Communicate Levant | November 2011 by MediaquestCorp.

Levant Edition • The marketing and advertising resource • November 2011 • Issue N°19 • communicatelevant.com.lb

Pay attention: 90:10 Group’s Patrick Attallah on how to really listen to social media Page 34

PRODUCTION Poster production The writing’s on the wall with our handy production map. See which agencies do what to whom. And find out how to get in touch with them too. The perfect office decoration for anyone (Free inside) working with film.

RECRUITMENT Paying a part

What are friends for? Isabelle Aoun on social media strategies for building brands Page 38

Untogether now: Leo Burnett’s Ahmad Abu Zamad on the merits of inconsistency Page 40

CHEAPSHOTS? There may be less money in the market to pay production costs, but nobody’s told Lebanon’s freelance film crews

The results of our first production salary survey are in. We see how much professionals in the film industry can expect to earn – in fulltime jobs and when they strike out on their own to go freelance. See if (Page 32) you are paid enough.

TELEVISION Channel surfing Do you surf with your phone while you are watching TV? You’re not alone. That’s why social networks, app developers and television channels are jumping on it. We look to the US and beyond to bring you seven things you should know. (Page 42)

CAMPAIGN Sling shot

(Page 47)

LEBANON’S PRODUCTION MAP 2011 INSIDE Cover Image: Corbis

MediaquestCorp Egypt................... E£ 10 Jordan ................... JD 4 Kuwait ................ KD 1.2

Lebanon ........L£ 5 000 Morocco ............DH 22 Oman ............... OR 1.5

Qatar ................... QR 15 Saudi Arabia ........ SR 15 Switzerland .......... SFR 8

Syria .................. S£ 100 Tunisia ................ TD 2.5 U.A.E ...................DH 15

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR | NOVEMBER 2011

From Mad Men to X-Men E

instein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Maybe human beings are inherently insane, only in various proportions. For example, most bad decisions have one thing in common: they all seemed a good idea at the time. Be it a financial investment, a marriage, a resignation, a confession, a change of location, a purchase… Only very rarely do we decide to do something while being really conscious of the fact that nope, this is not going to end well after all. In fact, we may be vaguely aware of potential negative consequences, but we choose to ignore them; for my part, a little voice keeps nagging me, having conversations with my supposedly in-charge and responsible self, arguing endlessly until I more or less consciously shut it up. The discussion usually goes something like this: – [Calm] Come on, you know better… – [Sounding reasonable, but decisive] Maybe, but it can turn out allright. I’ll make it allright if need be. – [Annoyed] But why do it in the first place? Why go through all the hassle? – [Taking a deep breath] Because I believe it makes sense. – [Soothing] You believe it, but you know it doesn’t… – [Trying not to appear

stubborn] Theoretically it doesn’t, but practically there’s a chance it still could work, and it can be fixed if it doesn’t. – [Pleading] Stop. Just don’t do it. Please. – [With finality] Hmmmm. No. – [Getting desperate/ angry] But why? We’ve been through this again and again. – [Stamping feet] Just because. Grown ups are weird, sometimes. But then again, human beings have a tremendous capacity to learn and adapt (yes, the Lebanese in particular, at least in terms of adaptation). And adaptation skills are fascinating. Take Darwinism, for example: In short, Darwin’s evolutionary theory states living creatures adapt to new needs by changing their own biology, behavior and even genetics. If we oversimplify, according to this natural selection line of thinking, little fishes grew legs in order to get on dry land and humans got increasingly bigger brains in order to learn how to use tools and survive predators. This got me thinking that it may be some sort of post-Darwinist view of today’s world that leads us to say “People can get used to anything” (and yes, again, Lebanon gives us daily proof of that). However, the contradiction

lies in the fact that one of the things people are most reluctant to accept is – guess what – change. It’s been a long time since we and change were on good terms. We adapt, indeed, but more often than not only when we’re obliged to; and with a lot of grumbling involved. I know, I know; here’s the pot, calling the kettle black. But take the Lebanese production industry, for example, on page 22. It seems awfully clear that the future is not looking good and some change should be in order. In tough times, the “survival of the fittest” rule applies even more than during quieter, more comfortable days. So, should production players evolve? Actually mutate? This, in fact, is what we are witnessing across the communication field: people turning into advertising X-Men, professional mutants who have developed new skills to match their changing environment. Or they can turn a blind eye and keep stomping their feet, repeating ad nauseam: “No. Just because.” That clearly doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. And, in this case, there’s no need for a little voice to nag about it. Einstein would be so proud. Nathalie Bontems, editor editor@communicatelevant.com

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NOVEMBER 2011 | CONTENTS

Contents

COVER: Blurred perspective

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Production is one of Lebanon’s thriving business sectors, but faced with the Arab Spring and an enduring global crisis, it’s confronted by new challenges Talent crisis: Production relies heavily on talent, and talent in the Lebanese production field works mostly on a freelance basis. But in tough times, freelancers may not be the answer – unless they change their ways In the arena: Competition is fierce in the Lebanese production industry, but with the business pie getting smaller, the fight is becoming even rougher Production salary survey: Who gets paid what in the Lebanese production business

NEWS 6 8 10 11 12

Advertising. Lebanon’s Ministry of Telecom unveils new in-house campaign Digital. TEDx comes to Beirut for the first time and gets the town talking Digital. A bunch of the world’s most prominent creatives will meet in Beirut for Lebanon’s first Creative Social event Agencies. Elephant Cairo grows and expands Agencies. PublicisLive sets up shop in Abu Dhabi

14 16

Agencies. MediaCom hires Nick Barron as regional CEO Digital. Yahoo partners with ABC news

THE COMMUNIQUESTION 18

We ask the industry: What’s the best way to lose a client?

FEATURES 34 38 40 42

Web Wisdom. 90:10 Group Middle East’s CEO Patrick Attallah on how to really listen to consumers through social media Guest Opinion. Social beings: How to handle social media as the personal relationship that it actually is X-Pert File. Not so simple: Leo Burnett’s Ahmad Abu Zamad says a little inconsistency can go a long way Television. TweeTV: What you need to know about social television

DEPARTMENTS 44 46 50

Blogosphere. What the Web is saying Work. Selections from the regional and international creative scenes Drive-by. One blogger’s take on Beirut’s billboards

NOVEMBER 2011 Medialeader SAL, Kaline Center, 9th floor, Fouad Chehab Boulevard, Sin el Fil, Beirut, Lebanon, Tel: (961) 1 492 801/2/3

CO-CEO Alexandre Hawari CO-CEO Julien Hawari MANAGING DIRECTOR Ayman Haydar CFO Abdul Rahman Siddiqui REGIONAL DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Bassel Komaty CREATIVE DIRECTOR Aziz Kamel ONLINE DIRECTOR Rony Nassour HEAD OF CIRCULATION Harish Raghavan, h.raghavan@mediaquestcorp.com MARKETING MANAGER Maya Kerbage, m.kerbage@mediaquestcorp.com COUNTRY MANAGERS Lebanon:

Nathalie Bontems, nathalie@mediaquestcorp.com, (961) 1 492801/2/3 KSA: Walid Ramadan, walid@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: (966) 1 4194061 North Africa: Adil Abdel Wahab, adel@medialeader.biz, Tel: (213) 661 562 660

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FOUNDER Yasser Hawari MANAGING DIRECTOR Julien Hawari GROUP MANAGING EDITOR Nathalie Bontems MANAGING EDITOR Austyn Allison SENIOR SUB EDITOR Elizabeth McGlynn JOURNALIST Vanessa Khalil CREATIVE DIRECTOR Aziz Kamel ART DIRECTOR Sheela Jeevan ART CONTRIBUTORS Aya Farhat, Jean Christophe Nys EXTERNAL AFFAIRS Manuel Dias, Maguy Panagga, Catherine Dobarro, Randa Khoury, Lila Schoepf, Laurent Bernard RESPONSIBLE DIRECTOR Denise Mechantaf PRINTERS Raidy Printing Group ADVERTISING The Gulf

MEDIALEADER, P.O. BOX 72184 Dubai Media City, Zee Tower, Office 206, United Arab Emirates, Tel: (971) 4 391 0760, Fax: (971) 4 390 8737, sales@mediaquestcorp.com Lebanon Peggy El Zyr, peggy@mediaquestcorp. com, Tel: (961) 70 40 45 44 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Tarek Abu Hamzy, tarekah@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: (966) 1 419 40 61, Ghassan A. Rbeiz, ghassan@ mediaquestcorp.com, Fax: (966) 1 419 41 32, P.O.Box: 14303, Riyadh 11424, Europe S.C.C Arabies, 18, rue de Varize, 75016 Paris, France, Tel: (33) 01 47 664600, Fax: (33) 01 43 807362, Lebanon MEDIALEADER Beirut, Lebanon, Tel: (961) 1 202 369, Fax: (961) 1 202 369 WEBSITE www.communicatelevant.com.lb

NOVEMBER 2011 | REGIONAL NEWS

New telecom campaign for prepaid cards

Beirut. After a previous outdoor campaign where it had announced cutting prepaid card and fixed line charges by 36 percent, Lebanon’s Ministry of Telecommunications (MoT) has carried out one of its advertising works in-house for a second time, promoting three new prepaid cards that have just been launched by the country’s telecom operators Alfa and MTC Touch. “Some agencies pitched for this, but our internal pitch was more convenient budget wise and answered the brief,”

says Sabella Bassil, marketing and advertising advisor to Telecommunications minister Nicolas Sehnaoui. This latest effort has been handled by independent director Pierre Salloum. The campaign includes four TVCs, the first of which was released on October 6, and revolves around the theme of choice for Lebanese mobile users. “Prepaid cards [all] had the same options before, but with different sizes. People before were restricted to recharging their phones, either with

less credit or more credit than they wanted,” explains Bassil. Therefore, the first three TVCs feature everyday scenarios where Lebanese customers are faced with a limited amount of choices – a character trying to sell them products that are not fit for their needs. “We would have loved [musician] Ziad El-Rahbani to play the salesman. But we were happy to get the rights to use his song,” adds Bassil. The latest TVC, called “Positive,” is yet to be released.

 I AGENCIES Memac Ogilvy organizes “Red Arrow” training Beirut. Regional agency Memac Ogilvy recently organized a two-day “Red Arrow” training seminar in Dubai attended by staff across the network’s 13 offices. The Red Arrow sessions aimed at helping attendees identify and discuss the communication styles of clients and colleagues, as well as understanding their own communication style through their thinking and behavior preferences. The seminar sessions were headed by Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Asia Pacific senior staff, regional director Daniel Ch’ng and training and development and regional executive advisor Doug Buemi. Developed by Memac Ogilvy worldwide, Red Arrow 2.0 management, relationship and leadership training is an international training program for account managers and staff that deal directly with clients. On a separate note, Memac Ogilvy’s Beirut office recently announced its sponsorship of TEDxBeirut (see page 8).  I MARKETING TagBrands gives Hello Kitty mature makeover

I DIGITAL Cleartag gets awarded for Web work Beirut. Digital branding company Cleartag brought home four awards at the Web Marketing Association’s 15th edition of its WebAward competition, where international experts review websites for more than 96 industries. Cleartag was awarded for “Best Real Estate website” for residential tower Beirut Terraces, “Outstanding website” for the traffic air pollution project Drive for Change, “Restaurant standard of excellence” for the Eight restaurant website, and “Other standard of excellence” for the Scoopcity website. Cleartag recently launched, in collaboration with Banque Du Liban and entrepreneurs.com, a central online platform where entrepreneurs can connect and collaborate with each other, as well as with investors and financial institutions, profile and develop their business ideas, and find information on support organizations and local and regional entrepreneurship-focused events.

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Beirut. Beirut-based branding and design consultancy TagBrands was the agency chosen for the brand identity of Pynkiss, Japanese brand Hello Kitty’s newest “grown-up” fashion label, which made its official debut at the Milan Fashion Week 2011 in October. TagBrands aims at positioning Pynkiss as a high-end fashion brand that would appeal to a sophisticated and mature audience. Pynkiss’s brand logo incorporates the Hello Kitty icon, using soft shades of lavender as the new brand’s signature color. “It made everyone in the TagBrands team proud to see a brand identity we had developed receive such global appreciation,” said Raya Nawbar, managing director at TagBrands. Arab Bank honored at IMF and IIF meetings Amman. Jordan-based Arab Bank was honored with seven awards from the

NOVEMBER 2011 | REGIONAL NEWS

TEDxBeirut gathers creative minds

Continued from page 6 international financial publication Global Finance during the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Institute of International Finance (IIF) meetings held in Washington early last month. The awards included “Best Trade Finance Provider in the Middle East, Jordan and Yemen,” “Best Emerging Market Bank in Jordan and Yemen,” “Best Foreign Exchange Provider,” and “Best Investment Bank in Jordan.” Winners were picked on the basis of qualitative and quantitative criteria, in addition to input from industry analysts, corporate executives and banking consultants. Grohe goes green

Mkalles. Lebanon hosted its first TEDx conference this month. TED [Technology, Entertainment and Design] is a nonprofit organization for “ideas worth spreading,” It was started in 1984 in California as a four-day annual conference where the world’s leading thinkers in these three industries, such as Bill Gates, Al Gore and Richard Branson, shared their thoughts for 18 minutes each in what came to be known as “TEDTalks”. TED has since developed TEDx, independently organized conferences using both the TED name and format, to help spread great ideas and innovative concepts. TEDxBeirut was held on September 24 at Berytech’s “Technologi I MARKETING Edutainment venue KidzMania launched Beirut. In an event held at Beirut’s Waterfront on September 29, edutainement venue KidzMania was launched in the presence of 600 guests. Designed like a micro-city, the KidzMania space allows children to assume their desired professions as adults through an interactive and educational role-playing approach.

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cal Pole” under the theme “From limitation to inspiration.” The full-day conference was licensed and curated by media independent worker Patricia Zougheib, and co-curated by The Vegan Design Studio’s founder William Choukeir. Zougheib had already organized several other smaller-scale salon events, including screenings of TEDTalks, since she had obtained the official TEDxSKE (Spreading Knowledge and Entertainment) license in 2009, in order to prepare the Lebanese crowd for the full-fledged TEDxBeirut event, which ended up attracting more than 600 attendees. It featured 19 speakers from the Middle East and abroad, including general director of the MBC TV Group Ali Jaber,

and Michael Kouly, the president of the Cambridge Institute for Global Leadership. The event also boasted an Idea Lab, where audience members had their ideas developed and presented, wall-to-wall projections, and live blogging and Tweeting spaces. Lebanese animator David Habchy also showcased his work. The conference was described by organizers as a “zero-waste” event, where all solid waste generated by its activities was recycled via compostable and recyclable waste disposal stations. The zero-waste initiative was courtesy of Cedar Environment, an environmental and industrial engineering organization.

Damascus. As part of its “Green Mosque” initiative, launched in the Middle East back in 2009, and in coordination with the Syrian Ministry of Waqf, sanitary fittings supplier Grohe replaced 50 mixers in the Great Umayyad Mosque – one of the largest and oldest mosques in the world – with self-closing taps. The new mixers will minimize water waste during ablution, a move aligned with Grohe’s WaterCare campaign, which seeks to increase public awareness about water conservation techniques. Five water meters were also installed inside the mosque to monitor the water usage for a period of one month. The Green Mosque initiative will be rolled out in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Linteo wine launches in Lebanon Jbeil. In an open-air reception held on September 9, Italian entrepreneur Enrico Baltrimini and distribution firm Khalil Fattal & Sons launched Linteo, the newest addition to Lebanon’s wine market. BLF launches Earth card Beirut. In partnership with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Mastercard, Banque Libano-Française has launched its Earth card product, an innovative payment card made of eco-friendly material. The launch took place at the Beirut Energy forum, which was

NOVEMBER 2011 | REGIONAL NEWS

First Beirut Creative Social event

Continued from page 8

held on September 29 at Habtoor Grand Hotel. In line with the bank’s green strategy, a percentage of profits from customer purchases through the Earth card will be transferred to the funding of environmental projects in Lebanon, under the supervision of the UNDP. BLF has also been expanding throughout the Lebanese territory, adding seven branches to its network since the beginning of 2011.  I ADVERTISING Beirut. On November 16, 17 and 18, approximately 40 of the world’s leading creative minds and digital entrepreneurs will gather for Lebanon’s first Creative Social event, the newest meeting of minds to hit the town. Creative Social is a “progressive, global, creative collective turned on by technology, culture and collaboration,” founded in 2004 by Daniele Fiandaca from digital communication agency Profero, and Mark Chalmers from ad agency Strawberry Frog. Creative directors and business owners meet twice a year for the event, each time in a different city. So far, Creative Social events have been held in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Sao Paolo and Stockholm. Thanks to Barry Brand, head of art and creative development at M&C Saatchi Middle East and North Africa, which is sponsoring the event, Beirut will now be added to the list. Brand, who will also be among the first-day speakers, convinced the Creative Social founders to hold the event in Beirut after he attended it in Montreal in March 2011. “It’s a hotbed of creativity, Beirut, and I find it much more soulful [than other hubs in the region],” Brand says. With an audience of around 600 people, the first day of the Beirut event will feature public speeches by eight business owners and creative

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Tenth Night of the Ad Eaters directors from all over the world, including the founders of Creative Social, Tom Sacchi, founding partner at unit 9 London, Fernanda Romano, global creative director of digital and experiential at Euro RSCG London, Graham Fink, chief creative officer at Ogilvy and Mather China, among others. The second day of the event will be a “behind closed doors” panel discussion, where 30 participants will discuss, debate and collaborate, along with six creative minds based in Lebanon. “Normally it’s two days where 35 to 40 of the world’s leading creative people get together. They sit for two days, and invite people from the local city who are doing interesting, creative, cutting-edge work. “I thought it would be great for Beirut to have it here. But I don’t think you can have that kind of event without giving something back,” Brand says. Participants that have confirmed for the second day session include the Lebanese Web series Shankaboot’s production team, American music journalist and filmmaker Jackson Allers , the Beirut Groove Collective (an effort aimed at documenting, promoting and preserving African and African-influenced musical traditions), Lebanese blogger Nasri Atallah, and Lebanese photographer Roger Moukarzel. Filmmaker Nadine Labaki and Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury are yet to confirm their attendance.

Beirut. On November 5 and 6, Lebanon’s Palais de l’Unesco will host the 10th edition of the Night of the Ad Eaters, an international event that features advertising work on the big screen from more than 60 countries worldwide. Created and produced by Frenchman Jean-Marie Bouriscot in 1981, the event is held in more than 160 cities worldwide every year. It has been held in Lebanon since 2002. “We’ve been sold out every year since,” says organizer Tarek-Gabriel Sikias, adding that around 2,500 people attend the show each year.

The conference drew an audience of more than 600 digital entrepreneurs and global players. The conference program featured an Ideathon (a series of rapid-fire, back-to-back, two-minute idea presentations) and a Startup Demo (five-minute product pitches for startups), and competitions for Egyptian entrepreneurs and digital startups. The participants pitched their ideas before foreign investors, business leaders and multinational executives. TIEC will be sponsoring 60 of these entrepreneurs. The conference also included discussion panels and specialized workshops that covered social commerce, mobile apps, locationbased services, e-commerce, social media, gaming, and so on. Né. à Beyrouth puts Lebanese Film Festival on iTunes Beirut. Production house Né. à Beyrouth has put up an app for the Lebanese Film Festival on the iTunes store. The app contains five short Lebanese films: Dans le sang by Katia Jarjoura, Notre Dame des Seins by André Chammas, La Cassette by Marc Sayegh Demain, 6h30 by Gilles Tarazi and Non Métrage Libanais, a film that had been banned from distribution in Lebanon. This is the first time Lebanese short films have been distributed through iTunes.  I PR

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Bobolink PR agency announces social awareness campaign Beirut. In a press conference held at Le Grey Hotel in Beirut on October 31, Beirut-based social media and online PR company BoboLink announced a social awareness campaign targeting Arab women. Three celebrity makeup artists – Bassam Fattouh, Hala Ajam and Fady Kataya – joined efforts for the launch of the campaign. “It [the campaign] aims at raising awareness on the abuse of plastic surgery and loss of cultural identity in the Middle East,” says founder of Bobolink, Labib El-Choufani.

ArabNet holds digital conference in Cairo Cairo. In a collaborative effort between Egypt’s Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center (TIEC) and Lebanese event organizer International Business Alliance Group (IBAG), Beirut-based digital conference Arabnet held its first twoday digital event on October 19 and 20 in Cairo.

On the move Marwan Ghanem, deputy general manager at Universal Media, has left his position; no information is available yet as to who will replace him or where he will go. Tracy El-Khazen has joined production house The Talkies as marketing coordinator, taking over from Joanne Keyrouz; no word on where Keyrouz will be moving to.

REGIONAL NEWS | NOVEMBER 2011

Elephant Cairo grows

 I AGENCIES

Agency secures investor and contracts with four big spenders in Egypt

Cairo. Elephant Cairo, the Egypt-based independent creative agency behind the notorious Panda Cheese commercials, is expanding its base. “We’ve finally secured enough contracts to turn Elephant from a two-man boutique to an 18-people agency, while still staying independent, and avoiding any mergers with the big network agencies,” says Ali Ali, co-founder and executive creative director. The independent shop has attracted investment from an Egyptian investment banker (Ali won’t say who) and has won contracts with four of the biggest spenders in Egypt, he says. The names of the clients are confidential too, but they are from the telecommunication, beverage, banking and real estate sectors, he adds. As part of its expansion, the agency will be moving to a bigger office in Egypt and will be opening an office in Dubai Media City early next year. A managing director will be appointed for the Dubai office which will house a team of five relationship managers. However, the creative “kitchen” will remain in Egypt, says Ali, and so will

he, where he will be sticking to his title as executive creative director. Elephant is also acquiring a small digital agency to create Elephant Digital. “You cannot have an idea today without digital legs,” says Ali. Elephant – founded by Ali and Maged Nassar – had been approached by network agencies regarding a merger, but none of the deals worked out. “[After] the first Dubai Lynx, we were approached by two big network agencies, and then after our last Dubai Lynx, where we won two Grands Prix, we pretty much had calls from all of them – maybe all but one. And we sat with them all,” says Ali. “2010 was like a year of meetings with all the big network agencies. We sat and discussed whether to merge our offices with their Cairo office or restart the Cairo office, whether we keep the ‘Elephant’ name or [remove it], etcetera.” “Some agencies were suggesting we completely [remove] the name, which we were against, because we feel Elephant has developed kind of a nice brand and we want to keep that going.

So that was one of our first objections to the deals that wanted to either kill the name or maybe have the name come after the network name, not before. We always wanted the name to stay, and we want our business cards to always say Elephant.” In other situations, the corporate philosophies of big network agencies didn’t click with Elephant. “We still want to remain a creative agency first and foremost. We’re not a client servicing agency and we’re not driven by account people – we are driven by creative people,” he says. “So sometimes it was a difference in philosophy, and sometimes it was a financial disagreement.” Many of the employees Elephant has recruited were working at big network agencies. Ali and Nassar have mainly hired people they have worked with before, and many of them are joining the agency with a 20 percent salary cut, says Ali. “I think [they’ve agreed to a lower salary] because they believe in the place and want to be working at a cooler, younger place. I think there is

an awful lot to learn there,” he adds.

Eric Hanna appointed CEO of Grey Group MENA London. David Patton, president and CEO of Grey Group Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), announced the appointment of Eric Hanna as CEO of Grey Group Middle East and Africa (MENA), effective mid-November. Hanna will be headquartered in Dubai, UAE. He succeeds Philippe Skaff who has decided to leave the company, a press statement reads. For the past two years, Hanna has worked as CEO of Mediacom MENA, a GroupM company, where he was the architect of the current Mediacom network in the region. He previously spent a decade at Grey serving in a number of key Middle East management roles. Ghassan Kassabji appointed MD of TBWA\Raad Dubai Dubai. TBWA\Raad has announced the appointment of Ghassan Kassabji as managing director of its Dubai agency after completing a transition period. Kassabji was previously managing director of TBWA\ Raad Saudi Arabia for five years, according to a press statement. Prior to his Saudi assignment, Kassabji worked as client services director and regional director for the Nissan Middle East business for four years at TBWA\Raad in Dubai. In 2006 he was promoted to managing director of TBWA’s operations in Saudi Arabia. TMH wins International Creativity Award

Dubai. TMH has been presented with a Creativity International award for the “Mohawk Desktop Swatch Book Set” at the Creativity International Awards, which recognizes graphic designers, advertising agencies and marketers all over the world. Its design was chosen from a host of international nominees in the Single Unit Print Collateral category.

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NOVEMBER 2011 | REGIONAL NEWS

PublicisLive sets up Abu Dhabi office

I MEDIA OMD retains du account Dubai. OMD, the global communications planning network of the Omnicom Media Group, has retained telco company du’s media account. The agency was first appointed in 2006, and after a four-way review in April this year, which included Mediavest, Mindshare and MEC, won the pitch again. Hala Badri, executive vice-president of brand & communications at du, says, “Despite the rigorous multi-agency evaluation process, OMD’s team’s demonstration of their sharp understanding of our business and quality of team really stood out.”  I PR

Abu Dhabi. PublicisLive, the Geneva-based event arm of Publicis Groupe, has opened an office in Abu Dhabi to serve as its hub for expanded operations throughout the Gulf and the Middle East. The emirate is PublicisLive’s third global hub after Geneva and Paris, according to a press statement. The office, based in Abu Dhabi’s twofour54 media zone, is managed by Matthieu Daurces, PublicisLive’s

event manager. Daurces and his team are responsible for events such as the Abu Dhabi Media Summit, an annual gathering of players in old and new media and the Internet. PublicisLive also hosted the Summit on the Global Agenda in Abu Dhabi in October for long-time partner the World Economic Forum, for whom PublicisLive produces the annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the statement adds.

John Rossant, executive chairman of PublicisLive, says, “We are very excited about setting up a shop in the UAE and Abu Dhabi….We have always wanted to be present on the ground in the Gulf so that we can respond quickly to the growing needs of clients in the region for high-level, world-class events. Abu Dhabi makes the most sense for us thanks to its forward policies, openness, and the ease of doing business.”

 I AGENCIES

opportunities for not only Leo Burnett, but for our clients and their brands to grow as well.” Traboulsi has been working with the Leo Burnett Group for the past 22 years, most recently as deputy managing director. He says, “We have to take into consideration that this is a new age of communications, in which we must constantly drive results to the requirements of clients and to think in a manner that is triggered by continual changes that affect our industry. I am confident we have both the ability and the talent to continue to affect the advertising world in the most meaningful way.”

Kamal Dimachkie and Jean Traboulsi promoted at Leo Burnett

Dubai. Leo Burnett’s Kamal Dimachkie has been promoted to executive regional managing director, in charge of the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and the Lower Gulf region. The position of managing director has been taken over by Jean Traboulsi, who will continue to report to Dimachkie. Dimachkie, who has been working in the role of managing director since 2001, says, “I will be focusing my attentions on the specific areas in which we can bring even greater value to our clients, creating regional

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Asda’a named MEA agency of the year Abu Dhabi. PR consultancy Asda’a Burson-Marsteller was named Middle East and Africa Agency of the Year at the International Business Awards, which took place in Abu Dhabi in October. The agency was also presented with the International Campaign of the Year – Multicultural award for its work on behalf of the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), while the Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey was commended in the Global Issues category, a press statement reads. According to award organizers, more than 3,000 submissions were received from firms and individuals in more than 50 countries, it adds. Wild Planet Productions wins Active PR service Dubai. Active Public Relations & Marketing Communications Consultancy (Active PR) has declared Wild Planet Productions, a natural history production company, as the winner of its Entrepreneur Loudspeaker Competition 2011. The competition was launched in June to give regional start-ups a chance to win $20,000 worth of PR consultancy by Active PR, by presenting a pitch for their business in a two-minute video. According to Sawsan Ghanem, managing partner of Active PR, the agency will support Wild Planet Productions in a three-month PR campaign.  I DIGITAL GoNabit officially rebrands to LivingSocial Dubai. Local group-buying website GoNabit has been rebranded to LivingSocial Middle East, following its

NOVEMBER 2011 | REGIONAL NEWS

MediaCom hires Nick Barron as MENA CEO

Dubai. Nick Barron has been named the new CEO of MediaCom in the Middle East and North Africa. While based in Dubai, Barron will lead the agency’s operations in the UAE, KSA, Lebanon and Morocco, which currently employ more than 100 people. He will report directly to Nick Lawson, chief executive of MediaCom EMEA, and Roy Haddad, chairman of MediaCom MENA, and the MENA board, which he will also sit on. Barron was previously CEO of Me-

diaCom Russia, Ukraine and CIS and has replaced Eric Hanna, who is returning to Grey Group MENA as chief executive after overseeing the 2010 merger between MediaCom and sister WPP agency Media Insight. Barron’s brief is to expand the footprint of the network across the region, initially in Qatar and Egypt. Lawson says, “The MENA region has continued to show real resilience and its increasing importance in the global economy is demonstrated by our commitment to building a centre

of excellence in the region. Nick’s time in Russia has given him extensive experience of developing MediaCom’s offering and I’m confident that both our current clients and future prospects will be impressed as we expand our capabilities across the region.” Barron has spent 27 years in the media and communications business, working at JWT, OMD, and as a consultant dealing with sports rights, interactive TV and mobile. He has also worked as head of MediaCom’s Russian operation.  I DIGITAL Tiger Translate comes to Dubai Dubai. Global art, design and music showcase Tiger Translate will be held in the Middle East for the first time on Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011. The event is coming to Dubai for workshops and collaborations between Thai and local artists and designers at a venue yet to be announced, a press statement reads. International and local digital artists will create ideas and designs under the theme “Universe”, in the context of modern Asia and the Gulf region. All artists will be involved in a collaborative cross-border design exchange called “Ping Pong” in the run up to the event, where a work of digital art will be passed back and forth between the artist pairings to produce a unique piece of Tiger Translate digital art, with finishing touches to be made live during November’s event, the statement adds. Other activities include a photographybased creative process, live music, and a chance for guests to create their own art.

14 I Communicate Levant

Continued from page 12 acquisition in June 2011. The rebranding requires existing GoNabit members to create a LivingSocial account in order to purchase daily deals. As part of the new platform, LivingSocial members will also be able to buy and redeem vouchers via a mobile application that has been launched, as well as view unexpired vouchers in their area. Moreover, they can access more than 600 daily deal markets in 25 countries around the world with their account. Wordy to relaunches website Dubai. Wordy, an online platform offering sub-editing services, will be relaunching its website, www.wordy. com, and is extending its services to the Middle East, says Lars Nielsen, sales manager at Wordy and a former owner of AMEinfo.com “Given that Klaus Lovgreen and I (AMEInfo.com owners for 12 years) know the region very well, and having experienced first-hand the editorial market and how often we and others get published content wrong, it is a natural place to introduce Wordy, we feel,” he says. “Our starting point has been Dubai and the UAE, given we have our network primarily there, but through these networks we are spreading our wings into the GCC and beyond. We will, to a large extent, be relying on partnerships and affiliates to help penetrate most of these surrounding countries as our manpower and resources are quite limited,” he adds. Wordy.com is run by CEO Anders Schepelern.  I FILM Image Nation rebrands and restructures Abu Dhabi. Image Nation Abu Dhabi has unveiled a new company structure and has rebranded to Image Nation. The company has created two distinct divisions to better align its core objectives: Image Nation Abu Dhabi and Image Nation International. “Our new company structure reflects Image Nation’s mission to build the foundations of a strong local film industry in the UAE,” says Mohammed Al Mubarak, chairman of Image Nation. “Both our local and international activities contribute to the local industry; we are developing projects and talent within the UAE, while supporting them through vital international partnerships and investments.”

NOVEMBER 2011 | INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Yahoo partners with ABC News International digital media company Yahoo has partnered with ABC News to share and create news and information online. The announcement was made by Ross Levinson,executive vicepresident of Americas at Yahoo, and Ben Sherwood, president of ABC News, at a press conference held at New York’s Times Square Studios during Advertising Week. As part of the strategic alliance, ABC News’ content will be available on the Yahoo network, and the editorial teams from both entities will work together to develop online news content. The networks also announced the launch of GoodMorningAmerica.com, which is now available on Yahoo, and three new online video series: Newsmakers, Around the World with Christiane Amanpour, and This Could Be Big.  I PR McDonald’s to launch in-store TV

McDonald’s is introducing a TV network in its restaurants that will include content from Mark Burnett and BBC America, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The fast-food chain will introduce the channel over the next few months to 800 restaurants in Southern California and Central California, where customers will watch on two 42-inch HDTVs visible from 70 percent of seats, the Times says. “Quiet zones” will also be available. Ketchum wins Gillette PR business Procter & Gamble has selected Omnicom’s Ketchum as its global and North America external relations agency of record for Gillette. The account had been handled by Omnicom sister agency Porter Novelli for approximately 20 years. “We believe the depth and breadth of Ketchum’s global expertise, combined with an innovative, creative client-engagement model, will help accelerate the growth of the brand,” says Damon Jones, director of global external relations for P&G Shave Care.

16 I Communicate Levant

Additional programs will debut this year and next. “Each and every day more than 25 million people are going to Yahoo News, and with the combined breadth and depth of experience and talent at ABC we think we can revolutionize the online and digital news landscape,” Levinson says. According to him, Yahoo News and ABC News now reach a combined “Porter Novelli remains a valued and trusted partner and will continue to support Gillette’s regional business units and other P&G brands in multiple countries around the world.” The agency will work closely with Omnicom creative shop BBDO, which serves as the lead agency on the Gillette brand, adhering to P&G’s brand agency leader structure. Within this structure, social-media duties for Gillette are handled by its PR firm in the US. Losing this $4 million to $6 million business doesn’t bode well for Porter Novelli, which has lost at least 20 executives over the past few months.

 I RESEARCH Ipsos competes acquisition of Synovate Ipsos has announced that it has successfully completed the acquisition of the Synovate business for an enterprise value of £525 million ($842 million). Following this transaction, Ipsos becomes the third largest global market research company, reads a statement. The acquisition was first announced on July 27, and was conditional upon various approvals, which have been obtained since then: The transaction was approved by Aegis’ ordinary shareholders on August 16 and obtained the mandatory antitrust clearances after that.

audience of more than 100 million in the US. Sherwood adds, “The purpose of this relationship, very simply, is to win the championship of news and information in the future.” He adds that Yahoo and ABC want the deal to be more than a content licensing relationship. “We already do something like that with Yahoo,” he says. “We provide around 20 or 25 percent of the video streams to Yahoo news right now. We really wanted to do something – to use a phrase of Mickey Rosen [senior vice-president of Yahoo Media Network] – truly transforming; to change the entire experience and the way people get their news and information online, and the people they get it from.” They seek to do this by leveraging Yahoo’s reach and technology and ABC’s journalism.

Levinson says that currently there aren’t any plans to introduce the model in other markets. “I think in the right circumstances we’ll look at other categories, but right now I think we have to make this one work very well.” He adds that the ABC and Yahoo news content will be available on multiple platforms, pointing toward the imminent launch of publishing platform, Livestand. “This is as much a mobile deal as it is a PC deal,” he says. On the second day of Advertising Week, Yahoo also launched a line-up of original online shows featuring Hollywood talent, in addition to the Beta version of Yahoo Screen, an online destination that hosts video content from Yahoo and other content partners such as ABC News, Hulu, and CBS.

 I OUTDOOR

the majority of the business, declined to comment. The global budget will likely exceed $86 million, which is what the company spent on US measured media in 2010, according to Kantar.

JCDecaux wins 2011 Autonomy Prize Outdoor advertising company JCDecaux SA has been awarded the “2011 Autonomy Prize” by the Paris branch of the Association des Paralysés de France (APF). The award recognizes the development of universal access automated public toilets, designed by Patrick Jouin for the city of Paris. The toilet was created specifically for the Paris authorities following their 2007 decision to provide the French capital with 400 universal access automated toilets.

Saatchi wins Kraft’s Trident global account

 I AGENCIES MEC wins Marriot’s media account Marriott has selected WPP’s MEC as its new global AOR for media buying and planning, following a competitive review to consolidate global accounts. The selection includes a one-year contract with the option to renew. Incumbents, including Aegis’ Carat (US), Publicis Groupe’s Starcom (Latin America), Publicis Groupe’s ZenithOptimedia (Asia Pacific) and MEC (EMEA), which earlier this summer began working with the brand on a project basis, were invited to participate in the review. At the end, it came down to MEC and ZenithOptimedia. Carat, which had

Saatchi & Saatchi has snagged creative advertising duties for Kraft Food’s gum brand, Trident, after a global review. The Publicis Groupe agency beat independent Wieden & Kennedy and Omnicom Group’s TBWA in the final round. Kraft pulled Trident from WPP’s JWT in July, saying at the time it wanted to bring “fresh thinking” to the brand. The food giant’s gum business has underperformed globally, and correcting that trend seems to be a particular focus of CEO Irene Rosenfeld, who indicated at an investor conference in early September that the key is boosting sales in more mature markets such as the US.

NOVEMBER 2011 | OPINION

The Communiquestion

Kiss them goodbye

We ask the industry: What’s the best way to lose a client? EDWARD BARSOUM Trade director, Vertical Media Services Acting as Yes people, serving the client rather than the brand, and reacting versus being proactive. FRIDA CHEHLAOUI Founder, Colorblind Agreeing blindly with everything he thinks he needs. DAVID PORTER Media director, Unilever MENA The easiest way? Talk about your own business more than that of the client. The best way? When your brilliant marketing means that global demand for their product or service is so utterly satiated that they decide to close the business as it no longer has any purpose. TONY ORSTEN CEO, twofour54 Tell them August [in the UAE] is rather mild and a brisk walk on the [Abu Dhabi] corniche at lunchtime is refreshing. FADI CHAMAT General manager, PHD Abu Dhabi Lose his trust. Transparency is the most important thing that holds the agency-client relationship; trust that the agency is giving the best rates, service, skills, people, etcetera. Once lost, trust is extremely hard to earn back.

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HUBERT BOULOS Head of strategic planning, JWT I don’t know. It has never happened to me. (Just kidding.) RONALD HOWES Regional managing director, GCC, Memac Ogilvy There is no best way to lose a client, but rather many ways to keep him. ADRIANA LEBBOS Account director, RPR Like any relationship, the client/agency relationship has its ups and downs. So here too, communication is key. Failing to communicate is without question the main reason agencies lose clients. Of course, there is no crime in making a mistake – we are all human. It’s how you handle that mistake that proves your worth. Second, you have to be available and discern how often a client wants to hear from you. Some want regular updates; others don’t. Each client wants to be treated like he or she is your most valued. When you are speaking with someone about work in progress, never act overwhelmed (even if you are) or indicate how busy you are with work for other clients. If your clients think you are currently servicing them at your full capacity, they will not ask you to do more. Another reason would be to overpromise and under deliver. Not for any major mishap, but more for consistently average work, laziness, lack of creativity, lack of results, etcetera. And obviously this scenario

NOVEMBER 2011 | OPINION

is quite subjective – you may not necessarily agree with your client on this one; in fact PRs rarely do. This is pretty much like the endless PR-versusmedia battle. YVES-MICHEL GABAY General manager, MEC MENA To not listen [to] what he or she is expecting. ROY BARGHOUT Senior manager – digital exchange, Mindshare UAE Keep telling them that the competition is spending more than them. MARWAN QUTUB CEO and co-founder, 3Points Advertising Either by not challenging his thoughts at all or by not knowing when to stop challenging him. MICHEL BORT Client relationship director, Kassab Media Take him for granted (regardless of the size), [and] bad service and follow-up. RAMI TRABOULSI CEO and co-founder, Joe Fish In my opinion, the best way to lose a client is by not taking him seriously. This can be by not responding to his requests, not looking presentable, or even bait and switch. No one likes to be treated this way. NASSIB BOUEIRI CEO, Y&R & Wunderman Challenge them. Or ask them to pay the fees that the agency is worthy of. JOELLE JAMMAL Managing director, Leo Burnett Jordan Say yes to everything they ask you for.

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MOHAMMED TAYEM Managing director, Entourage The human way: rudeness. The professional way: indifference. The basic way: zero understanding of your client’s products and services, needs and aspirations. Business relationships cannot start without common courtesies that we often take for granted. How about being proactive? What do you expect the client to think about you if you are not doing the same? Finally, unless you spend time and effort to understand client business, you’re in no-man’s land. No pain, no gain. AZHAR SIDIQUI General manager, Magna Global Underestimate the importance of the small issues. MOUNIR HARFOUCHE CEO, Lowe MENA You lose yourself. YOANN EL JAOUHARI Managing director, JC Decaux Dubai & Northern Emirates Not listening to him, or thinking you already know what he wants – which sometimes means exactly the same thing. HERMANN BEHRENS CEO, The Brand Union Middle East Drink too much and tell them their product is crap. Make them feel unimportant, like you don’t care. SAWSAN GHANEM Managing director, Active PR The best way to lose a client is, first and foremost, through a lack of a thorough understanding of who they are, their business objectives and what they want to achieve with their communication campaigns. This, combined with little or no creativity and not achieving the agreed results, and failing to manage a client’s expectations, usually does the trick.

NOVEMBER 2011 | COVER STORY

22 I Communicate Levant

COVER STORY | NOVEMBER 2011

Showdown on set

In a crisis environment, how long will Lebanon’s production industry be able to cope with its overpriced, demanding, but not always qualified talent pool? by Vanessa Khalil

ebanon’s production industry was always about its home-grown talent. And in a liberal market, Lebanese production houses rely heavily on freelancers. That used to work just fine, until the business environment started to become increasingly difficult, translating into a not so dormant talent crisis. Today, not only do production houses have a hard time answering their talent’s needs, but it even seems that freelancers have become a burden to market players. TOO FEW, TOO EXPENSIVE. In the face of the local political stalemate, regional unrest and global economic impasse, the country’s production players are not sugarcoating their shrinking market pie. In fact, “Business is very, very bad,” according to Youssef Ayoub, general manager and chairman at production house Intaj; and much to his and others’ dismay, little can be done to control the situation. Worse, against all

common sense, “People are not realizing that we are in crisis and if we continue this way we’re going to lose business because of our prices. We’re looking for a solution and we will find it. And we are going to be very aggressive about it,” says Paul Sabbagh, managing director at production house Wonderful Productions. According to Michele Tyan, co-founder and manager at boutique production firm Djinn House, it was the fact many companies used foreign talent that had distorted market prices some while ago. Agencies would ask for foreign directors of photography, and sell and overprice the projects on that basis. “Then [production houses] turned their attention to Lebanese talent. So, instead of a foreigner charging $10,000, a Lebanese would charge $7,000 and save per diem costs and travel expenses [for the client],” she says. However, Lamys Haddad, owner and executive producer at production house Cherry Films, says even Lebanese directors, who – for example – used to get paid $4,000 per shooting

day, are now getting $7,000, and such irrational prices might cost Lebanon its only advantage over other burgeoning production hubs in the region: relatively affordable and competent talent. “Now that they are overcharging, the hub might move from Lebanon to elsewhere,” she says. The situation got so much out of hand that the Association for Lebanese Commercials Producers (ALCP) recently met to address freelancers’ overpriced services and unwillingness to negotiate their fees, to no avail so far. According to Gabriel Chamoun, CEO of production house The Talkies, the market dictates the freelance prices, but it will be some time before the on-demand workers feel the heat of the industry’s financial squeeze. “What happens is that with supply and demand, the reaction is not very fast. Some director may raise his price, and get business when all the others are busy. But it’s the long run that determines if the price is correct or not,” Chamoun says.

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NOVEMBER 2011 | COVER STORY

Film

15A

YOUSSEF AYOUB. General manager and chairman at production house Intaj

GABRIEL CHAMOUN. CEO of production house The Talkies

LAMYS HADDAD. Owner and executive producer at production house Cherry Films

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16 FULL-TIME HEADACHE. Production companies are reluctant to lose money and clients because of overpriced services; they will either resort to cheaper foreign services or pay the price of investing in long-term talent. Obviously, one way out of this predicament would indeed be for production houses to hire staff on a full-time basis, instead of using freelancers. Sabbagh, for example, is a firm believer in full-timers. “Some [production houses] prefer not to go into overheads so they prefer to hire freelancers on each job. But clients get used to full-timers,” he says, adding that cross-function exposure (where employees do more than one job) is a set-up that only a full-timer can benefit from, even though, according to Chamoun, the burnout that occurs on the job in production makes it hard to stick around at one company, “with very few people [who] can last more than 10 years in this field,” he says. However, the effort should go both ways, as freelancers will also need incentives to let go of the extra fast cash and commit to one company. What company owners need to realize, says Sabbagh, is that the family-owned business model no longer works, and new talent should be allowed to become part of the company’s management. “That’s why people are not motivated to join companies; they want to freelance. Why would I let go of someone who is making me money for the sake of 5 or 10 percent in the company? They might set up in unlawful competition, and take business from me,” he says. On a more immediate front, the ALCP has also put in action rules to protect crew rights to overtime pay, as work conditions most probably are part of the factors deterring freelancers from joining a company on a full-time basis. “We have established the overtime rules and

16A

all members of the ALCP respect them and pay overtime, but there are much more production houses that are not members of the ALCP and who can break the rules easily. Crew members should know who to work for,” says Rafic Tamba, owner and executive producer at production house VIP Films, and president of the ALCP. BETTER, CHEAPER TALENT. In the meantime, Lebanese production companies are looking for solutions abroad. “I’m telling you what’s going to happen very soon, if the crisis persists in Europe and wherever: We’re going to start bringing in, at the same price, professional foreign people to work here,” says Sabbagh. Indeed, many production houses have already started outsourcing a big chunk of their work to foreigners. Tamba, for example, has to hire from other countries, he says, as it is quite rare to find Lebanese interested in being employed full time. Djinn House recently worked with a Serbian 3D animation house on a corporate 3D film to be released in Saudi Arabia. “It’s much cheaper; they are very professional, very humble and we don’t even speak the same language. Usually I wouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t take the risk with 3D. [Lebanon’s] prices are out of this world, with talent that isn’t,” she says. Likewise, Ayoub says VTR [the all-digital post-production sister company of Intaj] promotes “world-class” talent coming from Europe to clients, because local freelancers are not as exposed to the level of professionalism as foreigners are. “The problems arise when we hire freelance producers. They don’t know how to do a quotation; they always refer back to the director with questions about the number of shooting days. For

COVER STORY | NOVEMBER 2011

Film

17A

example, they ask the director of photography what we might need in terms of formats, and lighting, while a producer should know exactly how to do all that,” Ayoub says. Add to the mix the fact that, be it on a fulltime or freelance basis, production houses are having a hard time finding talent in the country willing to work its way up the ladder, and the picture becomes complete. “Everyone wants to be a director” has become something of a tagline for Lebanese production, most industry old-timers would agree. While Chamoun understands the appeal of the director title – because “in terms of financials it’s definitely the best position to have. And the fame. When you see a good spot, you ask who directed it, you don’t ask who edited it or who the prop buyer was” – he insists there are many vacancies to be filled by those going into the industry, namely directors of photography, sound designers and post-production technicians. And there’s also a “lack of writers, screen writers, editors, special effect specialists, colorists, artistic talent such as special makeup artists, hair stylists and food stylists. The list goes on,” Tamba adds. EGO ISSUES. Most fresh talent is reluctant to go through all of the stages of production to get to the top; and those who do often do not have the patience to spend enough time at one stage. “They all want to become producers without going through all of the steps. If you want to be a good producer you have to go through everything: sweeping the floors, catering, the whole nine yards,” says Haddad, while Ayoub adds that the boutique companies that are attracting young talent with big titles and big money have also contributed to the distortion of the market.

Film

“Nowadays they all want it big, and they want it fast without any effort. This new generation working on TVCs, they like the prestigious side of it,” says Ayoub, while Sabbagh adds that big titles such as producer and director are not only appealing because they are both financially and professionally rewarding, but also because of the misconception that any other title is not. “Most fresh graduates do not understand that many jobs on set pay well;” he blames the universities for not giving credit to each department in production. But Tyan says it is the students’ mindset that needs to be changed. “Students, they are more aware than they were 20 years ago, yet they are not aware. Their cultural exposure is declining, which is dangerous for someone who is going to work in production,” she says. Still, Pascale Kashouh, creative producer at Sunnyside Up, a new post-production boutique specializing in 2D content creation and branded content, says Lebanon’s young talent can inject some new blood into the industry, and help set new trends. Sunnyside Up’s team comprises six employees, among whom junior animators and illustrators are fresh graduates. “It’s true it’s not easy to find them,” she says. But Kashouh and her team went through unconventional routes to recruit their talent. “We looked up blogs for animation and illustration in Lebanon, and tried to find the people behind the work,” she says, adding: “Our business cards have no job titles to begin with. When we get the brief we all get excited about it, from the head of the company to the junior animator. And we work on the idea and on the concept as a team,” Kashouh says. Could it be that, along with the prices, the industry’s big egos need to deflate?

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MICHELE TYAN. Co-founder and manager, Djinn House

PAUL SABBAGH. Managing director at Wonderful Productions

RAFIC TAMBA. Owner and executive producer at production house VIP Films, and president of the ALCP

Communicate Levant I 25

NOVEMBER 2011 | COVER STORY

Blurred perspectives

Lebanon’s production takes the hit and has a hard time adapting to changing realities by Vanessa Khalil

ebanon’s production industry doesn’t rely on local business, but rather regional ones, to flourish. For example, Paul Sabbagh, managing director at Wonderful Productions, says that approximately 60 or 70 percent of his business turnover and profitability comes from the Middle East, mainly Saudi Arabia and the UAE; and his company is not the only one in Lebanon to function that way. This co-dependency may have spared Lebanese production houses from the worst of the region’s local instability. In 2006, most houses set up shop in the UAE following the July war. But the “Arab Spring” shook the dynamics of the region. “Some productions have come to be shot in the UAE or Beirut, but in general the business has been affected severely during that first quarter [because of the regional political unrest],” says Rafic Tamba, owner of VIP Films and president of the Association of Lebanese Commercials Producers (ALCP). Even Gabriel Chamoun, CEO of production house The Talkies, also admits budgets are tight, saying, “As long as Saudi Arabia is relatively stable politically, I think the market will be fine. We will survive, because countries such as Syria, Yemen and Libya did not exist on the communication map to begin with.”

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“But most agencies don’t expect 2012 to be good, and since most of our business comes from agencies, we can say this forecast more or less applies to production,” he says. Sabbagh adds that the clients’ stock market losses have not only affected their propensity to spend big marketing money, but also reshuffled the allocation of their budgets. “Because in the Arab world they cut the marketing budget first, I would say most of them cut it in half,” he says. These regional budget cuts, along with rising costs for airtime, left little money for production houses in Lebanon; and as the industry’s big boys struggle to keep their heads above water, they must also sail through a transition from film to digital production and post-production. “We are definitely in a changing phase,” says Chamoun. CLASH OF THE TITANS. The scarcity of resources also led to a circle of mistrust between agencies, clients and production houses. Advertisers are interfering with all stages of campaign production; which, as Chamoun puts it, is sometimes very good and sometimes very bad. “Nobody has the guts to say no. We are afraid to say no because we don’t want to lose the agency. The

agency is afraid to say no because it doesn’t want to lose the client. But this fear is not a good environment for creativity,” he says, noting that the result was a compromise in quality of the TVCs produced locally. As clients reach for cheaper solutions, the battle between boutique and big production houses is growing more intense. Once again, the number of production companies in Lebanon jumped from a total of 35 houses last year to approximately 50 this year. Youssef Ayoub, general manager and chairman at production house Intaj, and many other established players in the industry, are neither willing nor happy to share their piece of the pie; and certainly not in times of crisis. “These smaller production companies that are mushrooming in the country are taking away a big chunk of clients. They have no overhead costs. But many are delivering substandard quality work,” says Ayoub, while Tamba says the ALCP is fighting what he calls “the pollution of the market,” trying to convince agencies to work only with “established and serious production houses” to restore quality and respect in the industry. “For the moment there is stagnation in the creation and production sector; [it’s] probably a survival phase,” says Tamba. Chamoun, however, is not worried. “Nobody has the monopoly on entrepreneurship. They [the boutiques] do a good job, they survive. They screw up and they lose their clients,” he says; and Sabbagh is sure they will. “They’re going to be squeezed out automatically. If you’re small you’re going to break. It’s a clash of the Titans,” he says. But Michele Tyan, co-founder and manager of boutique production house Djinn House, doesn’t see it as a battle. “My annual return would probably equal what [the big production houses] charge for one project,” she says. Tyan’s house specializes in post-production services, mainly for documentaries for non-governmental and cultural organizations; and she feels the titans have lost their direction. “Those that are focused on producing commercials are no longer human or sensitive. Some people like the whole glitz and glam of massages, and people getting them coffee. We are communists here,” she jokes. Lamys Haddad, owner and executive producer at production house Cherry films, is probably not a communist. But she does not see why a company like hers would fail to deliver the same or even better quality work than a bigger production house, the people remaining essentially the same. “Suppose I [used to] work at a big company and worked on TVCs from A to Z. What difference would it make between my company and the [big] one I used to work at?” she says. Tyan also argues that aside from lavish editing suites and rooms, equipment and talent are the same everywhere. “Those working in these suites are the same that work for the smaller companies, even maybe less experienced because these companies need to pay less to save on overhead costs,” she says. But for Sabbagh, getting the job and executing it

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BATTLE GROUND. Boutique agencies and big players are clashing over shrinking market shares does not always come down to experience; nor does it solely rely on quality. “Many problems can occur with production; if not backed up by a solid production house, things will fall apart,” he says. OUTSIDE HELP. For now, production companies are looking at ways to make the pie bigger. Those in the industry have been singing the same tune for years: The government should cooperate with local houses to attract foreign producers and projects. The ALCP is currently in talks with the Ministry of Tourism and Ministry of Interior to facilitate visas and shooting permits, but also to promote the relative stability and security of Lebanon vis-à-vis other production hubs in the region. “Would you invest 4 or 5 million in a feature film when you have a conflict in the country? They’re going to Morocco, Jordan. Security is the problem,” says Sabbagh, while Haddad says the government could also help local houses benefit from foreign projects. “In Dubai, if you want to go shoot, you need to go through a production house,” she says. Of course, the government will have to incentivize the local industry first. “The government should have an important role and help in protecting and financing the local talent and the industry, but let’s not dream about things that will not happen,” says Tamba. Now that clients and agencies are pulling the plug on extravagant marketing campaigns, production houses must find solutions to ensure their survival.

NOVEMBER 2011 | COVER STORY

PRODUCTION SALARY AND FREELANCE FEES SURVEY Communicate Levant surveyed the Lebanese production industry to see which position is paid what. We asked companies to give us their figures, then took an average. JOBS PER DEPARTMENT PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT

FULL-TIME

FREELANCE

AVERAGE MONTHLY (USD)

AVERAGE FEE/DAY

AVERAGE FEE/HOUR

Producer

3,116

2,438

500

Assistant producer

1,292

260

115

Executive producer

6,586

Production manager/ supervisor

2,179

731

175

Casting director

1,314

292

175

Unit production manager

1,000

217

First assistant director

436

238

Second assistant director

197

Script supervisor

221

Key production assistant

250

1,738

15,000

1,595

820

Production account ART DEPARTMENT Art director Production designer Key make up person

403

Key hairdresser

262

Costume designer

341

175

Set costumer

190

500

CAMERA DEPARTMENT Director of photography

2,038

Camera operator

506

First assistant cameraperson

336

250

Second assistant cameraperson

217

Production still photographer

2,167

Mixer/ recordist

456

300

Boom operators

195

Sound assistant

131

275

PRODUCTION SOUND

SET OPERATIONS Key grip Best-boy grip

200

Set ops grip

158

Dolly grip

217

Construction foreman

175

Construction grips

112

ELECTRICAL Gaffer

2,500

291

172

Editor

436

Assistant editor

100

Best-boy electric POST-REEN PRODUCTION STAFF

COMPOSITING Lead compositor/visual effects supervisor

733

Compositors

583

163

SOUND/MUSIC Sound designer

500

Composer

1,500

Mixing engineer

400

Foley artist

500

NOVEMBER 2011 | DIGITAL

Web Wisdom

All ears

Listening to social media conversations is monitoring with purpose by Patrick Attallah

PATRICK ATTALLAH. Managing partner, 90:10 Group; CEO, 90:10 Group Middle East

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ne of the key pieces of advice that Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs, offers to companies getting started in social media is “Grow bigger ears.” This is a maxim repeated over and over again in a variety of ways: Listen before you talk. Join the conversation. Social media is a cocktail party. The reason so many people talk about it is that it’s right. Social media has changed everything important to our business. From marketing and sales, to research and financial management, the social media revolution has forced all of us to rethink how we approach business, our marketplaces and our customers. Today customers and prospects are throwing off billions of digital buying indications every day. They signal their intentions through the search keywords they use, the blogs they read, the white papers they download, the brands they like on Facebook and the shopping baskets they fill. They trust, and therefore prefer to do business with, companies that are open, honest and authentic. Thus, companies that listen carefully to their customers and respond to their needs will survive and prosper. Those that don’t will be gone. A social media program, in order to be effective, needs to be measurable within the context of the business it serves: measurable, in other

words, against the very objectives and targets it aims to influence. But often it is easy to get sidetracked by typical social media metrics that don’t have much of a bearing on business objectives: the number of fans, number of followers, number of brand mentions, positive versus negative sentiments within those mentions. Focus on establishing a listening measurement practice that caters to your company, not a celebrity. Popularity and popularity metrics are not necessarily what you want to spend a lot of time and energy on. Listening can be split into five types of activities: search, monitoring, alerting, measuring and mining. Search is often confused with monitoring, while it is actually just what you think it is: using search engines such as Google or Social Mention to find out what people are saying on a specific topic. Monitoring comprises establishing listening outposts and using them. Monitoring is listening with purpose. Monitoring is done using automated tools (some are free and others are paid) to find social conversations you can then read and analyze. Alerting is like monitoring, but the difference is it will alert you (via e-mail or SMS) based on activity reaching some value, or when modera-

NOVEMBER 2011 | DIGITAL

tion for your Facebook page needs your attention (when there is suddenly a burst of negative sentiment in the comments on your wall). Measuring adds a quantitative element to monitoring. When measuring, you’re aggregating data and generating numbers. Analysis is part of the measurement. It is the interpretation of data once it has been measured and quantified. There are two rules when it comes to measurement and analysis: Be precise and measure what matters. Start with your objectives and work your way back into metrics that support these objectives. Then make sure you quantify and analyze the degree to which they illustrate the types of changes in behavior you are looking for. Mining is a research activity and the output is more of a research product. It’s looking at archival data and answering a research question. Mining is the practice of looking for insights and for potential answers to business questions. IBM, for example, used social media mining to create sales leads for its software group. They studied the exact language that IT buyers used on social media about software topics and then custom designed a whole raft of inexpensive “how to” videos around these topics. IBM posted them on YouTube and tagged them with exactly the same words that buyers use when they search or converse about them. In order for you to succeed in this new era of easy and real-time conversations, it is critical you continuously listen to and evaluate what your market is saying about you. However, when I say “monitoring is listening with purpose,” it is important to tie your monitoring and measurement practice to your business objectives, as each department may have its own unique social media monitoring needs: Market research – researchers need to do ad hoc analysis of social media content to supplement traditional research projects. They are interested in understanding the demographics of people who comment on the products and services they are studying. Timeliness is less important to them than detailed archives: For instance, here Twitter’s two weeks of search is inadequate, especially for low-volume brands; researchers would love access to six months of Tweets. Marketing – where researchers are trying to understand markets, marketers are trying to influence them. They want to identify influential people: whether they are bloggers, advocates or just individuals with large bases of fans and/or followers. Marketing departments want to track consumer sentiment over time, as well as tie it into specific marketing campaigns. PR folks, meanwhile, have been tracking mentions since the days of clipping services and want to see how the brands they represent are doing in comparison to competing brands. Customer service – marketing folks will certainly intervene with influencers when appropriate, but customer service departments want to contact every single person who mentions a problem, even if they don’t have any friends or followers.

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LISTENING ANALYSIS ENABLES YOU TO ENGAGE AND CONVERT FANS INTO BUYERS

They will reach out on multiple channels – from replying on the social media channel where they find the cry for help, to checking their CRM system to identify the comment and reach out by e-mail or even phone. They are interested in reports that track priorities, response times and case management details. This is why listening measurement, analysis and reporting require context. Social media listening is here to support your social media program as it works on: Gaining real-time insights into consumer preferences and perceptions. Improving your company’s crisis monitoring and response process. Increasing the reach and impact of your marketing efforts. Reducing customer service costs. Improving customer service outcomes. Amplifying campaign impact. Increasing sales through frequency, reach and yield. Humanizing or otherwise improving the company’s image in the eyes of consumers. Helping reverse an event’s negative impact on your brand. Improving customer relations to help increase n customer loyalty.

NOVEMBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

Guest Opinion

Social by nature

Isabelle Aoun, marketing manager, Personal Care Category at Obegi Consumer Products, says social media takes a lot of planning if it’s to work well

ose the question – What is a winning social media strategy for brand building? – and you will first be met with silence. Then answers will come in paragraphs. That is how intricate the concept and practice of social media are for brands. To answer the question ourselves, we gathered advice from social specialists, digital workshops, and “been-there-done-that” opinion. The answer? A successful social media strategy meets set objectives and delivers business results. When it comes to brand building, a winning strategy is one that is integrated and built around online and offline touchpoints, uses digital formats and social channels to build a brand’s online persona, aims at developing a relationship with a target audience, builds a solid fanbase, generates inbound traffic, encourages product adoption and referral, and constantly increases followers, while keeping them engaged and coming back for more. A successful campaign generates word-of-mouth and viral growth. Nevertheless, aside from setting objectives, all of the above is easier said than done, and practically speaking we are faced with a plethora of questions. One such question worth dwelling on from a brand perspective is how to build a deep relationship with a community,

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the size of the prize being that rare gem called brand advocacy. Planning for this starts with defining the desired depth of the relationship: What is the level of involvement with the category that my brand falls into versus the wanted level for my brand? Then we start plotting, dissecting the stages consumers go though from the moment they start thinking about the category. At this stage brand choice is still far off – therefore we stay away from hardcore selling messages. Once the stages are clear, touchpoint mapping helps in that yo-yo-like endeavor, as we bounce back and forth to marry online with offline to recruit prospects and bring our brand into their purchase consideration set. It is a lot of hard work and multitasking as our target audience could be standing at different stages of the consumer journey. We have not even approached purchase intention yet, let alone that long-awaited goal we have been sweating to reach: purchase, trial, hopefully satisfaction, and eventually re-purchase and referral. It will take more of those listening skills and interval campaign measurements to audit the relationship’s health and take corrective action to preempt a breakup. Perseverance at drafting the content strategy to maintain engagement is complemented by having a brand ambassador in-house, dedicated to fueling the dialogue to take a brand from a touchpoint to a conversation, and into a steady relationship, by paving the way to brand conversion, adoption, referral, and advocacy. There is no “aha” moment here. It’s about going back to the basics of our social nature. Relationships are what we do naturally. Our local digital landscape is still too immature to reveal whether the size of the prize justifies the investment in time, energy, and resources. Our online marketing ecosystem is busy with tactical activations when we need more of the strategic effort. The role of marketers is fundamental to raising the practice bar and challenging digital agencies and online strategists into asserting the value-adding role that is rightfully expected from them as experts in the subject matter. This added value will be crucial in shaping the scene, by providing some missing ingredients: the insights derived from a reflective exercise on case studies, best practices, benchmarking, deeper online behavioral understanding, campaign ROI measurement frameworks and competitive scene landscaping, along with a lot of knowledge sharing with industry professionals. If social media for brand building is here to stay, that is.

NOVEMBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

X-pert Files

Same but different

Ahmad Abu Zannad, strategic planning director at Leo Burnett, Saudi Arabia, says “integrated” needn’t always mean “consistent”

AHMAD ABU ZANNAD. Strategic planning director at Leo Burnett

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ou’d have thought that striving for consistency is always the right thing to do when developing an integrated marketing communication (IMC) campaign (for example, one that combines elements of traditional media, social media and public relations). Surprisingly, that is not always the case. Several research studies and theories show that to effectively engage people with your campaign and have them interact with your brand, some level of inconsistency may be needed. From the theoretical side, academics say there is a tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their cognitions (beliefs, opinions, and information), and when there is an inconsistency between attitudes or behaviors, something must change to eliminate this dissonance. Other theories state that incoming information that is not completely consistent but rather moderately inconsistent can be evaluated more favorably than strongly consistent information. In terms of advertising, information

that defies expectations can enhance consumers’ persuasion as they successfully resolve the inconsistency. According to the European Advertising Academy (EAA), “incongruent (or inconsistent) information produces a kind of entertainment value, as it challenges consumers to solve a puzzle. Solving the puzzle produces positive responses and a sense of accomplishment.” The EAA, with the University of Murcia in Spain, has attempted to put this to the test. A total of 227 undergraduates were randomly assigned to three different levels of strategic consistency (high, moderate, or low). The study found a high degree of ineffectiveness at the low level of consistency, but it did not show a great difference between the moderate level and the high level of consistency. The EAA’s key take-aways were that the best level of consistency depends on the objectives of the campaign. According to the EAA, “If the campaign’s objective is to motivate people to process the communication message at a deeper level, at evoking favorable responses in people or at enhancing brand associations, a moderate level of strategic consistency should be selected.” At the same time, “brand equity could be more benefited by moderately consistent messages because it may excite people and make them think more positively about the brand.” However, the question is: What is the optimal level of strategic (in)consistency? The one that provides this required intrigue, favorability and persuasion to have recipients of the messages get engaged and interact with the brand? Unfortunately, so far there is no answer to this question. The EAA says this issue has been underresearched from an academic perspective due to the methodological difficulty of applying it in experiments. The Marketing Science Institute has made this a research priority, although they have not investigated it yet. What we’ve discovered is the rise of new tools such as social media has made it an ongoing challenge for any campaign to engage its audience and have them interact with it. However, if we keep our fixation on making our IMC campaigns consistent, it seems that at some point we will be losing the audience’s interest in engaging with the campaign. Therefore, to develop a more engaging campaign some inconsistency may be needed. Unfortunately, today there is insufficient proof of what the optimal inconsistency is for the most effective results.

NOVEMBER 2011 | TELEVISION

Seven things about social TV

No longer seen as passive consumers, viewers have the power to transform TV by Simon Dumenco 1. TV OWNS SOCIAL. For more than two years now, AdAge.com has had an editorial partnership with Trendrr, the social-media-monitoring company. Trendrr, which was born in 2006 as Infofilter, grew out of Wiredset, a Manhattan digital-marketing agency founded by Mark Ghuneim and Tom Donohue in 2004 (the same year Mark Zuckerberg was launching what was then TheFacebook.com out of his Harvard dorm room, and two years before Twitter fluttered to life). Ad Age partnered with Trendrr to create weekly online charts of rising and falling Tweet volume surrounding memes that were dominating Twitter conversations. Back in the summer of 2009, we tracked everything from Sonia Sotomayor (then a nominee for the Supreme Court) to Glee to Major League Baseball to True Blood. Over time it dawned on us that more than anything else TV was driving social. Sotomayor would trend on Twitter only when her confirmation hearings were being televised; a specific team would trend because it was doing great (or sucking) in the game being broadcast at that very moment on ESPN; during prime-time hours in the US and the UK, Twitter’s trending topics list would be all but taken over by TV-related chatter. You could get a real-time take on Glee viewers’ level of delight over the most deliciously nasty things uttered by Jane Lynch’s Sue Syl-

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vester character because fans would dutifully thumb-type their favorite bits of dialogue right into their Twitter streams. (In fact, it started to seem like Glee writers were writing as much for Twitter as for TV.) Over the past couple of years, Trendrr has tightened its focus on TV – even launching Trendrr. tv specifically to serve the TV industry. Today, 14 of the top 25 TV networks are Trendrr.tv data customers, and as the social-TV business has exploded, Ad Age has also started editorial partnerships (to generate charticles for AdAge. com) with other emerging players in the space, including Bluefin Labs a Cambridge, Mass.based outgrowth of the MIT Media Lab that is building a broadcast-meets-social database it calls the TV Genome project, and Manhattanbased entertainment check-in service GetGlue. “Social TV could not be heating up more,” says Ghuneim, “because engagement is really starting to map to currency.” The networks that “get it,” he adds, “are using the social graph to measure the effectiveness of their marketing spend, for real-time audience research to understand the demographics of their viewers, to be smarter about how production dollars are spent and what content will resonate. And especially to demonstrate to advertisers the value of the network off the network.”

TELEVISION | NOVEMBER 2011

2. SOCIAL TV IS, AT ITS CORE, INCREDIBLY OLDFASHIONED. Social TV is about watching TV with other people – think of “’50s-era family and friends gathered around an old Magnavox console to catch I Love Lucy. Only now the living room has gone national. (Get your feet off the coffee table, Texas.) 3. TWITTER IS DEFINITELY NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN WHEN IT COMES TO SOCIAL TV. Consider GetGlue, which launched in June of last year. This past August, it hit a high of 11.5 million checkins, driven by partnerships with big broadcast and cable networks from ABC and Fox to Showtime and HBO. (The summer’s most popular show on GetGlue was True Blood with 490,787 total check-ins.) TVGuide.com, which built its own sitespecific check-in service and launched it last October, recently surpassed 4 million check-ins and is averaging 20,000 per day just from its user base. General Manager Christy Tanner says that to date TVGuide.com has sold 45 sponsorships to both network and non-network advertisers – from ABC to Starbucks – eager to engage with a deeply engaged audience. And more and more networks are building their own social destinations. At USA Network, says vice-president of digital Jesse Redniss, more than 300,000 unique visitors came to its Character Chatter platform – at characterchatter.usanetwork. com – this summer to discuss USA shows including Burn Notice and Psych. When USA broadcast a Burn Notice marathon and ran Character Chatter posts on an on-screen crawl, “That was a big ‘a-ha’ moment for us because we saw 35,000 concurrent users logging on to the system. It was really cool to watch.” 4. SOCIAL TV IS A FORM OF SELF-EXPRESSION – AND A FORM OF PEER-TO-PEER PEER-PRESSURE MARKETING. “What we’ve learned since launching GetGlue,” says CEO Alex Iskold, “is that entertainment is an incredibly emotional experience for people and the reason that people love checking in is because it’s a gesture of self expression. It’s people saying, ‘I’m a diehard True Blood fan, and that’s a really important thing to me, it really matters to me, and that show gets into my head and gets into my soul.’” A network can drown you in endless promos for a new show it wants you to watch; maybe you’ll succumb, maybe you won’t. But the influence of social-media messaging about that show from a friend whose taste you trust can’t be underestimated. An enthusiastic Tweet about Ringer is not only an endorsement of the show, but an implicit call to action; it says, “This is what you’re missing out on.” 5. SOCIAL TV HAS SLOWED DOWN TIME-SHIFTING FOR SOME OF TV’S BIGGEST SHOWS. “We did a survey of our 10,000-person TV-fan panel last year,” says TVGuide.com’s Tanner, “and what we found is that 20 percent of them say they are watching more live TV specifically to avoid “social spoilers.’”

BLOODY CELL. People are more likely to Tweet about shows such as True Blood when viewing 6. SOCIAL TV IS NOT PRIMARILY ABOUT PREDICTING HITS. Some of the big shows premiering this fall already have great social buzz; ABC’s Once Upon a Time, which wasn’t even due to air its first episode until October, had more than 100,000 likes on Facebook weeks in advance. What does that tell us? That ABC is doing a good job promoting it and that the fantasy-drama theme conveyed in the promos is resonating with potential viewers. And that’s it. “Merely tracking the volume of buzz,” says Bluefin Labs vice-president of marketing and business development, Tom Thai, “without a deeper analysis of other factors, is very rudimentary.” What matters is context; once a show gets traction, what else can the viewers who are chattering about it tell us about their other preferences as consumers? “If you’re a CMO for an automaker versus wireless carrier versus laundry detergent,” says Thai, “your audiences and needs will be different. The key next step is marrying social-TV data about the shows with data about specific brands.” 7. THE COUCH POTATO IS A DYING BREED. Remember when TV viewers were seen as passive consumers? The minimal effort required to operate a remote control (and open a drink and a bag of Cheetos) meant that sitting on the couch and taking in a few of your favorite shows made you a “couch potato.” Funny how the addition of just another small device – the smartphone – to the mix has transformed the couch potato into a superfan/social-marketer/programmer with the power to transform TV.

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NOVEMBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

Blogosphere L

ebanon’s blogosphere is probably one of the most vibrant digital scenes in the region. Lebanese bloggers are many, dedicated, and very, very outspoken. Agencies are now turning to social media and online communities, listening intently to this direct feedback on how they are perceived. Here is what increasingly influential Lebanese bloggers – inside and outside our borders – have to say about local work and news. THEY’RE LISTENING, AND WATCHING. It was an emotional rollercoaster for Lebanese bloggers this month. They mourned, each in their own way, the loss of tech business magnate Steve Jobs. They raised their voices on world hunger for this year’s blog action day. And, for the most part, had some very strong opinions on the alleged upgrade of Lebanon’s 3G connection. Thankfully there were a few nice surprises along the way to calm them down.

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If any lesson can be learned from Imad Bazzi’s case (see “Blogosphere”, page 38, Communicate Levant, October 2011) it is that Arab bloggers’ voices know no borders; especially when their peers aren’t allowed to cross them. Beirutiyat’s Assaad Thebian brings to light yet another controversy that has shaken the Arab blogging community. http://beirutiyat.wordpress. com/2011/10/04/borders-vsbloggers/

In 2008, CNN infamously placed Lebanon’s Tripoli as Libya’s, and more recently Libya’s Tripoli as Lebanon’s; of course, these heinous acts against accuracy were reason enough for Lebanese bloggers to have an expression for them: “To pull a CNN.” And Jad, from Lebanon News: Under Rug Swept, has spotted the newest culprit. http://www.jadaoun.com/ blog/2011/10/4490/gulf-newsgoofs-up-with-the-tripolis/

Is it the clichéd use of a sexy girl in a “back to school” ad, or its irrelevance to the product being advertised? Something about this Pastai restaurant ad is puzzling Najib from Blog Baladi. And he’s not alone. http://blogbaladi.com/najib/ lebanon/back-to-school/

Just like any step up or reform in the country, Lebanon’s upgrade to 3G connection is reaching some slowly, some surely, and others not. So Gino from Gino’s Blog decided to put the rumors to rest and ask users: “Did you get fast Internet yet?” Guess what 76 percent of respondents answered. http://ginosblog.com/2011/10/04/ poll-of-the-week-did-you-getfast-internet-yet/

How do you market a taboo in the Middle East? Souppie from UXSOUP explains why Durex Arabia’s Facebook page succeeded in doing just that with its daring “Digital Love” campaign. http://www.uxsoup.com/thoughts/ how-do-you-tackle-a-taboo-inthe-middle-east/

The meeting of minds at TEDxBeirut (see “TEDxBeirut gathers creative minds,” page 8) left quite an impression on Nsrn Srks (no mistyping here) from the Designer By Day blog, who will even explain why engineers Bassam Jalgha and Ziad Abi Shaker talked oud tuners and passion for garbage. http://adesignerbyday.blogspot. com/2011/09/tedxbeirut-fromlimitation-to.html

SEPTEMBER2011 NOVEMBER 2011| |DEPARTMENTS DEPARTMENTS

Regional Work

Salaam by Mashreq 路

Agency: Zaman Branding

You will be missed Steve Advertising Agency: DDB Dubai Copywriter: Shehzad Yunus Art Director: Dinesh Gore Executive Creative Director: Shehzad Yunus

Better take control over your television Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett, Saudi Arabia Chief Creative Officer: Bechara Mouzannar Art Director: Feras Shoujah Copywriter: Faraz Khan Art Director: Jonathan Horner Illustrator: Anton Petrov

Islamic Banking. Swiss Standards Advertising Agency: Kobeso, Dubai, UAE Executive Creative Director / Art Director: Komal Bedi Sohal Copywriter: K.S. Gopal

These ads (and more) can be found at adsoftheworld.com

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DEPARTMENTS | NOVEMBER 2011

Regional Work

I Am Iconic Client: Iconic Agency: Brag, Dubai Creative Director: Ramzi Nakad

Harvey Nichols after sale items Advertising Agency: Y&R Dubai Creative directors: Shahir Zag, Kalpesh Patankar Copywriter: Shahir Zag Art director: Kalpesh Patankar

Cramped? Free yourself Advertising Agency: BLU/GREY Worldwide, Kuwait Creative Director: Gilbert Sabarez Semillano Managing Director: Sami Hanah Client Service: Salam Alghoul Designers: Thamer Ashour, Ibrahim Madi Media: Yasmien Minassian

These ads (and more) can be found at adsoftheworld.com

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NOVEMBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

Regional Work

Jooooy Finally Has Meaning Advertising Agency: Tonic International, Dubai, UAE

Keep it hot for hours Advertising Agency: FP7/RUH, Saudi Arabia Executive Creative Director / Art Director / Copywriter: Ahmad Beck Art Director: Ramero Firmeza Photographer: Steve Kozman Retoucher: Amin Daw Account manager: Mohammad Abdel Kader

These ads (and more) can be found at adsoftheworld.com

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DEPARTMENTS | NOVEMBER 2011

International Work

Sleep like it used to be Advertising Agency: Grey, Indonesia Executive Creative Director: Randy Rinaldi Art Directors: Ogi Prayoga, Berry Dawanas Copywriters: Andika Pandjaitan, Dodi Triaviandi Creative Group Head: Nicholas Kosasih

When you can’t see what harms you, it’s more dangerous Advertising Agency: Simple, Chile Photographer: Gancho Retoucher: Astro IC

Only with Stihl Advertising Agency: Giacometti, São Paulo, Brazil Chief Creative Officers: Daniel Rasello, Julio Isnard Art Director: Felipe Previtali Copywriter: Patrizia Scala

Red Cross: Donation Advertising Agency: ONIRIA / TBWA, Paraguay. Creative Director: Camilo Guanes. Art Director: Daniel Achaval. Copywriters: Arturo Valiente, Rene Lopez. Illustrator: Lucas We

These ads (and more) can be found at adsoftheworld.com

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NOVEMBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

Drive By One anonymous blogger critiques Beirut’s billboards. All of these examples, and more, can be found at beirutdriveby.com

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ONE AND ONLY You found the “One”. Years pass, the effects of time begin to show. The once firm will give way to familiar softness. You may look around for another, but take care and this one could last a lifetime. Flip it now and again… to extend the life of your mattress.

INTERNET PIRACY IN LEBANON Piracy is a way of life in Lebanon. “Original copy” DVDs, illegal software and even pirated Internet is common. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, KFC has been taken over by pirates. What have they done with the chicken?

LITTLE RED CORVETTE Because there’s nothing clichéd about a red Corvette.

FRUIT OF THE VINE Not to mention… the fruit of your loins.

MIDDLE EAST PEACE It’s actually the MercedesBenz emblem that most closely resembles the peace sign. Ironically it is also the preferred vehicle of diplomats, politicians and taxi drivers, none of whom bring much peace or peace of mind to anyone in the Middle East.

YA BUKRA, YA BA3D BUKRA Here in Lebanon things take time, but eventually they get done. Ma3lesh, we have time.