The Lebanese people have longed for peace and unity since the beginning of the 15-year civil war in April 1975. While the post-war government paid a concerted effort to recover the country from mayhem and destruction, it focused exclusively on reconstruction and urban development. The government’s investment in social reconciliation, on the other hand, remained deficient. In recent years, political upheavals and violence reemerged presenting the Lebanese people with a reminder of their traumatic past. Among the few forums for public discourse, television advertising became a unique space that engaged the conflict and offered alternatives. Advertising stepped in where public institutions were absent. Lebanese advertisers introduced narratives that worked through the tragic past and provided audiences with a sense of resolution and closure. Not only did advertising create a platform for negotiating history, trauma, and identity, but it also provided an alternative site to perform a “new Lebanese identity.” In response to the political and social tensions on the street, a number of commercial ads presented their viewers with scenarios of hope and optimism. These ads offered possibilities in which the Lebanese individual can actively participate in building the “new Lebanon.” The narratives in these commercials imagined a Lebanon within secular cosmopolitan terms. The product advertised is carefully situated in an ethnically sterile environment: a cosmopolitan space that could be part of any society in the world. The cosmopolitan setting detached the product from any political, religious, or local color. Essentially, these ads invited their viewers to participate in a collective social transformation through their products. These commercials painted a utopian image where one must shed an identity tainted by sectarian memberships and replace it with that which is unchained to political, sectarian, or even culturally-specific affiliations. The identity these commercials embrace belongs to a global culture: the cosmopolitan. Accordingly, this paper examines television advertising practices and explores the ambivalence of identity that these practices reveal. How do commercial advertisers construct a “new” cosmopolitan identity for the Lebanese? How do producers of television commercials associate attitudes, behaviors, and social status with the featured products? How do they utilize these associations as strategies to engage their publics in a discourse on national identity? This paper will attempt to answer these questions by exploring a number of advertisements while contextualizing the findings within a global, postcolonial, and consumption theories.