It's nice to meet you

We've all heard the phrase "a picture equals 1,000." But what happens when you pair it with words, particularly statistics. Well, let me tell you, it can go either way, but for Grande Reportagem it was a complete success.

"Grande Reportagem is a Portuguese news magazine known for its photo-journalism and investigative reporting. Since January 2005 it has been running a series (developed for them by the ad agency FCB Publicidad) called "Meet the World" where national flags are used to graph a social/political issue specific to the particular country." Ethan Ham

Below are some of the ads that the magazine ran:

9gag

The statistics were taken from Amnesty International and the UNO. The images have been circulated around the world via e-mail chain letters.

Ethan Ham

"There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc." Brazilian Artists

Social activism and awareness via advertising or PR has to be one of my favorite things. Each day we are bombarded by ads telling us to buy, buy, buy! It's refreshing to find an ad that just wants to inform us of something instead. You could make the argument that the magazine is calling for people to use this new awareness to make a change, but that's the observer's own choice.

x,

Chace