How Advertisers Might End the War on Terror

The advertising industry believes Muslims could be one of its next big revenue drivers. Both News Corp. (NWS) and WPP (WPPGY)'s Ogilvy & Mather have recently set up new operations targeting the world's 1.8 billion Muslims. What's refreshing about these endeavors is that they treat Muslims the same way advertisers treat everyone else: as consumers.

If there's one thing the international Muslim community needs, it's to normalize its relations with the rest of the world and move past this phase in which Muslims are regarded either as terrorists or sympathizers. (And in return it might be nice if Muslims stopped regarding non-Muslims as kafir or kuffr).

WPP's new Ogilvy Noor agency could well find itself at the forefront of this. Its mission is to do for Muslim consumers what advertisers for years have been doing to everyone else on the planet: Targeting them appropriately with messages that bring them into the consumer economy.

While there lots of places where Islam is a mainstream Abrahamic faith that would be unremarkable in any Christian or Jewish nation, there still are plenty of places where Islam operates as an impossibly extreme medieval cult. Read Maureen Dowd's "A Girls' Guide to Saudi Arabia" in this month's Vanity Fair and you'll get an idea of how difficult it will be to reach a female consumer there -- without a man's permission, that is -- and that kingdom has some of the wealthiest Muslim consumers on Earth. This isn't just about culture, of course. Money talks:

The market for halal food -- or, meat slaughtered as permissible under the Islamic law -- alone is worth a staggering $2.1 trillion and growing $500 billion a year, according to a research report done by Ogilvy Noor and market research firm TNS.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud plans to launch a 24-hour Arabic-language news channel in partnership with Rupert Murdoch's Fox network, and has recruited the controversial Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi to head the station.

Human creativity flourishes in freedom... By making the decision for greater openness, you will signal the importance you have assigned to creativity in your plans for the future and declare your confidence in your people.

[In Hebron], tales of travel restrictions, scare tactics, and even children getting pelted with stones as they walk to school are not uncommon.

[Eido] Gat and [Ziv] Schneider were allowed to tour Hebron with a police escort for half a day to determine if such a branding scheme would even be possible. They found the city in "much worse shape" than they pictured, a place where politics and religion conspire daily against the rudimentary efficiencies of urban life. Gat admits: "[O]ur branding suggestion is more of an optimistic view of the future." Any way, Hebron will need a lot more than a new logo. But a new logo is at least a start.

The challenge, he argues, is not to revert to stereotyping and rely on religious messaging. "We tell marketers not to use overtly religious messages to market your products. Most Muslim consumers are very mainstream and if you target the religious minority, then you will be targeting a niche within a niche."