ARCHIVEKunhadi Turns the Midnight Kiss Into a Road-Safety Warning
Kunhadi's 'New Year' is a 2011 public-interest film produced in Lebanon by M&C Saatchi MENA, Beirut, that transforms the iconic midnight kiss on New Year's Eve into a direct narrative argument against dangerous driving on one of the country's deadliest nights of the year.
Released in December 2011, the campaign addresses a concentrated window of road risk: New Year's Eve, when celebration, alcohol, and speed combine on Lebanese roads. The film employs a single, emotionally loaded cultural moment — the midnight kiss — as its central device, building a dramatic narrative around that gesture and redirecting its emotional charge toward a road-safety message. In doing so, it avoids the hectoring tone that weakens many public-service announcements and instead operates through expectation, recognition, and consequence. The medium is film, and the campaign consists of one primary media asset, designed to reach Lebanese audiences during the holiday period when the message carries immediate behavioural relevance.
The campaign sits within a broader multi-year effort. According to kunhadi.org, Kunhadi's New Year's Eve campaigns ran from 2011 through 2016 and were later described as having significant impact during subsequent holiday periods. In Lebanon, where road safety has long been an urgent public-health concern, that sustained commitment gives the 2011 film its founding significance. It is the opening statement of a campaign lineage, not an isolated execution. Clapboard rates this campaign 64 out of 100, reflecting its creative coherence and cultural specificity within the public-interest category.
ARCHIVEKunhadi identified speeding as a primary driver of road fatalities in Lebanon. According to kunhadi.org, citing Lebanese Internal Security Forces statistics, speeding caused more than half of all road crashes in the country. That figure frames the strategic urgency: in a nation with a historically under-regulated road environment, reducing dangerous behaviour on high-risk dates carries measurable public-health value.
M&C Saatchi MENA's strategic insight was to avoid confronting the problem directly through statistics or authoritative warning. Instead, the agency located a universally understood Lebanese social ritual — the New Year's midnight kiss — and built the campaign's argument inside that ritual. According to Kunhadi Wordpress, Kunhadi's broader Taxi Night initiative, which began in 2007, had already established the strategic principle of making responsible behaviour socially desirable rather than morally obligatory, reframing safe driving from something perceived as cowardly into something understood as intelligent. The 'New Year' film inherits and deepens that philosophy.
In Lebanon, the advertising market was approximately US$150 million in total billings around 2011, according to a 2013 interview published by Executive magazine. That market had only recently begun recovering from a downturn in 2009 and 2010, with small growth returning in 2012 per the same source. Public-interest advertising operated within that constrained environment, competing for attention against commercial campaigns from well-funded regional advertisers. Competing road-safety communicators in the region, including government-run traffic authority campaigns in the Gulf and NGO-led efforts in Jordan, tended toward explicit shock imagery. Kunhadi and M&C Saatchi MENA chose narrative seduction over graphic confrontation — a differentiated position with meaningful creative consequences.
Director Hadi Syriani led the production of 'New Year' for Kunhadi, working with Director of Photography Pedro Del Rey and production company City Films, Beirut. The combination of a locally rooted production house and a cinematographer capable of rendering the warmth and intimacy of a New Year's celebration gave the film the tonal credibility its concept required. A road-safety message embedded in a romantic social ritual demands visual fluency in that ritual — flat or clinical production would collapse the premise immediately.
Creative Director Samer Younes and Associate Creative Director Pierre Khoury shaped the campaign's conceptual architecture at M&C Saatchi MENA, Beirut, with Senior Art Director Rola Ghotmeh and Associate Art Director Ibrahim Hamdan defining its visual language. Copywriter Maya Macaron and Agency Producer Joumana Haddad completed the core creative team, with Account Director Shermine Hraoui and Senior Account Executive Grace Zakka managing the client relationship. The density of that team — experienced across both regional and international work — is consistent with M&C Saatchi MENA's Beirut office operating as a creatively ambitious hub within the network.
The narrative structure of the film uses the midnight kiss as both a promise and a turning point. The film builds toward the moment every Lebanese viewer recognises from lived experience, then reframes what that moment means when the night has included reckless driving. The structural decision to anchor the road-safety message inside a moment of intimacy rather than a moment of collision is the campaign's defining creative choice. It implicates the viewer emotionally before it informs them rationally — a sequence that public-interest communication research consistently supports as more persuasive than the reverse.
No verified performance data for the 'New Year' campaign — including viewership figures, recall scores, or documented behavioural change attributable solely to the 2011 film — is publicly available. Assessment of the work therefore rests on structural and contextual evidence.
The strongest contextual indicator of effectiveness is longevity. According to kunhadi.org, Kunhadi continued producing New Year's Eve campaigns through 2016, a five-year run that implies the 2011 film established a strategic and creative template worth sustaining. Organisations with limited NGO budgets do not extend campaign formats without evidence, anecdotal or measured, that the format is working. According to kunhadi.wordpress.com, later iterations of the New Year's Eve campaign were described as having significant impact during the holiday periods in which they ran, lending retrospective weight to the founding 2011 execution.
Structurally, the campaign earns its persuasive case through specificity of occasion, cultural accuracy, and narrative discipline. By targeting a single night — New Year's Eve — rather than making a general plea for road safety in Lebanon year-round, the film maximises behavioural relevance. A viewer watching on 31 December faces the exact decision the film addresses within hours of seeing it. That proximity between message and moment of choice is among the most reliable structural indicators of public-service campaign effectiveness. Clapboard scores 'New Year' at 64 out of 100, reflecting the campaign's creative integrity and contextual precision alongside the limitations of a single-asset execution in a fragmented media environment.
Kunhadi's 'New Year' is a public-interest film created by M&C Saatchi MENA in Beirut and released in Lebanon in December 2011. It uses the cultural tradition of a midnight New Year's kiss as a narrative device to warn against dangerous driving on New Year's Eve, targeting one of the country's highest-risk nights on the road.
Kunhadi identified New Year's Eve as a concentrated period of road risk in Lebanon. According to kunhadi.org, citing Lebanese Internal Security Forces statistics, speeding caused more than half of all crashes in Lebanon. Targeting a single high-risk night allowed the campaign to reach viewers at the precise moment a behavioural decision was imminent.
M&C Saatchi MENA, Beirut created the campaign. Creative Director Samer Younes and Associate Creative Director Pierre Khoury led the concept. Director Hadi Syriani helmed the film for production company City Films, Beirut, with Director of Photography Pedro Del Rey. The full team included art directors, a copywriter, and agency producers across M&C Saatchi MENA.
Kunhadi continued New Year's Eve campaigns from 2011 through 2016, a five-year run, according to kunhadi.org. Later iterations were described as having significant impact during the holiday periods in which they ran. The 2011 film by M&C Saatchi MENA effectively established the creative and strategic template that the organisation sustained across subsequent years.
Clapboard rates Kunhadi's 'New Year' campaign 64 out of 100. The score reflects the film's creative coherence, cultural specificity, and narrative precision within the public-interest category, balanced against the limitations of a single media asset operating in Lebanon's constrained advertising environment during the post-downturn recovery period of 2011.
M&C Saatchi MENA chose narrative seduction over shock imagery. Drawing on Kunhadi's established Taxi Night philosophy, documented on kunhadi.wordpress.com, the agency reframed responsible behaviour as socially intelligent rather than morally dutiful. Embedding the road-safety message inside Lebanon's midnight kiss ritual engaged viewers emotionally before delivering the rational warning — a deliberate inversion of conventional public-service communication.
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