The Trillion Dollar Campaign

Why it works

Zimbabwe's hyperinflation had made its banknotes worth less than the paper they were printed on, so TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris printed the ads on the money. The client was The Zimbabwean, a newspaper published in exile and then hit with a 55 per cent luxury import duty that priced it out of reach at home. The Johannesburg agency turned worthless trillion-dollar notes into flyers, mailers, posters, murals and billboards, each carrying lines such as "It's cheaper to print this on money than on paper." The medium was the message in the most literal sense: every billboard was itself physical evidence of the collapse the paper was reporting. It is studied as the textbook example of a material becoming the idea, and of turning the regime's own creation against it. It won the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes in 2009 and, in 2010, Africa's first D&AD Black Pencil, and one of the banknote posters is now in the V&A's collection.