In 2012, I inherited the Israel Ministry of Tourism account when the previous Creative Director of my ad agency retired. I was reluctant to take on the business due to my personal feelings about the place, though I’d never visited. However, I was committed to retiring the existing campaign, No One Belongs Here More Than You, which ignored the political realities of this contested land. The new campaign, Israel is Beyond Belief, represents an acknowledgment of the problematic nature of the country’s present. To my knowledge, it is the only national advertising campaign that can be read as either critical or celebratory, representing the complexity and intractable nature of the situation within and around the country.

My feeling is that we need to experience places we see through the biases of media for ourselves, and to meet the people of all cultures and creeds who call this place home. We launched the campaign by letting a family and a couple tell their own stories as they traveled, doubling goals to pull in record numbers of new visitors across all demographics.