them going back to the elections last May, or to the World Cup, or to campaigns already gone by. But here they are, layers on top of layers of old, sun-beaten campaigns, which intermingle on top of one another. With little or new additions, revealing more and more the depth of the crisis and yet advertisers seem either willingly or unwillingly oblivious of this (as show in my very long editorial for ArabAd here). When just two new small campaigns hit the streets in a full month, it tells you how bad things are - despite the upbeat messages advertisers want you to believe.