Ethical by design, contested in reception: collective memory, habitus, and backlash in a lebanese teaser campaign (2025)

Teaser–reveal strategies are a go-to for advertising campaigns looking to spark curiosity, with standard ethical evaluations usually focusing on execution, intent, and industry norms. However, audience reception can shift dramatically when these messages touch on deeply sensitive social issues. This article explores a 2025 Lebanese “Missing” teaser campaign that triggered intense public pushback, even though its creators played it strictly by the book ethically. Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and theories of collective memory, this qualitative study looks at how people actually decode and process ad messages in the real world. Frameworks like Faizan’s focus mainly on execution—arguing that ethics come down to how a campaign is built and the effect it creates. However, our findings show that real-world impact is deeply shaped by shared history, cultural sensitivities, and lived experience. From a semiotic angle, the word “Missing” carried painful associations with loss and disappearance that went far beyond what the advertisers ever intended. By taking a critical look at standard advertising frameworks—including Kotler’s work on social responsibility—this paper argues that ethics aren’t guaranteed just because a campaign was designed responsibly. In reality, ethical judgment is co-created the moment the audience interprets the message. By bringing a humanities lens to ad ethics, this study highlights the real limits of “universal” guidelines in places carrying heavy collective memory, making a strong case for communication strategies that actually account for local context.