How AnNahar and Impact BBDO gave Lebanon an AI president

When generative AI began capturing global attention, that vast archive suddenly looked less like history and more like data with purpose. The team asked a provocative question: what if Lebanon’s story could write its own future? That thought became the foundation for The AI President, a digital head of state generated entirely from the country’s journalistic record.

Giving history a voice

The process behind the idea was both technical and emotional. More than 30,000 editions of AnNahar, dating back to the 1930s, had to be scanned, translated and restructured to make them readable for machine learning. Working with New York–based AI partner Addition, Impact BBDO built an optical character recognition (OCR) system capable of reading Arabic newspapers, converting them into usable text and training a model that could respond to citizens’ questions with historical and contextual insight.

The AI wasn’t designed to imitate politicians but to embody the knowledge of a nation. It used an agent-based approach to combine lessons from Lebanon’s past with an understanding of current events, producing multilingual answers in Arabic and English. Each interaction came alive through a custom AI voice and a dynamic visual identity, transforming what was once static data into something distinctly human.

“The challenge was massive,” says the creative team. “But that’s what made it meaningful. We weren’t training an algorithm, we were reviving a century of Lebanese journalism.”

From newsroom experiment to national symbol

The AI President quickly transcended its campaign roots. Within days, it had generated more than 100,000 interactions, trended across social media and boosted AnNahar’s web traffic by 30%. The print edition sold out in hours, a rare feat for any newspaper, and subscriptions rose by double digits.

More importantly, the experiment shifted public behavior. Citizens began using the AI President to explore governance questions, journalists cited its data in debates and even cabinet members referenced its insights during policy discussions. The initiative drove $25m+ in earned media and transformed political apathy into a wave of civic curiosity.

Younger audiences, long disengaged from traditional media, found themselves drawn back to the paper. What began as an act of protest became a bridge between generations, renewing AnNahar’s credibility as both a voice of record and a force for progress. When Lebanon eventually elected a new president, the AI version remained in the national conversation as a symbol of innovation, trust and accountability.

When journalism becomes leadership

AnNahar’s AI President redefined what journalism can be when it stops reporting from the sidelines and steps into the story. For the first time, readers weren’t just consuming the news; they were conversing with it.

The next phase will expand the platform, allowing AI to help readers question, analyze and co-create the news in real time. As Impact BBDO puts it, this was the world’s first instance of AI being used within a functioning government, but it will not be the last. The project points to a future where artificial intelligence becomes a civic tool, not a political weapon.

For a nation long accustomed to silence from its leaders, the campaign gave Lebanon something it had lost: a voice that listens back. And in that voice, a glimpse of what leadership, human or artificial, could mean when built on memory, transparency and hope.

AnNahar and Impact BBDO will be celebrated as one of The Ad Club NY’s Brave Brands for 2025 during Advertising Week New York.