The traditional cloth banner advertisements that accompany elections are noticeably absent this time round, much to the chagrin of their makers, reports Dena Rashed As this year's elections approached, cloth merchants, paint shops and calligraphers were expecting a boom. Their cheap, quick and easy to hang method of advertising has always been a favourite for candidates. But two weeks into the campaign, it's the more modern form of advertising -- the slick billboards that line the city's streets -- that are getting the lion's share of the business. Adel El-Gammal, a traditional calligrapher in Cairo's Abdin district, said he has definitely seen better days. "Normally our profit margins are low, so we eagerly wait for elections every few years to finally do a larger volume of business," El-Gammal said. In the business for the past 30 years, he fondly recalls the heydays when "we used to set ourselves up for a really heavy work load" when elections came around. This year, El-Gammal said, "we thought would get a lot of work from the presidential campaign, but now we are extremely disappointed." Beside his tiny shop, a worker puts the final touches on a cloth banner with the name of a private company displaying its support for President Hosni Mubarak. "These are the few pieces of work we get these days, the compliments from people -- businessmen or private companies -- expressing their support for various candidates, and mainly Mubarak," El-Gammal said. There is not as much of these shows of loyalty as before. In fact, said El-Gammal, there was far more work being commissioned for the May referendum on amending the constitution. "The number of people complimenting the president was much higher then," he said. At other professional calligraphy shops, the mood is similarly low. Calligraphers attribute the drop to a variety of reasons. "We used to produce artistic banners for the candidates, but nowadays people are going for ordinary, unskilled painters, who produce banners with very poor handwriting, lacking any creativity," said Ibrahim Badr, who has been a calligrapher for 17 years. "Some of us, especially the professional calligraphers, will refuse work if we discover that the candidates aren't looking for quality," he said. For each metre of written cloth, the calligrapher gets LE5. Non-skilled painters have brought prices down to LE1 per meter, virtually pushing the professionals out of business. Ordinarily, candidates running for People's Assembly seats, for instance, might commission some 5,000 metres of cloth to produce banners ranging from five to 30 metres long each. Another calligrapher, Ahmed Arabi, who has been in the business for 30 years, said the traditional means of advertising have become passé. "We can't expect presidential candidates to ask us for traditional cloth banners, when they can advertise in the newspapers, and thus reach the public across the country, instead of just putting banners in some streets." Arabi and other calligraphers hope that in November, when parliamentary elections are scheduled, this more local form of advertising will become popular again. For now, the competition from advertising agencies that rent out space on huge billboards in attractive spots across the city has also dealt the banner painters a serious blow. Billboards cost more -- around LE500 per metre, in addition to the cost of using the space -- but that hasn't seemed to deter the customers. "Although some of the candidates wont be spending more than the LE500,000 provided them by the government," said Badr, "it would seem that they've opted for these more expensive, yet more efficient billboards."
