Communicate September 2010

In association with

The marketing and advertising resource • September 2010 • Issue N° 69 • www.communicate.ae Keeping pace: Two Booz consultants on how to cash in on modern media Page 46

Just the job: Fifth Ring’s Nicola Gregson on how to write a CV for a job in PR Page 48

Attempts on goal: D’PR’s Jamal Al Mawed on the region’s World Cup campaigns Page 28

MEDIA A special place Dubai has one, Abu Dhabi has one, and Egypt has one. Saudi wants to build one, Beirut might, and Iraq’s is due to be completed next year.

Why is the Middle East in love with media free zones? (Page 24)

RESEARCH It’s good to Sharia Young Muslim consumers want brands to be halal, but they want to ha v e f u n a s w e ll. W e s pe a k t o international Islamic branding agency Ogilvy Noor and see what its new survey can tell us about Arab youth.

(Page 30)

MARKETING Good guestwork In the competitive world of fivestar hotels, the Ritz tries to stand out by making its employees centrral to its brand.We see what lessons can be learned. And why you might find a picture of your favorite pet when you check in. (Page 40)

CAMPAIGN Net result

LUXURY’S NEW LOOK

(Page 55) Registered in Dubai Media City/Cover Image: Getty/Gallo Images

How the evolving economy has affected indulgence 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

A MediaquestCorp publication

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

SEPTEMBER 2010 | LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

If the shoe fits I

n July I went on holiday. As my connecting flight between Guangzhou and Hanoi landed, the passengers on the small plane cheered. I didn’t.

It wasn’t a tricky landing, from what little I understand of airplanes, and I like to consider a safe touchdown a right and not a privilege. If the pilot had done a loop-theloop, I would have cheered from my sick-bag; that would have been beyond his call of duty, a treat for the passengers, a luxury.

Luxury is the subject of our cover story, on page 16. We look at how the credit crunch has changed consumers’ attitudes to extravagance.

When I flew back to Dubai after a fortnight in Vietnam I had another luxury from the trip: a pair of handmade shoes.

Shoes themselves aren’t a luxury for most of us. On the sliding scale of world poverty, we are the lucky ones; we can afford footwear. A pair of shoes is nothing out of the ordinary.

Until you see mine.

They come from Hoi An in central Vietnam, a pretty city of cobbled streets and Chinese-style houses.

It has a Japanese covered bridge of which its citizens are justifiably proud, and a reputation for tailoring.

I visited Hoi An hoping to have a jacket made, and

4 I Communicate

ended up with a jacket, three shirts, a kimono and a pair of silk pajamas. Then I discovered you can have shoes made to measure as well.

I decided to treat myself.

What I wanted was a pair of comfortable, well-fitting leather shoes that I could wear as easily with that new jacket as I could with jeans and a t-shirt.

My girlfriend said no.

She had a point; I’ve got a pair of shoes like that. And I can easily get more in Dubai.

Another pair wouldn’t be a luxury, just a replacement for a necessity I already have.

So when I left Hoi An, I was wearing a pair of Converse-style sneakers in blue and gold silk, with my name embroidered across the tongues. My girlfriend was regretting her advice.

It’s fair to say that I don’t actually need those shoes.

They are a pure indulgence, a beautiful and classy (some might beg to differ) luxury.

I can justify that luxury by saying the shoes are unique – a statement with which nobody in their right mind can argue.

In the heady days of precredit-crunch luxury, I might have bought the shoes just for bling value. Now, however, we’ve all tightened our Gucci belts and need more justification when making

extravagant purchases; conspicuous consumption is not enough.

That’s why I was initially wooed by the comfort and craftsmanship of hand-made shoes, and finally settled on the exclusivity and sophistication of my disco creepers. These are selling points for luxury products.

They are stories luxury marketers tell, as atelier’s Youssef Naaman explains on page 22.

Quality is another selling point. But as my shoes still smell of glue, and have a few wisps of blue and gold silk hanging off them already, I don’t want to dwell on that.

In my mind, I now own a luxury worth cheering for.

Austyn Allison, managing editor editor@communicate.vg

Dubai 3515505 Abu Dhabi 6457060 Al Ain 7666690 Sharjah 5687775 Ajman 7441113 Ras Al Khaimah 2280600 Fujairah 2233151 Umm Al Quwain 7664004 Bahrain ■ Saudi Arabia ■ Kuwait ■ Oman ■ Qatar ■ United Arab Emirates ■ Lebanon ■ Malaysia www.ajmalperfume.com

CONTENTS | SEPTEMBER 2010

Contents

COVER: Luxury special report 16

20

22

Old-fashioned values: Brands rediscover integrity and authenticity in a post-recession world X-pert Files. The personal touch: Luxury is now about richness of experience rather than just products, says the former executive director of strategy at The Brand Union, Michael Hughes Ten story love song: Atelier’s Youssef Naaman on the stories brands can tell in their marketing strategy

SHORTS 8

Over-the-top advertising: Is Kassab’s new LED bridge display a bright idea?

NEWS 10

12

14

Digital. Group buying site GoNabit launches in Arabic Advertising. Axiom Telecom hires TBWA/Raad as integrated agency Digital. Old Spice’s new ads have smashed all previous viral-video records, but how has that affected the male grooming brand’s bottom line?

FEATURES 24

28

Media. In the zone: Media hubs are popping up all over the region, hungry for talent and investment Marketing. Scoring big: What did regional brands do to make the most of the soccer World Cup?

30

34

36

38

40

44

Research. Do the right thing: Young Muslims want brands to reflect their values Print. Remember the Time: US publishing giant offers advertisers make-good spots if their ads don’t generate recall Marketing. Clean tactics: JWT’s Sam Williams on Lux soap’s growth in emerging markets Marketing. Finding focus: Visa, P&G, and Coke prove single-minded strategy scores in sport Marketing. Human resource: Lessons to learn from Ritz’s philosophy that employees are the brand Marketing. Care in the community: Brands eager to hire community managers to keep tabs on followers

DEPARTMENTS

46

48

50

52

58

Guest Opinion. Chasing change: Consumers are changing fast, say Booz & Co.’s Jayant Bhargava and Karl Nader. But marketers that adapt quickly can turn this to their advantage X-pert Files. Appeal to a hire power: Fifth Ring’s Nicola Gregson on how to write a good CV. Rule one: no baby photos Media Work. How Bahrain’s Batelco took the game to its consumers Work. Selections from the regional and international creative scenes The Dish. Balloons, bras, and bananas

SEPTEMBER 2010 Published by: Medialeader FZ/MediaquestCorp Medialeader, P O Box 72184, Dubai Media City, Al Thuraya Tower 2, Office 2402, Dubai, Tel: (971) 4 391 0760

CO-CEO Alexandre Hawari CO-CEO Julien Hawari MANAGING DIRECTOR Ayman Haydar CFO Abdul Rahman Siddiqui CREATIVE DIRECTOR Aziz Kamel DISTRIBUTION & SUBSCRIPTION DIRECTOR JP Nair, jp@mediaquestcorp.com MARKETING MANAGER Joumana Haddad, joumana@mediaquestcorp.com KSA GM Tarek Abu Hamzy, tarekah@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: +966 1 4194061 LEBANON GM Nathalie Bontems, nathalie@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: +961 1 492801 NORTH AFRICA GM Adil Abdel Wahab, adel@medialeader.biz, Tel: +213 661 562 660 FRANCE SALES DIRECTOR

Manuel Dias, dias@arabies.com, Tel: +33 1 4766 46 00

6 I Communicate

FOUNDER Yasser Hawari MANAGING DIRECTOR Julien Hawari MANAGING EDITOR Austyn Allison CREATIVE DIRECTOR Aziz Kamel SENIOR JOURNALIST Rania Habib ART DIRECTOR Sheela Jeevan SUB EDITOR Salil Kumar ART CONTRIBUTORS Alvin Cha, Jean-Christophe Nys, Aya Farhat EXTERNAL AFFAIRS Manuel Dias, Maguy Panagga, Catherine Dobarro, Randa Khoury, Lila Schoepf, Laurent Bernard PRINTERS Raidy Emirates Printing Group (Lebanon) ADVERTISING The Gulf MEDIALEADER, PO Box 72184, Dubai

Media City, AlThuraya Tower 2, Office 2402, Dubai, Tel: (971) 4 391 0760, Fax: (971) 4 390 8737, sales@mediaquestcorp.com Lebanon Walid Ramadan, walid@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: (961) 339 9087 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 WEB SITE www.communicate.ae

SEPTEMBER 2010 | SHORTS

Bright future Kassab Media says its new LED facing can be a bridge over the troubled waters of outdoor advertising

by Austyn Allison

T

ELIE-CHARLES YOUSSEF. Marketing and development manager

MICHEL BORT. Sales and marketing manager

GERARD RUSTOM. Director of regional sales

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here’s a new billboard on Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed Road: an LED mesh mounted on the bridge linking Mall of the Emirates Metro station with the other side of the road. Kassab Media, the outdoor supplier behind it, is very proud.

It’s the latest offering from Kassab’s Trans Media division, a revenue-sharing partnership with Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), which also has the rights to sell advertising on Dubai’s buses, and to publish a daily paper for commuters on the Metro. (No date has yet been set for the launch of this publication.)

Dubai drivers can expect to see more LED hoardings soon, however; this one is the first of a new network that Kassab says will change outdoor advertising. The 18-meter-by-fivemeter screen is molded to the shape of the footbridge, and pedestrians passing behind it can see out and over the traffic flowing beneath them.

It might not block Metro passengers’ views, but Communicate wonders whether the facing’s bright lights and vibrant colors could be distracting to drivers.

It’s very safe, says Elie-Charles Youssef, Kassab Trans Media’s marketing and development manager.

“We studied the intensity of the light in order not to have something too bright,” he says. “And we have limitations on how often the visuals change. So every eight seconds we can change a visual. It’s not like you’re driving by and you’re watching a TVC or a video that’s playing and flashing and distracts drivers. This was part of a survey done by the RTA safety department.”

The mesh was also tested in the US, where it was made. “California has a similar climate to Dubai in terms of the light and the heat,” says Youssef.

“The façade of the footbridge was recreated in California, and the actual mesh attached to it.”

This also provided a practice run for the disruptive job of putting the mesh up. It took two weeks to erect the sign in Dubai.

At time of writing there is no third-party advertising on the mesh; Kassab is running its own graphics while it tests the sign, which displays one word: “Digital.”

Kassab is keen on the interactive possibilities of digital marketing, as it applies to out-of-home media.

“We can ask for feedback from the people,” says Michel Bort, sales and marketing manager at Kassab.

“We can engage the consumer, let him make the decision on what’s best to put out there.”

Advertisers are keen to be on the new signage, says director of regional sales Gerard Rustom, but Kassab has yet to decide whom the sign will host first.

“We have a line-up of clients, but we are going to handpick them,” says Rustom. “The aim of the LEDs is to have a network, and we will sell it as a network. But since we only have one now and everybody’s interested, we will try to give it to one group or exclusively to one client for a month to three months.”

Rustom won’t say how much space on the sign will cost, but says it will be more than backlit bridges.

Ads, however, can be switched in and out depending on the time, allowing advertisers to target different demographics of road users. The space can be shared between clients, but competing brands won’t be allowed to run next to one another.

Kassab has the rights to 22 bridges on the Metro’s Red Line (which runs parallel to Sheikh Zayed Road), but says it plans to concentrate on one area at a time. More meshes will be coming in the next few months.

SEPTEMBER 2010 | REGIONAL NEWS

 I ADVERTISING

GoNabit launches in Arabic Founders say group-buying site is a social media hit

Dubai. GoNabit.com has launched in Arabic, making it the first Arabic group-buying website in the world, according to its owners.

“As a company we, of course, want to have local relevance to every market we are in, and the availability of GoNabit in Arabic has been important to us from the outset,” the site’s CEO and co-founder, Dan Stuart, says in a statement.

“This development offers consumers more choice, and the duallanguage capability strengthens the GoNabit model for merchants, as we can now market their services in both English and Arabic,” he adds.

Launched in Dubai in June, and expanded to Abu Dhabi in July, GoNabit offers discounts on goods and services to often-unrelated groups

of individuals. Subscribers receive a daily e-mail offering a discount of between 50 percent and 90 percent on massages, meals, beauty products, fitness classes and the like. A deal will only “tip” and become active when a minimum number of customers opt in to it within a specified timeframe (usually between 24 and 72 hours).

At that point, the cost of the deal is deducted from customers’ credit cards. If the minimum number of customers isn’t reached, the discount doesn’t apply and no payment is made. Buyers receive a voucher from the merchant that must be used within an agreed timeframe.

The site’s owners say GoNabit encourages buyers to share deals with friends to reach the tipping

point. Chief operating officer and co-founder Sohrab Jahanbani says, “We are seeing a lot of activity on our sites; visitor numbers are increasing daily, deals are tipping, our social media groups are running hot, and we have some avid GoNabit fans becoming value evangelists by spreading the word on Facebook and Twitter, and encouraging their social media community to tip the scales.”

“We’ve also had excellent feedback from merchants who have partnered with us to offer deals,” he adds.

GoNabit is financially backed by jobs site Bayt.com. Founded earlier this year, it has around 16,000 users in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and plans to launch sites for a further eight cities in the region by the end of the year.

the project, but says it will be branding the inside and outside of 59 bridges and the exterior of 94 buses. That’s 20,990 square meters of branding, the equivalent of 80 tennis courts.

It will take 11,000 man-hours to put up. HSBC predicts the branding will reach around 60 million passengers each year.

Simon Cooper, CEO of HSBC MENA, says in the statement, “Dubai International is the world’s fourth busiest airport for international passenger traffic, making it the ideal location for our very successful airport branding campaign.”

HSBC says it pioneered airbridge advertising at London’s Heathrow Airport in 2001, and has since expanded to 48 airports in 24 countries.

 I OUTDOOR HSBC launches massive airbridge campaign Dubai. HSBC Middle East has signed a five-year contract through outdoor supplier JC Decaux Middle East to advertise on airbridges (the passages between a terminal and airplanes) at Dubai and Sharjah International Airports.

The airbridge campaign is the biggest in the Middle East, says HSBC in a statement, and the bank’s largest single media investment in the region.

HSBC has not revealed the cost of

10 I Communicate

Mojo wins Atlantis account Dubai. Independent Dubai-based advertising and PR agency Mojo has won the full-service communications account for Atlantis, The Palm, a luxury hotel in Dubai.

Mojo won the account in a four-way pitch, and will handle local, regional, and international campaigns for the hotel, which is owned by South African hotel and casino magnate Sol Kerzner.

Ravini Perera, senior vice-president of marketing at Atlantis, says in a release, “We need strong, creative, well-integrated campaigns and fast turnaround. We believe Mojo’s allround advertising, design, and interactive capabilities will deliver that.”

 I AGENCIES Day breaks into Middle East Dubai. Amsterdam-based creative agency Day has officially opened its Middle East operation with a seven-strong office in Dubai. The three-year-old company describes itself as “a multi-disciplinary creative agency offering brand strategy, corporate identity, packaging, and branding services.”

The Dubai operation is already handling projects for Unilever, Coca-Cola, and Masafi. It will cover the MENA region, and is headed

by Day’s global strategy partner, Dennis de Rond.

McCollins announces account wins Dubai. McCollins Communications, a Dubai-based PR, advertising and new media agency, has announced a series of account and project wins over the six months since the agency launched.

The agency has been working for 3i Infotech, DeWalt, Juelmin Insurance, and Aqaar properties in Ajman. It has already worked on the

REGIONAL NEWS | SEPTEMBER 2010

Dubai launch of the Mercedes SLS Gullwing for Gargash Enterprises.

McCollins is a sister company to Red Orange Events. Managing director Meghna Kothari says in a release, “Our experience in organizing world-class events for the past couple of years has provided us with a great insight and opportunity to work with the communications industry, and prepared us to better promote the issues and challenges of the industry and further promote its growth.” © I PRINT New Forbes publisher to set up in DMC Dubai. Arab Publisher House (APH) is to open offices in Dubai Media City (DMC). The group, a recently formed joint venture between Arab investors, will be opening offices in Building 4, and putting a large Forbes sign on top of its new headquarters.

APH recently won the regional license to publish Forbes, a business magazine headquartered in New York.

It says it will launch an Arabic version next month, and an English-language

edition of Forbes Arabia in 2011. Forbes was present in the UAE before, in Arabic, but ceased publication when its publisher, DIT Group, closed down in April of last year.

Jazeera Airways’ in-flight wins design award Kuwait City. Jazeera Airways, the Kuwait-based budget carrier, has picked up a Magnum Opus Gold Award for Best Use of Illustration in J, its in-flight magazine.

The Magnum Opus Awards are based in Missouri, USA, and honor publishing in corporate communications. J won for a story in its AugustSeptember 2009 issue about a train journey between Istanbul and Tehran.

Michael Keating, executive creative director at Ink, the London-based publisher that produces J, says in a statement, “We are grateful to Jazeera for having the vision to agree to let Ink commission this piece of work.

Not every airline would have accepted to publish a cartoon treatment of a train trip between two cities. Clearly it was a successful decision.”

and a desire to appraise your peers, e-mail MEPRA executive director Rebecca Hill at inquiries@mepra.org.

OI PUBLIC RELATIONS MEPRA Awards open for entries Dubai. The Middle East Public Relations Association (MEPRA) Awards are open for entries at Awards.mepra. org until October 14.

Organizers say the 10 best practice categories remain the same (although some entry guidelines have been clarified), as do the two individual categories of Outstanding Young Professional of the Year and Communicator of the Year. Two new team categories have been added, for Agency of the Year and In-house Team of the Year.

MEPRA is also looking for judges; if you have eight years of PR experience

Jiwin becomes Subway’s PR agency Dubai. The Middle East division of sandwich shop Subway has handed its public relations account for the Middle East and Africa to Jiwin PR, a Dubai-based agency.

In a statement announcing the deal, Subway International’s regional director, Joseph Tabet, says, “Jiwin’s pitch included highly creative and inspiring concepts that reflected an in-depth understanding of our brand.

We are particularly impressed by the agency’s strong regional capability.”

Mamoon Sbeih (pictured, left), managing director of Jiwn, says, “Winning the Subway account demonstrates the creative and strategic breadth of our solutions. We are fully geared to roll out region-wide programs for Subway.”

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | REGIONAL NEWS

ENOC hands PR account to Entourage.

Dubai. Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC) has signed Dubai-based Entourage Marketing and Events Management to develop a corporate communications plan for the company’s commercial interests in more than 20 countries, and its business lines spread across 30 companies, according to a press statement from Entourage.

“Brand building and strategic marketing are our core competencies,” says Entourage managing director Mohammed Tayem. “We understand insights and behavior of people in our client’s environment very well. This knowledge and experience will be used to create communication programs to engage people with the ENOC brand at its points of sale.”

ENOC’s group brand and marketing manager, Khalid Hani, says, “Given Entourage’s profound experience in corporate communications, we are confident that the company will bring strategic solutions to increase ENOC’s brand awareness internationally.”  I DIGITAL

Axiom Telecom hires TBWA/ Raad as integrated agency Mobile phone retailer Axiom Telecom has appointed TBWA/Raad as its integrated communications agency in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. TBWA/ Raad will provide advertising creative, while Ketchum Raad Middle East will handle public relations. TBWA/ Raad recently launched Integer, its shopper-marketing arm, which will handle Axiom’s in-store activation.

TBWA/Raad helped launch the Axiom Telecom brand in 2000, and Axiom has since worked with various agencies, including Team Y&R and Expression on the creative side, and Hill & Knowlton for PR. TBWA/Raad group managing director Reda Raad tells Communicate his agency’s long relationship with Axiom and its understanding of the brand helped it clinch the deal. “We were there from the beginning,” he says. “We helped create the brand and we understand what it takes to take it to the next level.”

12 I Communicate

Raad won’t say what that next level might be, but says it is unlikely to involve a complete re-brand.

“Axiom is such an established brand name and we are going to be building on that success,” he says.

Axiom CEO Faisal Al Bannai (pictured, above) says in a statement, “We aimed for an agency that shares our passion for the Axiom Telecom brand and can translate our vision and strengths into creative, newsworthy communications.

TBWA/Raad’s disruptive ideas were the right fit to enhance our brand.”

The agency says it has already begun a “Disruption” workshop with Axiom. It says disruption, a TBWA buzzword, is “the art of asking better questions, challenging conventional wisdom, and overturning assumptions and prejudices that get in the way of imagining new possibilities and visionary ideas for a brand.”

Yahoo launches Ramadan content Amman. Regional website Yahoo Maktoob has announced various initiatives to connect with people celebrating Ramadan. The portal’s Ramadan microsite has three main sections addressing “Spiritualities,” “Ramadan and people,” and “Entertainment.” It will carry such seasonal offerings as Ramadan screensavers and wallpapers, recipes, and an online application to help users read the Quran in accordance with Islamic tajweed reading and pronunciation rules.

VERY BRIEFS Du named UAE Superbrand Watermelon PR opens office in Singapore Robert Kay joins TBWA/Raad as managing director in Abu Dhabi Renault GCC hires Benoit Turib as marketing director CNN hires correspondent Mohammed Jamjoom Rami El Zein appointed as head of marketing for United Arab Bank Hill & Knowlton wins GM PR account Ducab wins Superbrand award Universal Media launches “Curiosity” program Reiner Braun appointed head of sales and marketing at BMW Middle East OMD wins Henkel media account Dubai First appoints Amit Marwah as head of marketing Fadi El Aswad replaces Ashraf Tamim as head of marketing at Mercedes Regus survey finds 29 percent of UAE businesses use social networking as business tool M Communications wins Banaja Holdings and Peregrine Holdings as PR clients

Since US Internet giant Yahoo acquired regional Web portal Maktoob last year, it has strived to capitalize on its Arabic and regional strengths. In a press release announcing the site’s Ramadan drive, vice-president and managing director of Yahoo Middle East, Ahmed Nassef, says, “Through these new features, we hope to provide a customized platform for people practicing the spirit of Ramadan and introduce regionally relevant content to our users in order to provide an engaging online experience during the Holy Month.”

TBWA/Raad wins Renault relaunch creative brief in Saudi Arabia Quint design studio launches Quint magazine Oreo launches family entertainment portal Zed Communications wins Web Agency of the Year at Pan-Arab Web Awards Arabian Eye appoints Jesus Blanco as regional manager

SEPTEMBER 2010 | INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Did the new Old Spice ads strike gold?

Mustafa is clearly selling some body wash, but he may not be responsible for the bulk of sales gain New York. Isaiah Mustafa, aka “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” has clearly broken all previous viralvideo records and achieved pop-icon status. The question is: How much Old Spice body wash has he sold?

And the answer is a bit of a mystery.

Since Mustafa lent his sotto voce humor to the production wizardry of the Wieden & Kennedy ad in February, the Procter & Gamble Co. brand has been consistently gaining market share, even though that’s only been enough to erase a deficit the brand built up earlier. In the 52 weeks ended June 13, it had a roughly flat share in a category that grew a robust 8.6 percent, according to data from Symphony IRI. Then again, some other men’s brands have also been making substantial share gains of late, including P&G sibling Gillette, and Beiersdorf’s Nivea. And the thing Old Spice, Gillette, and Nivea have in common isn’t Mustafa, but rather multiple US drops of high-value coupons.

They included buy-one-get-one-free offers from both P&G brands and up to $4 off a single bottle of Nivea Men from Beiersdorf, reflecting unprecedented levels of promotional intensity in the category.

Newsweek sold for $1 New York. Sidney Harman, the businessman who made his fortune selling stereo equipment, secured a deal to buy Newsweek from The Washington Post Company for a token price of $1 early in August.

“Newsweek is a national treasure,” Harman, 91, says in a statement. “I am enormously pleased to be succeeding

14 I Communicate

Meanwhile, Unilever’s Dove Men & Care has also picked up some share, albeit with lower-value coupons and higher price points.

The bottom line: Mustafa and Wieden & Kennedy are clearly selling some body wash, but they may not be responsible for the bulk of Old Spice’s sales gain this year.

Consider the four weeks ended June 13. Old Spice’s sales were up 106 percent from the prior-year period, jumping 4.8 share points in a category that grew 17.7 percent. But sales of Gillette body wash, also backed by buy-one-get-one-free coupons and by TV ads (but not Mustafa), were up a lot more – 277 percent and 3.9 share

points – though it’s by far a smaller brand in the category.

Nivea men’s body wash, backed by little other media support but $4 coupons, saw its sales rise a mere 63 percent and its share go up 0.5 points.

And Dove Men & Care, the newest brand in the segment, dropped no coupons and was outside the main promotional burst of its February launch, but still held on to 2.4 share points for the four weeks ended June 13, down a bit from the 2.7 points for the 12-week period.

How much of Old Spice’s gains – of that 106 percent bump measured by Symphony IRI in June, for example – come from Mustafa’s ads, and how

The Washington Post Company and the Graham family and look forward to this great journalistic, business, and technological challenge.”

Reports say Harman planned to retain 250 of Newsweek’s employees. Newsweek counted 379 fulltime staffers at the end of March, according to the sale book posted

by PaidContent, but a significant number have left in the time since.

Losses at the magazine could approach $70 million this year. Harman reportedly agreed to assume the magazine’s liabilities.

It is unclear at this point which agencies will be taking part in the review, but media-agency executives who have seen the review says the company is looking for a shop with a “strong presence on the US West Coast.”

The business is split between WPP siblings Mindshare, which handles traditional global buying, and Neo, which handles digital-buying duties.

Yahoo spent $45 million on measured media in the US last year, according to Kantar Media.

Yahoo launches global media review New York. Yahoo has initiated a global review of its traditional and digital media-planning and -buying account.

“We are conducting a review as part of normal business practice to determine the best partner for Yahoo,” Yahoo spokesman Graham James says.

much from the coupons? “It’s impossible to know,” says P&G spokesman Mike Norton. But it seems clear the ad has had some positive impact. Old Spice began to reverse share losses as soon as it began in February.

Mustafa, a former NFL wide receiver who essentially switched to playing defense for Old Spice against the Dove launch, is now clearly back on offense. None of the data (including that for the four weeks ended July 11 that showed continued gains for P&G in body wash) yet reflects the sales impact of Mustafa’s 186 highly publicized personalized response videos earlier in July, which generated more than 34 million aggregate views and a billion PR impression in a week, according to P&G. In a single week, views of the personalized ads surpassed the nearly 29 million viral video views of Mustafa’s four TV ads since February.

As of July 18, Old Spice, with 94 million views, had become the No. 1 all-time most-viewed sponsored channel on YouTube, Norton says.

Old Spice had eight of the top 11 most-popular videos on YouTube on July 16. In the six days following the start of Mustafa’s videos, he reached more than 100 million followers.

A car that helps moisturize your skin Yokohama. Nissan Motor Co.’s announcement of a new feature that will diffuse vitamin C while you drive has got newspapers and blogs around the world talking.

The Japanese automaker is introducing improvements to future models designed to create a more comfortable in-car environment.

The most intriguing improvement in Nissan’s new “health and well-being” concept is an air filter infused with vitamin C that moisturizes passengers’ skin.

The idea is that the car’s air conditioning system, instead of drying out passengers’ skin, will dispense vitamin C into the car’s interior, stimulating people’s bodies to supply more moisture to the skin, making it appear younger.

It’s unclear when or in which countries or car models the feature will be available.

© Getty/Gallo Images

SEPTEMBER 2010 | COVER STORY

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COVER STORY | SEPTEMBER 2010

Good old values Authenticity and integrity are back in fashion as luxury brands navigate the recession by Rania Habib hat’s in is authenticity; what’s out are superficial, flashy status messages.” That’s according to Youssef Naaman, managing director of atelier in Beirut, a Leo Burnett division specializing in luxury brands. “For consumers, the age of bling and flashy symbols is over,” he says. “It started right before the recession: There was a shift to a more introspective and authentic mood. When the recession hit, it highlighted even further the need for change. We are going back to authenticity, integrity, and to relevance, versus having a superficial status message. Today, consumers need much more justification when making a luxury purchase. It’s true that they still want to communicate status, but through the point of view of integrity.”

The recession has left nothing untouched in its wake, not even luxury brands. That which is considered exclusive, special, and expensive, remains so, but 2009 saw a change in even the most untouchable of categories.

However, that change has not been drastic – buyers of luxury brands may have altered their spending habits, but they have not stopped spending, and luxury brands have found ways to weather the crisis. Naaman says this return to authenticity is crucial to marketing luxury brands during a crisis, and so is telling a brand story.

“Today, all successful luxury brands are going back to their stories, because they cannot just communicate superficial messages,” says Naaman. “The brands that have value and authenticity are going “

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to win in the desire game, and that’s why brands like Louis Vuitton or Hermes, which are brands that have stories and have been authentic and have stuck to their values, and build on their heritage, are able to win today in the market place, unlike other brands that do not have a story.”

Nicola Giorgi, worldwide general manager of Hogan, an Italian luxury brand specializing in shoes, says the company grew by 7.6 percent in 2009, and that its loyal customers contributed to the growth.

“Our customers are loyal, and they appreciate the fact that we have a very good combination of being fashionable, but not changing our products rapidly,” says Giorgi.

ALWAYS IN. “The product you buy from Hogan doesn’t become obsolete after a season or a year. This was very important during the recession, because customers realized it was no longer the time to buy products that go out of fashion quickly. Customers are looking for quality, something more like an iconic piece that doesn’t go out of style fast. This was a general trend in the luxury business, and brands that were developing fast fashion products were brands with big problems. For the first time, customers are considering the inner value of products.”

At Ferrari, the general manager of the MENA region, Pietro Innocenti, says the luxury car manufacturer follows the words of its founder, Enzo Ferrari. “He used to say, ‘We will always produce

one car less than the market demands,’” says Innocenti. “Exclusivity is part of our DNA and this has helped and still helps our brand to weather the downturns that occur from time to time. Of course, though, exclusivity needs strong foundations, otherwise consumers just opt for something else.

Ferrari represents many positive values that make it appealing regardless of the economic trends, and those are: strong technological innovation, beauty of Italian design, the heritage of the brand, and the passion of its people.”

One way brands have responded to the crisis is by slashing prices – a not-so-advisable move, according to industry insiders. “You walk through the malls, and everybody has discounted prices right now,” says TB “Mac” McClelland Jr., president and CEO of The Luxury Marketing Council Middle East. “Everybody is in sale mode, and that’s different from how it used to be. While consumers might appreciate being able to buy a $5,000 bag for $2,000, prices will still go back up once the crisis is over, and that is going to be difficult. Customers will ask, ‘If you can sell it for $2,000 and make a profit, then why is the price going back up?’”

McClelland says consumers dictate the way they will be marketed to. Naaman says the best example of a brand that has navigated the crisis successfully by telling a story is Louis Vuitton, with its ongoing “Journey” campaign featuring former soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and tennis legend Andre Agassi, among others. “You can see

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relations activities, but the rise of the digital marketing age has made its way to luxury brands as well.

“Older generations may want a piece of paper they can hold in their hands, but the younger generations want to look on the Internet quickly, compare, contrast, and make a decision,” says McClelland. “I think that marketing luxury brands is changing not only because of the economic situation, but because there is so much change in the demographic of who’s going to be shopping.”

RIGHT MESSAGE. Brands like Hermes, which have stuck to their values, are doing well

MAC MCCLELLAND. President and CEO of The Luxury Marketing Council

NICOLA GIORGI. General manager of Hogan

PIETRO INNOCENTI. General manager of Ferrari in the MENA region

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from their sales performance that Louis Vuitton is doing extremely well,” says Naaman.

“Regionally, brands that have handled this well are Aishti and Aizone, brands that we worked on with Tony Salameh, the founder,” he continues.

“He is a person who believes in brand-building.

The story with Aizone is that the brand is the spokesperson of the younger generation, and so they use issues that are dear to the heart of that generation, including voting, censorship, and being able to express oneself. It’s a brand that is authentic and true, and not about gratuitous messages and luring people. It’s about engaging consumers and building a rapport. Another huge trend today is brands going back to having an exclusive retail environment, where the brand message can be expressed at its fullest, and provide an experience for the customer.”

CHERISHED CHECKOUT. Giorgi says point-of-sale is a very important aspect of the marketing of the Hogan brand, and it helps make consumers feel cherished. “Our shop is very important,” he says.

“Hogan has been in the region for only five years, and we only have one shop in the UAE, so it’s very important for us to do everything right. Our merchandising is very important, we change our windows often, and the role of the store is very important in building a connection with our customers. We know our customers are loyal, and we want to keep them, and this is paying off, because the awareness of the brand is spreading through word of mouth.”

Marketing luxury brands may have typically focused on glossy print ads and luxurious public

NEVER ADVERTISE. At Ferrari, Innocenti says the car manufacturer “has never and will never use advertising campaigns.”

“We rely on one-to-one relationships with our customers,” he says. “Through experiences, we build a strong bond with our clients, who in turn become our best ambassadors. Public relations remains the most important element of our communication strategy.”

Innocenti adds that digital has always played a key role for Ferrari, particularly with the advent of social media. “Now that social media is available, we are able to maintain an even closer relationship with our clients and enthusiasts,” he says. “Our portal, Ferrari.com, provides features addressed to both tifosi [fans] and owners, such as the virtual factory tour, direct contact with engineers, and a Web TV channel with the latest news from the track.”

Hogan has developed a website, Hoganworld. com (see “Hogan knows best,” page 58, Communicate, September 2009), where clients can experience the brand. “Consumers can register, see what the brand is doing, see images from events, advertising, and backstage shows,” says Giorgi.

“It’s a very lively place for consumers who aren’t just looking for products, but for engagement.”

And while social media – a medium for the masses – may stand in contradiction to luxury’s exclusivity, luxury insiders say social media is as good as any other medium to promote luxury brands, when done properly. “If the consumer says, ‘This is how I want to be marketed to,’ then the brands that respond to that with taste are the ones that will benefit,” says McClelland.

Naaman says there is no stereotype for marketing luxury brands, and that brands need to do their homework in order to understand consumers’ behavior.

“Today, it is about personal relevance, and at the same time creating an experience,” he says. “Brands should be able to identify the most relevant mediums in order to create desire. Depending on the brand, PR can be very important, or print can be extremely important, but also the retail environment is very important, and digital is extremely important because it allows brands to tell stories in a relevant manner.”

According to optimists, the worst of the economic crisis may be over. Luxury brands may be exclusive enough to capture the hearts of affluent shoppers, but a sound marketing strategy and consideration for the times will determine which brands make it in the long run. “Everything that glitters isn’t gold,” says Naaman.

“A brand that wants to build its image needs to clearly differentiate itself from the rest and at the same time not depart from its values; it shouldn’t change just to be able to be opportunistic.”

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X-pert Files

Luxury in the new world What matters more to consumers in this post-recession world is richness of experience, and not just products, says The Brand Union’s Michael Hughes he world has changed since 2008 and the Middle East has not been immune. This used to be one of the fastest growth markets for luxury brands.

However, being one of the quickest to grow, it has also suffered one of the most dramatic declines.

Prior to the recession, most luxury brands couldn’t keep up with demand. For hotels, restaurants, fashion, cosmetics, and cars, it was the same story: Demand massively outstripped supply.

Suddenly, a market that had the means to buy many of these brands shrank significantly. One of the biggest factors is the sudden decline in the ranks of the “super nouveau riche.” What seemed to be an unstoppable rise of those with high disposable incomes and an insatiable appetite for luxury has all but disappeared. The bubble has burst, and not just in the property and financial sectors. Many people – who were spending well above their means and using luxury brands to display wealth they didn’t have – have had to adjust to a major shift in circumstances.

For those who still have money to spend, it could be one of the best times to buy, as luxury is now more affordable. This has been evident in ongoing sales. Some of the smarter retailers have even realigned their normal pricing to meet customer expectations. However, the ability to spend is no longer the only barrier as many people are now driven more by sentiment than actual hardship.

In the image-conscious Middle East, attitudes have started to change. Overt displays of luxury or

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wealth are no longer essential for social acceptance; in fact, they can even be a turn-off for many. Affluent consumers are curbing their profligate ways to reassess, re-evaluate and reprioritize their lives.

Luxury is now much more personal – it is about richness of experience rather than just products. Regardless of wealth, people are now much more conscious about what they spend their disposable income on. Impulse purchasing is now extremely rare.

The purchasing process is now much more complex and takes longer, especially for larger investments. Luxury brands have to work much harder to justify the investment, especially if there is a more affordable option.

The questions many luxury brand owners have no doubt been asking are: Who actually is our target audience now? Do we understand them? How do we connect with them? What will motivate them to purchase? How do we keep them loyal?

MICHAEL HUGHES. Former executive director of strategy at The Brand Union, a branding agency with regional offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi

Many brand managers have turned to advertising and PR, but this is next to useless unless they understand whom they are talking to and why. In many cases, a brand might be hoping that keeping its name in the spotlight will lead to rewards when times improve. However, according to many experts, times have changed. The extravagance of the mid-noughties is not coming back any time soon.

Affluent consumers are starting to question and challenge the luxury brands of which they were once advocates. The new affluents are redefining, reassessing and re-evaluating their lives. This is happening across different markets and cultures and it will mean a major shift in the way luxury brands market their merchandise in the new economy. Discounts, sales, and other short-term initiatives simply won’t be enough.

Once a brand has a true picture of its target audience and its value proposition, a realignment may need to be considered. Careful consideration needs to be given to balance the brand’s heritage and reputation with the changes in the market.

Values may need to be more thoughtful, selective, and reframed to sync with new attitudes. The promise may need to be recrafted and then used as a basis to rebuild the entire brand.

The process should be based on sound consumer insight on how to reconnect the brand with its core audience. The internal culture needs to be rebuilt and the new brand proposition infused across all touch points to deliver meaningful experiences.

SEPTEMBER 2010 | COVER STORY

Telling tales Luxury brands now require stories that imbue a purchase with greater meaning, stories that resonate with values and experiences oussef Naaman is managing director of atelier in Beirut, a division of ad agency Leo Burnett specializing in fashion and luxury brands. He shares with Communicate 10 stories brands can tell in their marketing strategy in order to be successful. The stories were identified as part of atelier’s 2010 Luxury Trend Report, “Luxury in a recovering society.”

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THE STORY OF SUPERIOR PERFORMANCE. Substantiated by how and why it is the best reassures the consumer.

THE STORY OF SOPHISTICATION. A subtle language that assures the consumer of a shared taste and aesthetic.

THE STORY OF CRAFTSMANSHIP. Upheld by expertise, time spent, tradition, and beautiful design.

THE STORY OF COLLABORATION. Gives a brand an exciting hybrid story, co-opting the creative partner’s brand attributes, for a collective experience.

YOUSSEF NAAMAN. Managing director of atelier

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THE STORY OF EXCLUSIVITY. Imbuing an item with a sense of rarity and exception, which justifies the expense.

THE STORY OF INVOLVEMENT. The rising demand for bespoke items builds the status and exclusivity of both brand and consumer.

THE STORY OF INNOVATION. Keeps brands relevant, particularly those with a heritage story; and a really significant innovation can create a luxury brand.

THE STORY OF HERITAGE. Not just a name and a date of inception, but a proper history, whether a story of longevity or cultural immersion.

THE STORY OF PROVENANCE. If a brand comes from a location famous for that product, that place’s story becomes its own.

THE STORY OF ETHICS. A green or fair-trade badge isn’t enough – there must also be an authentic, inspirational, or heartwarming tale.

“Luxury in a recovering society,” the 2010 Luxur y Trend Report by atelier, a division of Leo Burnett – www.atelier-lb.com

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | MEDIA

Cities of gold Media zones in the region are in a rush to attract talent and investment. Communicate assesses the field by Rania Habib he UK is developing a media city of its own; MediaCityUK, in Manchester, will be the BBC’s new headquarters, and is expected to open its doors next year. Who knew? As far as Communicate was aware, media cities were a thing of the Middle East, where like-minded businesses could come to set up shop, catch much-needed tax breaks, and operate under more transparent laws than they might find elsewhere in the region.

And while the UK may be following suit, media cities are seemingly a regional model, and a sustainable one at that. Egypt spearheaded the movement in 1997, when it inaugurated the Egyptian Media Production City (EMPC) in Giza. Thirteen years later, the region has eight media cities – and counting.

The UAE alone hosts five of these, (see page 26). The country is perhaps best known for Dubai Media City (DMC), inaugurated in 2000 and, more recently, Abu Dhabi’s twofour54. Tony Orsten, chief executive of twofour54, says the proliferation of media hubs in the UAE comes down to the country’s attitude towards foreign investment.

“I think it’s down to freedom,” he says. “The UAE has always been very open to having foreign investment. At twoufour54, we are trying hard to make it a very good balance between investment from the region and from outside.”

While twofour54 is focused on creating Arabic content for the region and beyond, according to Orsten, the DMC model was structured differently. DMC accepts 100 percent foreign ownership and offers a 50-year corporate and personal tax exemption. It was set up with a vision to build a media community that would bring broadcasters, television production companies, publishers, ad agencies, public relations

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TONY ORSTEN. Chief executive of twofour54

JAYANT BHARGAVA. Principal with Booz & Co.

JAMAL AL SHARIF. Managing director of Dubai Media City and Dubai Studio City

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companies, and freelance journalists together in one area, creating what Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and founder of DMC, called a “media ecosystem.”

Jamal Al Sharif, managing director of DMC and Dubai Studio City (DSC – a DMC offshoot), says Tecom’s investment and strategic vision, along with that of the Dubai government, has lead to DMC having 1,432 business partners, while DSC today counts 257 – three years after it was completed to cater to the needs of DMC business partners looking for more developed studios, broadcasting centers, sound studios, and all kinds of broadcasting infrastructure and services.

PIONEER. “DMC was a pioneer in a very global and metropolitan city,” says Al Sharif. “Dubai was successful with tourism, hotels, financial centers, and airlines, so I think DMC came at the right time, because most of these corporations require a media infrastructure.” Al Sharif tells Communicate that the UAE’s business environment, along with its federal regulations, allowed increased media activity. “It made it easier for international companies to consider the UAE,” he says.

Orsten says twofour54’s focus on Arabic content is part of the Abu Dhabi 2030 plan outlined by the government, whereby one of the goals is to create a hub for media to complement the creative and cultural centers being built in the capital.

“We believe you have to have a creative heart to the society, where you’re able to create content and disseminate it,” says Orsten. “Everything we do is creation of content, with people creating content

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in the UAE for the Arab world and beyond. That is absolutely key, and there’s no reason at all that content from this part of the world can’t be good enough to ultimately be seen by the rest of the world.”

The rest of the UAE’s media hubs are focused on developing media-related activities: DSC is dedicated to production of films and television commercials, and broadcasting; Ras Al Khaimah Media City leases land to investors looking to set up facilities such as printing presses, film studios, ad agencies, or publishing houses; Creative City Fujairah operates in seven areas – audiovisual, publishing, training, theatrical arts, design, technology, and cinema.

DIFFICULT. Jayant Bhargava, principal with business analysts Booz & Co., says it’s difficult to say whether one model works better than the other. “I think everybody has a place, and in general these zones will move towards playing a sector development role, sooner or later,” he says. “These hubs, in the UAE, in Egypt, in Jordan, all attract and play at the regional level. The UAE is attracting talent from the region, and playing in the same pot. And they’re all moving towards the same end point, which is addressing the key challenges of the sector, while giving people a conducive environment to work in.”

Al Sharif also believes the media cities in the UAE complete each other and create a healthy environment. “Business partners get to choose where their business fits the best,” he says.

“Every emirate has different models and criteria, and maybe different services. It’s a small country, but there are lots of opportunities. We guide any company that comes to DMC, and will guide them on to DSC if they fit better there, or to the International Media Production Zone (IMPZ, another DMC offshoot aimed at developing publishing) if they fit better there. And sometimes, if we feel their model doesn’t fit in Dubai, we will guide them to other media hubs in the country. We just want to make sure the company chooses the right place to develop business and add value to the community and the economy.”

Bhargava says the biggest challenges facing the media cities are funding and finding talent. “Finding talent will continue to remain an issue, as will the ability to develop high-quality content,” he says.

“Another issue is more down to regulations – not so much on setting them, but on increasing transparency.”

Orsten says twofour54 does not operate under laws different from the rest of the country, but that the Media Zone Authority (of which Orsten is CEO) has created a companies’ law. “It’s very transparent, very Western, and all-encompassing. It’s a free zone because of the tax-free and ownership structure, but it ultimately falls under the federal law. We’re just giving people the comfort that they have a real law they can look at, read, and understand.”

ADDRESSING CHALLENGES. A recent re-structure at Tecom points to the authority’s desire to address the challenges facing media cities, in order to become closer to its business partners, says Al Sharif. He says that with the financial crisis affecting the media industry, officials need to work more closely with their partners to weather the storm, and to work on other challenges.

“There isn’t a lot of talent here, so it’s a challenge for companies to hire talented people,” says Al Sharif. “The industry is new, yet still we’ve managed to come a long way, with productions such as [UAE feature film] City of Life or Freej [a cartoon series about four Emirati grandmothers]. But only a few years ago, none of this existed. Still, talent is something we need to address, as well as investments in media production, as this is very new to the Arab world. We need more investment activity to move along with the growth of the media industry.”

According to Orsten, the issue facing media hubs in the region is that… well, they are based in the region. “We are in the Arab world; people think people here throw bombs on the street and kill each other,” he says.

“People don’t get it, and part of our job is to get people to understand that this is a civilized part of the world, and that there are important and viable

opportunities here. It’s becoming less and less of an issue, as there is a stream of businesses from the region that want to come here because they believe in us. When we started twofour54, we were trying to convince people to come to Abu Dhabi, because there was nothing. Now there is a fantastic array of content being created here.”

FORGING AHEAD. Such challenges don’t seem to be deterring anyone from setting up shop. In 2009, Kuv Capital, a digital investment company in Beirut, launched a website to gather support for a proposed Beirut Media City (BMC).

According to Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National, Herve Cuviliez, managing director of Kuv Capital, had set a deadline of September 2009 to decide if the BMC model was feasible. There have been no updates on the website.

“There’s a good media industry in Lebanon, and many of our partners come from Lebanon, as does a big percentage of the talent,” says Al Sharif.

“So having a media city in Beirut would add value to the region.”

Earlier this year, plans were announced for two more media cities – in Baghdad and in Saudi Arabia.

Baghdad Media City is expected to be inaugurated in 2011, and will focus on broadcasting, studios, new media, music, publishing, and production. As for Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Minister of Culture and Information, Dr. Abdul Aziz Khoja, announced plans for an “integrated media city that will help boost media activities in the kingdom.” But he did not specify when or where the media city would be set up.

Bhargava says having a media city in Beirut would make sense, given that the bulk of the regional talent comes from Lebanon. “The talent is already there, they just need an institution to bring things together in a formalized way,” he says.

“Saudi Arabia will face the challenge of attracting talent, and maybe face the same challenges the UAE faced, but more acutely, now that they are coming late into the market. And I think Baghdad will have the biggest challenge,

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because of the ­political instability, and I’m not sure if they have local talent.”

Orsten prefers not to speculate on whether plans for Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq will go through. But he believes the political instability in Lebanon and Iraq may present serious challenges, while Saudi Arabia’s conservative climate could be a difficult sell to media professionals. However, Orsten welcomes the proliferation of media hubs.

“The more clusters that appear, the more media professionals will get paid, the more stories will be written, the better newspapers will be, and the better shows will be,” says Orsten. “The more there are, the better the quality. We are not here in a competitive way; 340 million people in the region need a voice that will ultimately represent the Arab nation to the world. So like I said, the more, the merrier; the more these things happen, the better the content. I don’t see anything as com-

petition, to be honest. Anything that comes here is ultimately going to be good for the people here.”

MANY COMPONENTS. According to Al Sharif, having a media city alone is not enough. He says that a media hub should be one of many components driving a country’s economy.

“Managing a media city is not an easy thing, as it’s a very large operation,” he says. “Regulations and the quality of service should be up-to-date, to provide the best services and information to your partners. Transparency is also very important. These are all serious issues, so you can’t just have a media city, you need to have other components.”

Orsten recalls being in the UK 20 years ago, and says the country’s media felt it couldn’t compete with the US. “Now, the majority of top 10 shows in the US have come from the UK,” he says.

“It took that long,” he continues. “In the West, we’re much less able to do anything as visionary as this. I’ve been here three years, and so much has changed. Having media hubs here has given us the opportunity to create something that wasn’t there to begin with in the UK, and if it had been, our media industry would have grown 10 times faster. And I believe strongly that this part of the world will move very quickly to produce content that will ultimately be attractive enough to the rest of the world.”

Bhargava says media hubs have an integral and critical role to play, and he sees them progressing in the right direction. “The landscape has changed considerably for media players, and for the right reasons,” he says. “The competition created by the media zones will make each of them focus on what differentiates them from the rest. I can already see it changing; people are really investing, and everybody has had to pull up their socks.”

MEDIA CITIES IN THE REGION Media hub: twofour54 Website: www.twofour54.com Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE Founded: 2008 CEO: Tony Orsten Specialty: Arabic content creation Media hub: Dubai Studio City Website: www.dubaistudiocity.ae Location: Dubai, UAE Founded: 2005 Managing director: Jamal Al Sharif Specialty: film production, broadcast Media hub: Ras Al Khaimah Media Free Zone Website: www.rakmediacity.org Location: Ras Al Khaimah, UAE Founded: 2006 CEO: Junaid Shaikh Specialty: printing presses, film and TV studios, advertising agencies

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Media hub: Creative City Fujairah Website: www.creativecity.cc Location: Fujairah, UAE Founded: 2005 Chairman: Sheikh Rashid bin Hamad Al Sharqi Specialty: audiovisual, publishing, training, theatrical arts, design, technology, cinema Media hub: Dubai Media City Website: www.dubaimediacity.com Location: Dubai,UAE Founded: 2000 Managing director: Jamal Al Sharif Managing director of Tecom Media Cluster: Mohammed Abdullah (former executive director of DMC) Specialty: media businesses

Media hub: Egyptian Media Production City Website: www.empc.com.eg Location: Giza, Egypt Founded: 1997 CEO: Abdul Fattah El Tohami Specialty: studios, post-production, preproduction, foreign productions Media hub: Jordan Media City Website: www.jordanmediacity.com Location: Amman, Jordan Founded: 2001 CEO: Radi Al Khas Media hub: Baghdad Me­dia City Website: www.bmc-iraq.com Due for completion: 2011 Location: Baghdad, Iraq CEO: Kareem M. Ashoor

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Post-match analysis D’PR’s Jamal Al Mawed says companies in the region used innovative marketing techniques to score big during the World Cup

JAMAL AL MAWED. Senior account manager at D’PR

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or the doom-and-gloom analysts who predicted a month of crime, controversy, and carnage for visitors, South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup was something of an anticlimax. In the end, the closest the tournament got to controversy was a Luis Suarez handball, and most of the violence was actually committed on the field by Holland’s Marc Van Bommel.

Here in the region, World Cup battles were a distinctly corporate affair, as companies vied for a piece of the football pie. The resulting melee included international sabotage theories, 3D games, live airport broadcasts, and a 42-hour football match. Now that the debris has cleared, the lessons to be learned from South Africa 2010 should provide food for thought for marketing managers when Brazil 2014 beckons.

two giant six-square-meter screens, and seating for 600 guests. Jumeirah Group built The Arena in Jumeirah Beach Hotel with a capacity for 600 viewers, while popular beach bar Barasti followed suit with its Barasti Beach Stadium, seating 1,200. Dubai Media City hosted 3,000 fans at The Palladium, while the Walk at Jumeirah Beach Residence was the location of the Kia Fest marquee, covering an entire parking lot. Even the newly-opened Meydan Racecourse worked its way into the reckoning as it set up screens and popular VIP areas for live games.

Far from suffering from empty seats à la Johannesburg, the different locations were at full capacity for most of the games, suggesting that the companies that invest the most in impressive venues are likely to see the most action in 2014.

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME. As the RollsRoyce of sporting events, with a predicted cumulative viewership of 20 billion people for the entire tournament, the World Cup almost guarantees success to outlets showing games.

This time around, local companies needed no persuasion to invest their money into bigger and better venues for live broadcasts.

Du and Coca-Cola teamed up to provide us with One, an upscale two-storey marquee in the Burj Khalifa area featuring 35 plasma screens,

GET INTERACTIVE. With Middle Eastern fans obsessively supporting their adoptive teams, such as Brazil, Argentina, and Spain, brands that provided platforms for two-way communication had a lot more success in keeping these customers engaged.

A d’PR client, Visa, was one company that leveraged its official sponsorship of the event with activities that allowed fans to get interactive. Fresh from bringing the actual World Cup trophy to Dubai Mall last year for fans to take

MARKETING | SEPTEMBER 2010

pictures with and, in some cases, even touch, the exclusive financial services partner of the World Cup launched a YouTube channel titled Go Fans, which enabled fans to express their support by viewing, uploading, and sharing videos.

Visa also launched a Facebook application titled Adopt-a-fan, which allowed fans whose teams had been eliminated to transfer their support to another team, with their profile picture being transformed in the process. The company also commissioned a survey to learn more about fans’ viewing habits in the UAE, exploring the number of hours of football watched per week, and the players most idolized in the country.

Dubai Festival City catered to the public’s voracious appetite for the sport by setting up an indoor beach football stadium at the Festival Centre, where teams went head-to-head daily in three-a-side games of beach football, minus the brain-melting heat of a real Dubai beach.

Mirdif City Centre launched a similar initiative by hosting a summer camp at its Soccer Circus, giving youngsters the chance to play out their World Cup dreams.

TAILOR YOUR INITIATIVES. It was refreshing to see some companies launch initiatives that were actually related to their product, thereby maximizing their brand awareness at the same time.

It didn’t take Grand Cinemas long to put two and two together and realize that its screens could provide a whole new viewing experience for fans who weren’t interested in inhaling two cubic tons of shisha smoke at every game. A deal with Al Jazeera allowed it to broadcast all 64 games in its clean, air-conditioned cinemas across the UAE, resulting in one of the most fulfilling viewing experiences on offer during the summer.

Etisalat was another company that was on the ball (no pun intended), as it launched a variety of mobile phone services on the eve of the tournament, including a dedicated WAP portal featuring news and details about the event and the participating teams, team news feeds, player profiles, statistics, fixtures tables, and team lineups. Customers could also sign up for an SMS service of live goal updates for as low as Dh10 for the whole tournament. In addition, the company teamed up with Al Jazeera to launch a 3D channel for viewers with the right hardware to enjoy another type of viewing experience.

Emirates leveraged its $250 million official sponsorship by opening new air routes and offering multiple packages to South Africa covering air travel, match tickets, accommodation, and transfers to and from games. Furthermore, the official FIFA partner offered live broadcasts of games at 14 airports, and even allowed weary business travelers the option of watching replays on flights.

CREATIVITY SHINES THROUGH. Setting a world record is a sure-fire way of getting your brand

MONEY WELL SPENT. Local companies invested in bigger and better venues for live broadcasts some attention, so kudos to Snickers for managing to organize the longest football match ever played (not to be confused with Japan versus Paraguay, which felt like the longest ever but in fact lasted only 120 minutes).

The confectionery brand, well known for its sports marketing, chose 36 players from a plethora of applicants to take part in the match, which clocked in at 42 hours and five minutes.

The game took place in Qatar, and was watched by officials from Guinness World Records, who endorsed the claim.

Perhaps even more creative were Al Jazeera’s excuses for transmission cuts during the opening ceremony, followed by further technical problems during the early days of the tournament, including transmission blackouts, loss of signal, and the morphing of commentary from English into French. The Qatar-based broadcaster said “a deliberate act of sabotage” was to blame, which conspiracy theorists attributed to a host of sources, ranging from individual hackers to foreign military interference.

In the end, the perpetrators seemingly lost interest after three days, perhaps realizing that France versus Uruguay had done more harm to the World Cup than they ever could.

JUST GIVE US NANCY. When you’re not sure what to do, just bring out Nancy Ajram. Coca-Cola’s strategy of having Ajram singing, dancing, and fist-pumping to the official Coca-Cola World Cup theme, “Wave Your Flag,” had us contentedly sipping Coke for the remainder of the tournament. Sometimes it is that simple.

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | RESEARCH

Who cares wins A survey by Ogilvy’s branding arm shows brands with good old values win with young Muslims

by Rania Habib

ere’s an interesting fact: Young Muslim consumers are not interested in brands that present themselves as “Islamic.” “If they are Islamic, brands should be so in every sense, and not be opportunistic,” says Tanya Dernaika, planning director at ad agency Memac Ogilvy & Mather. “Once young Muslim consumers feel they’re being played with or used for opportunistic reasons, they will turn their backs on brands. But when they see that a company is profit-driven but still doing much more in terms of giving back to the community, these brands are the most successful.”

Brands better listen up. These insights come from the Islamic branding survey, “Brands, Islam, and the New Muslim Consumer,” carried out by TNS and Ogilvy Noor, the new Islamic branding arm of ad agency Ogilvy (see box, page 31).

Why are young Muslim consumers so important?

Dernaika says that the two-year survey revealed a powerful segment within the community: 18- to 34-year-olds.

“We’ve seen the emergence of young Muslim consumers who are very proud of their faith, and this pride and adherence has an influence on their brand and consumption choices,” says Dernaika.

And according to the Noor Global Brand Index – part of the general survey – their choices were more likely to be global: Food brands Lipton, Nestlé, Nescafé, Nido, and Kraft were the top five favored brands, ranked by their Sharia-friendliness.

“We didn’t try to define how Islamic brands are, but how close Muslims feel towards brands,” says

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TANYA DERNAIKA. Planning director at Memac Ogilvy & Mather

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Dernaika. “Consumers felt that the top five brands’ actions delivered on their promise. They come to Muslim majority markets, but they don’t just want to drain the consumer wallet – they want to give back to the community. They consider them to be brands that have bothered to create advertising and communications relevant to them. They’ve created jobs and established relationships with communities.

These are the brands they feel close to.”

Najeeb Hasany, Kraft’s marketing director in the GCC, says the FMCG group’s almost-100-year-old heritage in the region is very important, and that the company’s efforts to engage with Muslim consumers will be continuous. “This continuous effort is one of the cornerstones of our marketing practice, not just here, but also globally,” says Hasany.

“For Muslims, it’s halal foods, so there have been many instances where we have reformulated our products so they can have a halal designation.

Also, for almost 90 years, we imported cheese into this region. Today, our cheese plant is located in Bahrain, and that was a major investment on our part. It brings us closer to our consumers than when we were sourcing products from outside.”

Dernaika says that while consumers trust and encourage regional brands because they are owned and run by Muslims, global brands have an edge.

“Global brands have resources to be more innovative, and youths embrace innovation,” she says.

“One stereotype that was debunked during this survey was that young Muslims care only

RESEARCH | SEPTEMBER 2010

about modesty and purity. But they want to have fun too. They want entertainment that’s in line with their values.”

While global brands tweak their communications to suit the region they’re operating in, Dernaika says most of the brands that ranked high on the index were behaving the way they would anywhere else.

“Some brands make conscious decisions to appeal to young Muslim consumers, but some are just applying good, universal business practice,” she says. “What these consumers are looking for in terms of Sharia-compliance is transparency, humility, quality, and authenticity.

“They need to justify their consumption behavior, and to feel that their decisions are not in conflict with their beliefs,” she continues. “What brands need to do is provide consumers with reassurance, first and foremost about the product quality. Beyond that, the more consumers can know and research about a company’s business practice and customer service, the closer they will feel to the brand. Information is key to that segment of the population. More information means more reassurance.”

A brand must reflect the values of the people who invest in it, says Hasany. “Brands need to understand the culture, and we should make sure that a brand always stands for the values of its consumers,” he says. “We have many corporate social responsibility initiatives and traditions of giving back to society, and those are values that we take from society.”

Hasany adds that Kraft continuously ensures it is able to connect with consumers. “When connecting at a deep enough level, we must be able to understand what the consumer is about. Powerful brands in the region would not have become powerful without understanding what the consumer expects of them.”

DEEP RELATIONS. Dernaika says that brand owners and marketers should focus on this generation.

“These consumers enjoy the deepest relationships with brands today, because they integrate brands into their lives,” she says.

“At a superficial level, they like brands that help them express their identity. Brands should step up and meet their expectations, because their trust is difficult to win. But once brands gain their loyalty, they are extremely loyal. They will embrace brands wholeheartedly, but they will also shun other brands.

They will readily use word of mouth.”

Brands aren’t doing enough to appeal to young Muslims, according to Dernaika. But she hopes the results of the survey will change that.

“Marketers should stop being scared. A lot of them are kind of paralyzed by the fact that they don’t understand this market very well,” she says.

“They adopt engagement strategies that are conservative, not creative, because they are worried about offending. Through this survey, we’re trying to inspire brand owners to know that there’s much more out there that’s halal than what is haram. So they should explore the opportunities of what is halal. We want to unshackle marketers, because this generation of consumers will influence the future.”

THE NOOR GLOBAL BRAND INDEX 2010 (SEE NEXT PAGE FOR EXPLANATION) BRAND Lipton Nestlé Nescafé Nido Kraft Maggi Mirinda Pringles Lays 7Up Colgate Lux Sunsilk Close Up Dove Pantene Rexona Head & Shoulders Heinz Nivea Fair & Lovely Pepsi Coca-Cola Air Arabia L’Oreal Axe Emirates Red Bull Etihad Airways Singapore Airlines Cathay Pacific Citibank Standard Chartered HSBC RBS

Noor Index Score 131 130 122 118 117 117 110 110 110 109 108 108 105 103 103 102 102 101 101 98 97 95 94 91 90 88 85 78 77 63 62 59 54 51 47

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | RESEARCH

TOP MARKS. Lipton has the highest Noor Index score of 131

WHAT IS OGILVY NOOR Ogilvy Noor is a multidisciplinary global Islamic branding practice that aims to help brands better engage with Muslim consumers worldwide.

The Muslim consumer is viewed as a critically important segment for marketers, with the halal segment alone worth $2.1 trillion, and growing at $500 billion annually.

“We are a specialist consultancy for clients, and as a result of our report ‘Brands, Islam, and the New Muslim Consumer,’ companies will engage with the Muslim consumer,” says Tanya Dernaika, planning director at Memac Ogilvy & Mather. “Our expertise is with the consumer, but also with branding.”

Miles Young, global CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, says in a press release, “A market of 1.8 billion people that has scarcely been tapped, Muslim consumers offer enormous potential to businesses around the world – but only if their values are fully understood.While there are vast and colorful differences among the populations surveyed, we identified behavioral trends and insights that would be valuable to marketers in developing meaningful relationships with this emerging global constituency.”

tive “Muslim-friendliness” of certain global brands across the world today.

How was the index compiled?

The index averages the composite scores in each of four markets, and as a global average ranking can be taken as indicative of how appealing these brands are to Muslim consumers relative to each other.

The numbers represent the people who agree with the statement, “This brand is completely halal or Sharia-compliant,” averaged across the four markets.

How should one read the index?

The scores are on a 100-point index, where brands above 100 are perceived by consumers as being more Sharia-compliant and brands below 100 are seen as less so.

Why were these brands chosen?

The 35 global brands chosen to test quantitatively (see previous page) were the ones regularly mentioned spontaneously in qualitative research, as well as other brands in the same category to provide a measure of comparison.

(Source: Memac Ogilvy & Mather) SURVEY INFORMATION

WHAT IS THE NOOR GLOBAL BRAND INDEX? MILES YOUNG. Global CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide

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The Noor Global Brand Index is a preliminary exploration of the consumer perception of halal status and Sharia-compliance, or rela-

Countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Malaysia.

Sample size: More than 2,000 people.

Criteria: 18- to 60-year-old Muslims.

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | PRINT

Magazines’ new pitch Time Inc. works with Starcom MediaVest to guarantee performance results, or run make-good advertising by Nat Ives agazines have always promised their advertisers a certain number of paying readers.

Now the industry is moving toward another guarantee: That its ads will work.

Publisher Time Inc., and one of its biggest ad buyers, the Starcom MediaVest Group, are collaborating to develop promises that certain numbers of people will remember ads or take action on them. If a participating marketer’s campaign doesn’t achieve the promised result, Time Inc. will run free additional ads until it does.

The Alliance for Magazine Accountability will study audience and performance data from outside providers, Affinity’s Vista service and Mediamark Research and Intelligence’s AdMeasure service, covering the first half of this year, then start making guarantees covering the second half of the year.

“We’ve been preaching that magazines engage readers like no other media,” says Stephanie George, executive vice-president at Time Inc., which publishes magazines such as Time, People, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune.

“So today, in a crowded media market, when it comes to accountability, the work from this alliance will help prove magazines’ advertising effectiveness.”

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NBC’S MOVES. The recession, new research tools, and increased spending on more easily tracked digital channels have pressured all media to better prove their worth to advertisers – and

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that’s slowly making performance guarantees more common. In TV, for example, NBC has been guaranteeing audience engagement to some clients in particular deals for several years.

Circulation will continue to be important because it’s a valuable metric and benchmark for all marketers, says John Muszynski, chief investment officer at SMGX, a Starcom MediaVest unit where the group’s agencies exchange intelligence, test new models and share resources.

“However,” he says, “as all the other media out there starts to bring out more sophisticated, more precise targeting data and accountability metrics, the magazine industry needs to keep up.”

The other major US magazine publishers, including Condé Nast, Hearst, Bonnier, Meredith, and Rodale, only guarantee paid circulation. But since the beginning of the year, two magazines, Scholastic Parent & Child and The Week, have also been guaranteeing performance for marketers making big enough ad buys. Both titles use Affinity’s Vista service, which surveys readers on measures such as ad recall and actions they took after seeing ads.

Scholastic guarantees qualifying advertisers that their ads will generate enough reader action to rank in the top third among the women’s magazines that they are using. If a campaign’s results fall short, Scholastic will issue a 10 percent refund.

The Week guarantees each qualifying advertiser that its ads will get reader recall scores that rank in the top third of all the magazines in the

marketer’s media plan. If they don’t, The Week will run more ads until the guarantee is met.

DIFFERENT. The pledge that Time Inc. and Starcom MediaVest are developing is different because it deals with the number of people who recall an ad campaign or take action in response to it, not performance in relation to another title or mix of titles.

The Week’s guarantee makes advertisers happy, helps sell ad pages, and shores up ad prices, according to Steven Kotok, president of The Week. “We only do it for 12 pages of advertising or more, so a lot of advertisers are running extra paid pages to reach that threshold to get the guarantee,” he says.

The push toward performance guarantees from a major publisher such as Time Inc. suggests such promises could become much more common for magazines – especially if it proves to help ad sales.

But how these guarantees are executed will determine how much they benefit magazines and advertisers, says Scott Kruse, managing director and director of print at Group M, another major ad buyer.

“In theory, this sounds like a positive, but there are going to be a lot of questions around methodology and the nature of the guarantees,” he says.

“It’s one thing to do it on a smaller title like Scholastic or The Week, but when you do it across a major publisher, it could become a lot more complex.”

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | MARKETING

Lux grows in Asia, Latin America JWT’s Sam Williams on selling soap in more prosperous and competitive emerging markets

by Normandy Madden ux, one of Unilever’s billion-dollar global beauty brands, has evolved from a bar soap once marketed in the US using glamorous Hollywood stars into a leading mass-market brand in emerging markets.

Sam Williams is in charge of Lux’s growth as Asian and Latin American women become more affluent consumers and rival local brands get better at marketing. Williams moved to Singapore in April as global business director for JWT’s Lux business, overseeing marketing for one of Unilever’s biggest brands. Previously, she was the London-based director of JWT’s Kellogg’s business.

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SAM WILLIAMS. Global business director for JWT’s Lux account

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Tian-Poh Sze, is currently based in Singapore.

The job has previously been based in Sao Paulo and Bangkok, but it’s been in Singapore for about two-and-a-half years.

How big a brand is Lux for Unilever?

Lux is sold all over the world and sales are over 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) globally per year.

It’s one of Unilever’s top three beauty brands, along with Pond’s and Dove. Lux isn’t sold in the US anymore; the brand is marketed under the Caress name there.

Where is Lux sold?

Lux is in 50 or 60 markets globally, but the top 10 account for most of the business: India, Brazil, US [as Caress], China, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Thailand, South Africa, and Pakistan.

Those are the main markets for skin cleansing. If you take hair-care products, we would also include Japan. Lux hair-care products are only sold in Japan and China.

Unilever has other hair-care brands like Sunsilk and Hazeline in major markets, but they have not decided to introduce Lux hair-care anywhere else at this point.

Lux is also big in South Africa. We are exploring the rest of the African continent, but that’s more about sales potential than current sales.

Why is the global role based in Singapore?

The decision was made by Unilever, but it’s essential from an agency perspective anyway, since the global vice-president for the Lux brand,

What is the strategy behind Lux’s marketing?

The last big relaunch was in early 2008, with a campaign called “Diva,” which had [English actress] Rachel Weisz as the global talent. We also

MARKETING | SEPTEMBER 2010

featured [Bollywood actress] Priyanka [Chopra] in India. The campaign ran in 50-plus countries and was all about soft skin and increasing your desirability. The campaign was very sensuous. The strategy was about helping women stand out from the crowd; that’s what our consumer is looking for.

What’s the current global tagline?

Unilever is a very innovation-led company, so changes to the brand depend on what news is coming through. There’s no tagline currently.

That’s one of my challenges; bringing some distinctiveness and coherence to the work.

Campaigns can be local or multi-country, depending on the learnings, but that goes with the category. Women’s interpretation of beauty can be very different around the world.

like the Catherine Zeta-Jones film last year in North Asia. It’s definitely an area we’re looking closely at: mobile, Internet, and digital platforms.

Lux is a mass brand and television continues to remain important.

Has the global recession hurt Lux sales?

No, Lux is very mass-market, and most consumers are in developing and emerging markets. Even in the US [Caress] is more of a Hispanic brand.

Sales have grown every year for the past five years, and Lux has strong brand equity and a strong presence in consumers’ hearts.

but it’s more premium. There are some strong local brands like Goodrich in India, Liushen in China, and Parrot in Thailand, and local value brands are a big part of the competition, because they are becoming more sophisticated in their marketing.

It’s a big challenge for us, capturing women as they’re trading up from soap bars, and making sure they choose Lux rather than a local brand.

Other categories can also be a threat. In markets like South Africa, for example, a naturals range from Dettol has just been launched and the packaging and in-store materials have more beauty cues than just germ-killing soap, so now there’s competition coming from that category as well.

Who is Lux’s biggest competitor?

It varies by market. Olay is a huge brand in China,

Is Unilever focusing more on digital marketing?

We’ve done some work in this area already,

What motivates consumers in emerging markets?

There is a global identity for Lux packaging that gets localized in a pre-agreed framework, and TV ads are shot featuring local stars. What unites [consumers] is [their] modest background.

As women become more sophisticated in their beauty regime, that’s where other products start to come in.

In some emerging markets, women are still using beauty bars. As they become more affluent, especially in places like India and China with their emerging middle class, they start to bring in other products like shampoo, conditioner and lipstick, and then move onto face moisturizers, fragrances, whitening and skin-tone products… the products become more specialized.

Lux is one of their first beauty products with accessible aspirations, and that gets portrayed through the Lux woman in ads and how we portray her consistently. We talk about her being a woman who writes her own story. That’s what unites consumers with the brand.

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | MARKETING

Single-minded strategy scores in sport Visa, P&G, Coke hit the mark by connecting every facet of their sports sponsorship activation to one big idea by Jeremy Mullman ricey sports sponsorships are often described as a casualty of the digital revolution. Why write a nine-figure check to be an official partner of the FIFA World Cup or the Olympics when a well-executed Web video such as Nike’s “Write the Future” can score 20 million online views, or associate a non-sponsor more strongly with an event than the companies that paid for the affiliation?

Increasingly, mega-marketers are finding that the best way to make such sponsorships worth their considerable cost – and fend off well-executed ambush attempts – is to connect every activity related to the sponsorship to one big idea.

That approach paid off handsomely for global marketers such as Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Visa. Executives say that for brands such as these, tightly aligning all their activation for a sponsorship under a theme that reinforces their brand message pays significant dividends for

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JEREMY MULLMAN. Owner of EyeCandy, an agency specializing in interactive media, including digitized outdoor.

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them and limits opportunities for competitors.

“It is not important, it is critical,” says Antonio Lucio, chief marketing officer at Visa, which saw dramatically improved returns on sponsorship investment after collating all of its global activities under the “Go” platform, which emphasizes the access Visa provided during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics (and, subsequently, the 2010 World Cup). “At the end of the day, a sponsorship is nothing more than an amplification of the brand message, and it doesn’t work if that message isn’t… consistent,” he says.

There is, in some way, a back-to-the-future quality to this trend. Part of the reason heavily themed sponsorship efforts went out of style was that work built for one event is often difficult to repurpose for another. An ad built for a soccer tournament doesn’t fit in during a basketball broadcast, and it’s hard to justify the expense

MARKETING | SEPTEMBER 2010

of creating reams of creative with such a short shelf-life.

But the soaring costs of sponsorships, combined with an increasingly fragmented media that not only dilutes muddled messages but also provides countless outlets – and ammunition – for would-be ambushers has forced major-event sponsors to reconsider.

One mega-marketer that clearly came to the same conclusion was P&G, which reportedly spent $15 million to become an official sponsor of the US Olympic team and utilized the platform solely to court moms.

The “Proud Sponsor of Moms” program at the Winter Olympics incorporated advertising and promotion for 18 brands, including endorsement deals with 16 US athletes and the company’s first corporate-branding effort on TV, marshaled by Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Oregon.

The company also set up a house in the Olympic Village in Vancouver for families of US athletes and paid travel costs for moms of athletes who couldn’t otherwise afford to come to the games. Besides some well-received ads produced in advance of the games, P&G also got NBC to provide footage of moms celebrating the victories of their children to show in a commercial that aired during the closing ceremonies.

The effort paid off in spades. P&G’s favorability rating jumped 10 points over the course of the marketing program, says global brandbuilding officer Marc Pritchard, and sales and share of the participating brands grew ahead of projections. In all, he says, the program generated 6 billion impressions, 3 billion of them from PR with 2 billion from TV and 1 billion online. Months later, he says, P&G is still getting letters from moms thanking the company for the work.

UNIFYING IDEA. Key to making the program work, Pritchard says, was a strong, unifying idea. “We had 18 different brands that sponsored 16 different athletes. Each of [the brands] had its own idea. That was good. But we didn’t think it was enough. So then we put that to our creatives.

“The brief was, ‘What idea would link these 18 brands, 16 athletes, and P&G.’ And at first it wasn’t clear what that would be. [Wieden] arrived at the idea that behind every athlete was a mom, and moms are there to make sacrifices every step of the way, and P&G is there every step of the way in appreciating them.”

The 160-country, $600 million campaign Coca-Cola launched for this year’s FIFA World Cup had a broader target in mind than P&G’s Olympics push, but executives there insisted on a similarly singular message for the largest campaign in the history of the world’s most famous brand.

Coke executives say they realized early on that, given how cluttered the media landscape is, they’d need a clear and simple message to break through. So in 2008 they took 13 different agencies to South Africa, took in a local

TEAM SPIRIT. Visa has collated all of its global activities under the “Go” platform soccer game, and quickly decided that all of the company’s activation around its massive FIFA sponsorship would focus on soccer celebrations as the expression of Coke’s “Open Happiness” tagline.

That started with creative focused on the “History of Celebration,” from Argentina-based agency Santo, which assembled highlights of some of the most memorable on-field rejoicing in the sport’s history. The celebration theme was continued through Coke’s sponsorship of the World Cup trophy’s 126-city, 84-country tour, which drew 862,000 consumers, many of whom recorded their own celebrations that were uploaded to the campaign’s hub on YouTube as part of a 120-country deal with the Web-video colossus. As of June 25, the YouTube page and associated widgets had garnered 25 million visits.

The effort had a soundtrack, too: Somaliborn artist K’Naan re-recorded a celebratory anthem with Coke-inspired lyrics, and the song hit No. 1 on iTunes in 15 countries. Coke also deployed the theme on packaging, producing more than 1 billion special-edition packages with the celebration theme.

And, in addition to all those Coke-branded billboards surrounding the pitch, the marketer also got FIFA to agree to present a trophy to the player whom fans selected as having had the best goal celebration at the end of the tournament – via Internet voting, of course.

While consistency is always a virtue in marketing, it’s also a money-saver for global marketers such as Coke that need to operate in dozens of countries at once, because they can deploy many of the same materials and programs with only minor tweaks.

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© Corbis

SEPTEMBER 2010 | MARKETING

Why it pays to put on the Ritz Marketers can learn from hotelier’s philosophy that employees are the brand

by Michael Bush ichael Monarca won’t rest until he finds the perpetrator.

Tucked in among reports of rattling air conditioners and overpriced bar cocktails in a GIA (guest incidents and accidents) report is a complaint that’s irritating the manager of the Ritz-Carlton Central Park New York.

“There’s one person up there in the lobby who is not smiling or greeting people when they walk in,” he glowers. “I’m not sure if it’s that person, but we need to do a time-card check to see if they were in the lounge when this guest filed their complaint, and resolve this.”

Many employers might consider a non-smiling employee the least of their problems, but at Ritz-Carlton, renowned for its on-site customer handling and service, it’s serious business. The hotel is considered the gold standard because of its conviction that employees are the face of its company, and that service isn’t just part of its brand, it is the brand.

“About 15 percent to 20 percent of our customers come back because of the people working here and the relationships they have with them, not the product,” says Aziz Bendriss, the hotel’s

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assistant rooms executive, who has been at the hotel, which has 460 employees and 259 rooms, since 2001.

Bendriss, like every other Ritz employee, comes to work each day armed with a hearty “good morning” and a 1.5-inch-by-2.5-inch accordion-style foldout. His weathered copy contains 12 “service values,” “three steps of service,” and the Ritz-Carlton credo, part of which reads: “The Ritz-Carlton is a place where the genuine care and comfort of our guests is our highest mission.” Service value No. 1 states, “I build strong relationships and create Ritz-Carlton guests for life.”

KEY TO THE CULTURE. Bendriss is on his way to the 8am meeting, which consists mostly of housekeeping staff and is a companywide practice. In each of the 75 Ritz-Carltons around the globe, management and staff meet every morning and read from the “Commitment to Excellence and Strategic Planning Process.” The document contains one of the 12 service values, which is read to the staff, and a short article that could either be about the company’s strategic plans or a specific

new shape, sleeker feel, smooth taste.

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | MARKETING

In the Ritz-Carlton Central Park’s small, gray housekeeping office, which Bendriss calls the heart of the hotel, phones are jangling with guests looking for everything from conditioner and body lotion to ironing boards and a new shower head, as employees shout over a walkie-talkie to Deniza, the sole operator managing the controlled chaos. Her job is to get an employee on a complaint within seconds of hanging up with a guest. And she does it all while answering questions for employees who repeatedly stop by her office.

Surprisingly, Deniza says she never hears a complaint or request that stuns her. The same can’t be said for Maria and George at the concierge desk, who admit they get surprised a couple of times a week.

“The more affluent the guest, the more outlandish the request,” Maria says. She’s gotten requests to have playgrounds shipped to Saudi Arabia and has arranged a lavish Thomas the Tank Engine-themed party for a 4-year-old that included opening up the toy store FAO Schwarz early just for him.

COMPANY CREDO. Ritz-Carlton’s says its highest mission is care and comfort customer-service incident that took place in one of its locations and how it was resolved.

“The lineup is key to the culture here,” says Scott Geraghty, area vice-president and general manager of the hotel. “It sets the pace for the entire day.”

At one morning meeting, Geraghty had a surprise for a housekeeping staffer. Bill Marriott, chief executive of Ritz owner Marriott International, stayed in the hotel the night before and asked Geraghty to pass along a sizable tip to the attendant who took care of his room.

In the cafeteria, where the operational meeting is held, hangs a photo depicting a horse race each week based on an internal “gallop” poll done by the hotel. On it, six horses, each representing a Ritz-Carlton in the Northeast, are arranged in order based on their scores.

“The staff takes that very seriously,” Bendriss says. “Depending on where we post our horse, you can see the joy or disappointment on their faces.”

Geraghty says one of the tenets of the hotel is that whichever employee gets a customer complaint owns that complaint through resolution. “There’s no transferring of calls or pushing you off to someone else,” he says. “If the employee doesn’t have the answer, they will get assistance, but never will they pass the customer along to someone else.

We believe in empowering our staff so they can resolve any situation that should arise.” To that end, each employee is reimbursed up to $2,000 to help a customer resolve an issue.

How far will the hotel go to please a customer?

Bendriss says if it gets hold of a picture of a guest’s pet, it will make a copy, have it framed and display it in the guest’s room in whatever Ritz-Carlton the guest visits.

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FRENZIED DAYS. On this day, George is calling every sporting-goods shop in the city trying to secure 80 US soccer jerseys (20 in each size) for a guest who needed them – predictably – five minutes ago.

But that might well be a snap for George, who says his most recent adventure involved helping a frequent guest ship a goat to Pennsylvania as a gag gift to a friend.

At 10am comes the operational meeting in the cafeteria with department heads. In addition to the unfriendly employee in the lobby comes discussion of a recent guest who was in town for the TV-network upfront, lost his luggage at the airport and was left without a suit. The hotel sent his family back to the airport in a town car without charge to look for the luggage and ended up providing him with a suit from its uniform department. The guest eventually left without returning the suit – and was hit with a $500 charge without any heads-up from the hotel.

“That was just a bad idea on our part,” Monarca tells his team. “We had a great story and ruined it.

We did all of this stuff to wow him and then threw it out the window for a suit.” The situation has since been resolved and ended with the customer “happy,” Bendriss says.

The meeting moves on to VIP arrivals. The day’s list is made up mostly of executives but does include one TV actress. The data on guests, used to prepare for arrivals and enhance their stays, is impressive. The staff knows who requested extra body gel, who is allergic to peanuts and who prefers the blinds open when they arrive.

Brian Bennett, area director-performance improvement for Ritz-Carlton, says many aspects of the hotel, such as marketing, pricing and product, can be copied by rivals, but the experience can’t.

And it’s the experience that’s most profitable, he says. “It’s the positive experience that will make a guest who visits us five times a year visit us six or seven times,” he says. “The experience is what triggers change in customer behavior, and that change is pure profit.”

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | MARKETING

Wanted: community managers Brands are eager to fill social-media staffing need to keep tabs on followers by Jack Neff t Procter & Gamble Co., where the brand manager was invented, one of the growth job titles of late has been “community manager,” in charge of engaging a brand’s community of followers wherever they pop up in social media.

P&G is far from alone here. Job listings for community managers with duties that encompass social media began showing up in late 2007, then hit an explosive growth curve in April 2009, according to job search engine Indeed.com. While such listings are off their peak reached this January, they’re still coming at triple the rate of a year ago.

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RECRUITMENT WAVE. Recent listings come from marketers such as Walt Disney Co., Allstate, Office Depot, Citibank, Vonage, and the University of Chicago, in addition to numerous tech and digital players where the job title has existed far longer.

They’re the foot soldiers in a recruitment wave that has placed social media terms in four of the top 10 trends currently on Indeed.com, including “Twitter,” “Facebook,” “blogger,” and “social media.”

A Facebook group for community managers now has more than 3,400 members, though many of them appear to have marketing or social-media roles beyond those of just community managers.

Jeremiah Owyang, partner at Altimeter Group and a former Forrester analyst who started his career as a community manager for Hitachi, keeps the most definitive list of such managers at corporations of Fortune 1,000-size and large education institutions, currently numbering 41.

But the list is far from all-inclusive, as it only covers community managers who apply, and it was last updated in January. It doesn’t include a group

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P&G alone has designated for 10 of its brands in the past year, a spokeswoman says, including Iams, Eukanuba and Pantene.

DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS. While being a community manager is clearly a marketing job, it’s not necessarily staffed by classically trained marketers.

At P&G, they often come from the consumer-affairs area of the company, though beauty external-relations director Anitra Marsh said in an April talk at a BlogWell conference in Cincinnati that they could come from a variety of the company’s brandbuilding functions.

P&G declined to make any of its community managers available for interview. But one who’s playing a role in the current re-launch of Pantene hair-care products is Ashley Bryant, a consumercare executive turned “Pantene Beauty Maven” who engages with consumers both on the brand’s Facebook and Twitter presences and elsewhere, while also maintaining her own Twitter account.

Iams and Eukanuba’s PetCareBev operates a blog, PetCareBev.com (by Bev Van Zant), and a Twitter feed (Twitter/PetCareBev) where one recent post expressed a private sentiment: “HEY DELTA AIRLINES!! YOUR PHONE SYSTEM IS CRAPPY!!!,” though she’s usually talking about pets or Iams’ own products.

Van Zant is also around to answer ticklish questions elsewhere in social media, such as this from Yahoo Answers: “Can Iams kill your cat?” Her not-surprising response, ranked best among users, essentially, was no. “I’ve worked at Iams for nearly 15 years,” she said. “A very high percentage of our employees share their lives with dogs and cats. We

would never intentionally put something in our food that we wouldn’t feel comfortable feeding to our own furbabies.”

It’s an approach that just might work. If community managers “sound very corporate or PR-ish, they lose trust, and therefore aren’t very effective,” Owyang says. They need to be trusted by their communities, and “often come from the same lifestyle as their community.”

PARADOX. Therein, of course, lies the Zen-like paradox. Community managers are expected to be “brand evangelists” while blending into the milieu of online communities, and not coming off as shills.

The difficulty of finding the right person to navigate that path is probably why marketers appear ambivalent about whether formal marketing experience is a prerequisite, says Lisa Bradner, president of Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Geomomentum, a hyper-local media unit.

For example, the recent online listing seeking a community manager for Disney Music Groups says “marketing knowledge is a big plus,” but experience there is no pre-requisite.

But Bradner, who last year was the lead Forrester analyst on a report about how brand management should be structured in the age of digital marketing, isn’t sure community managers are the answer to marketing’s social-media staffing needs.

“One of the dangers of how it’s being handled right now is the idea that every brand is going to have a community, and every community is going to have a community manager,” she says. “The challenge is whether there’s really a reason for that community to adhere.”

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | DEPARTMENTS

Guest Opinion

Keeping pace Consumers are changing fast, say Jayant Bhargava, principal at analysis firm Booz & Company, and Karl Nader, a senior associate. But marketers who adapt fast can turn this to their advantage n the media world, power is shifting to consumers. They are no longer passive recipients of a brand’s message. Instead, they have more sources of information – and more control over how they consume that information – than ever before. They also want to create their own content, and discuss brand preferences in ways that marketers can’t control. Some 20 percent of Twitter posts now mention a brand by name.

Above all, consumers are increasingly turning to digital. They use the Web as their main source of information about future purchases. Web sites, search engines, and mobile Web represent three of the top four factors driving the decision to buy, while print and television lag behind.

This transition requires a fundamental shift in marketing strategies. Marketers worldwide have responded by allocating marketing budgets away from traditional media such as print and broadcast, and toward digital media, with the goal of creating 360-degree campaigns that can reach potential customers everywhere they go.

In America and Europe, marketers are adopting a range of new platforms such as privatelabel media, digital initiatives (often on mobile

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devices), social media marketing, online videos, and contests that allow direct, interactive contact with consumers. Instead of simple impressions or clicks, these programs aim to increase engagement and deepen a consumer’s relationship with the brand.

Nike, for example, has shifted from straightforward ads centered around the “Just do it” tagline to focus on consumer experiences. It markets Nike Plus, a joint venture with Apple in which consumers post their workout results on Nikeplus.com and compare them with those of professional athletes such as Lance Armstrong and LeBron James.

However, even the most sophisticated marketers are struggling to keep up with the accelerating evolution in consumer behavior. Consumers spend more time each day with digital media, yet ad spending on digital platforms has not proportionally caught up.

Furthermore, marketing budgets are coming under pressure, and individual campaigns are not delivering the expected response rates, while their net effect is becoming increasingly difficult to define.

DEPARTMENTS | SEPTEMBER 2010

In the Middle East, the transition to digital marketing is even more challenging, because the local market is still centered on traditional media and constrained by a set of factors unique to the region. Regional consumers vary widely by ethnicity, culture, and income level, making large-scale campaigns difficult to tailor.

The region also has more than 450 free-toair satellite channels with audience metrics that are relatively unsophisticated and unreliable.

Advertising space is still largely sold through media reps (as much as 75 percent of TV time in the region is sold this way), who offer discounts and volume rebates that can vary widely, making the market opaque.

As a result of these factors, ad spend per capita in the region remains low for traditional and digital media alike.

The confluence of these trends presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The time has come for marketers here to frame a unique perspective on the market’s sweet spots, and designate their marketing spend accordingly.

Three initiatives can help: First, marketers should allocate more money to digital efforts; second, they should apply more science and sophistication to evaluating their marketing effectiveness; third, they should expand their relationships and work with a broader set of partners who have expertise in specific areas.

KARL NADER AND JAYANT BHARGAVA. Transition to digital media has upended the traditional model BREATHTAKING SPEED. The consumer shift from traditional platforms to digital, interactive technologies continues to take place at breathtaking speed. Jeeran’s social networking community has 1 million active users, 650,000 Web sites, and 120,000 blogs. The number of Middle East visitors to Facebook increased from 3 million to 15 million in just one year.

Because of these factors, digital media will only become more relevant in the coming years.

In fact, digital marketing offers MENA marketing executives a way to circumvent many of the issues surrounding traditional media.

Digital campaigns are more targeted, interactive, and measurable, giving marketers far more information on consumer preferences and brand penetration. That information allows them to build more direct connections with consumers, often by cutting out media agencies and talking directly to customers through “private-label media.” Moreover, mobile is beginning to gain recognition as a mainstream advertising platform.

For example, in the US, Kraft’s in-house smartphone application, called iFood, is among the most frequently downloaded apps for iPhone users. This is a concept that Middle East marketers need to explore.

MARKETING AS SCIENCE. In the current environment, the ability to measure marketing effectiveness is paramount. Chief marketing officers need to focus their resources where they can make the biggest difference, and make more accurate sales

predictions by addressing five key questions: What promotions and media platform will optimize profitability? What elements of this new platform are known to work, and which need to be tested? How does the business move to this platform quickly, maximizing the benefits while minimizing sales and profit risks? How does the business use the new insight to improve budgeting and planning?

What is the impact on company profits?

A key part of this approach is understanding the impact and return on investment of the marketing spend, by using econometric analysis and modeling to figure out which factors are influencing customers’ purchases. Implementing this analytical approach can be a challenge in the Middle East, largely due to problems with data availability and consistency.

In these situations, marketers can use a more qualitative approach such as the relative return index (RRI), particularly for analyzing abovethe-line marketing spend. RRI requires periodic consumer surveys, and, because it’s qualitative, is subject to judgment and interpretation. These elements make it most applicable to the planning phase of marketing functions.

NEW RELATIONSHIPS. Because the marketing world is in such flux right now, it’s no longer realistic for a marketer to outsource all of its marketing needs to a single ad agency – or to any single partner.

The various ways of reaching consumers (digital, mobile, leveraging user-generated

content, traditional media) all require different kinds of expertise, at a time when technologies are evolving rapidly. As a result, marketers may need to work with a more complex set of partners to optimize their strategies. In some cases, this may even include taking agencies out of the equation and partnering directly with media companies.

For example, in the US, tech firm HewlettPackard recently worked with MTV Networks on a reality show that aired on television and online. The show, Engine Room, followed 16 digital artists as they competed for $400,000 in prize money and the chance to program the giant MTV screen in New York City’s Times Square for one night. HP underwrote the show and provided all the computer hardware for the designers. It was an extremely effective way to increase HP’s brand presence.

In conclusion, the transition to digital media has upended the traditional model of marketing, but the proper response isn’t merely to get everything online as quickly as possible. Instead, digital media makes up just one part of a successful marketing strategy.

Equally important for marketers are the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of specific efforts (in both traditional and digital media) and the formation of a broader network of partnerships.

Power may be shifting to consumers, but marketers can use this shift to their advantage by ensuring they reach those consumers in compelling, effective ways, through a variety of media formats.

Communicate I 47

SEPTEMBER 2010 | GUEST OPINION

Guest Opinion

The art of selling yourself Nicola Gregson, head of PR at Fifth Ring integrated corporate communications agency, gives tips on how to enter the PR field in the UAE urriculum Vitaes, resumes, work histories – call them what you will. I looked at mine not long ago (no, I am not looking for another job, boss. I promise), and it took me back on a long traipse down memory lane of past clients, pull-your-hair out events, gleeful client victories, the odd award win, team bonding sessions, colleagues, bosses, clients, and all those who have been a part of my career over the years.

I’ve been employed a handful of times, and in turn I have employed dozens. Many more CVs cross my inbox nowadays than my desk, so I feel I have some authority on the subject of how to get your foot in a PR agency door.

As a prospective employer, the CVs that arrived in my inbox in the past year must account for about a fifth of all the emails I received. Yet only one or two of those hundreds actually led to a phone conversation or a call in for a job interview.

So let’s take a look at those who did, and didn’t, make it. For the sake of anonymity, we will call Candidate A The Historian. He chose not only to write his CV in the third person, but he went on to include a photo of him as a six-month-old baby.

Needless to say, he didn’t get a call back.

Then there is the esteemed fan club of people who use every opportunity to drop their favourite word in every paragraph, and pepper their CV with flowery waffle.

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Finally, but by no means the last in the delete folder, I come to my all-time favorite. I actually took the time to read this man’s full CV, in which he explained in great detail the PR skills he had accumulated over the years – as a car-parking attendant. Ho hum.

The list of candidates who did manage to put their best feet forward were those who: (a) Overviewed their key skills, job titles, and successes at a glance in a cover letter (being mindful that PR professionals are usually busy people, so any primary facts that hit you in the face have the most impact). (b) Took the time to learn about us as a company and tailored their CV and approach to highlight synergies. (c) Showed attention to detail. (d) Followed up with a phone call.

That said, other candidates have come via direct recommendations from clients or industry people we know, so word-of-mouth certainly does open doors more quickly and reliably than anonymous emails.

So when faced with unemployment or the need for change, candidates should treat their CVs as their best-ever press release. We advise clients not to “spray and pray” with a press release. CVs should have key messages, a target audience, tell a story, and present you at your very best.

SEPTEMBER 2010 | DEPARTMENTS

Media Work

Batelco’s “Debate the Game” Bahraini telecom provider Batelco got into the spirit of consumer-generated content and drove conversations over this summer’s football World Cup by running a “Debate the Game” initiative throughout the country.

A simple red-and-white booth held two microphones, two chairs, and an open platform to discuss, analyze, and debate team selections, refereeing decisions, and the games themselves.

The booth was situated at different venues for different games.

A “pulsating” conversation between opposing fans ensued, says Fortune Promoseven (FP7), the communications agency behind the campaign.

“They say more human emotions come alive during 90 minutes of football than during an entire lifetime,” says a statement from FP7. “Scenes of ecstasy, anger, sarcasm, joy, despair, and even pure magic were witnessed.

Adults jumped like kids, friends became rivals, and fans sometimes had to be physically separated.”

Batelco published videos of the booth to its Facebook and YouTube pages, and won itself almost 3,000 friends in a fortnight, with 1,800 interactions (such as video comments, photo comments, and wall posts) each week. The YouTube channel got more than 6,300 hits, and local print media and radio gave Debate

the Game coverage. Bahrain’s largest cinema showed Batelco video clips around its screenings of the World Cup games. FP7 says that Batelco’s sales, including its broadband, postpaid billing, and BlackBerry services, doubled.

The agency says, “Take one look at facebook.com/batelco and you’ll see the celebration of the spirit of the game itself with one simple idea.

There’s no debating that.”

Tang’s Human Vending Machine: The contraption spoke to people and handed out cups of Tang in Dubai’s Mirdiff City Center mall

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www.menacristal.com 31 Jan. / 4 Fev. 2011 - Mzaar Kfardebian, Lebanon

Call for entries!

Competitions are open for the MENA Cristal Festival Enter your best campaigns to the “Cristal”

BEFORE FRIDAY 22ND OCTOBER: Cyber Media Direct & Promo

BEFORE FRIDAY 7TH JANUARY: Film Radio Outdoor Daily Press Magazine Print Craft Corporate International Production

SEPTEMBER 2010 | DEPARTMENTS

Regional Work

Client: Kurban Travel. Agency: Spirit.

Location: Lebanon. Creative Director: Maya Saab. Art Director: Olga Salman.

Turn everyday shopping into fantastic rewards.

Client: Air Miles. Creative Agency: Atom. Creative Director: Duncan Clark.

Art Director: Milan Far. Account Manger: Eve Brennan.

Fight for better working conditions.

Advertising Agency: Sandpaper Middle East, Dubai. Creative Director:Peter Caush.

Art Director: Peter Caush. Creative Director: Abraham Quintana.

Copywriter: Tim Derry. Photographer: Suresh Subramanian.

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

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | DEPARTMENTS

Regional Work

Client: Mobily. Agency: Impact BBD KSA. Production Co: Déjà vu. Post Production: Optix Digital Pictures Dubai. Producer: Andreea Gurbina. Art Director: Amin Faramarzeyan. 3D Animation: Nicholas King, Geoffrey Dela Cru.

Client: BMW Egypt. Agency: Marcom, Egypt. Creative Director: Tamer Serag El Din. Associate Creative Director: Karim A. Yusuf.

Copywriter: Nada Hesham. Art Director: Ramy Abd El Azim. Graphic Designer: Ayman S. Anwar. Animation: Ayman S. Anwar.

Sound Editor: Omar El Abd. Editor: Hesham Belal. Account Manager: Rania El Kest. Account Executive: Mohamed El Sharawy.

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

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DEPARTMENTS | SEPTEMBER 2010

Regional Work

Don’t let ticks and fleas become your pets.

Petzone: Where pets come first.

Advertising Agency: Tonic International, Dubai, UAE Creative Director: Vincent Raffray Art Director: Peter Walker Copywriter: Vincent Raffray Photographer: Rainer Holz

Executive Coaching Skills A three day leadership training course in Dubai: 21st - 23rd November

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Coaching is the most valuable leadership and management style a senior executive can have and is now common practice amongst the world’s leading companies. This 3 day intensive training course will show you how to use executive coaching skills to enhance the effectiveness of your key personnel and maximise your organisations potential.

By attending this senior level training course you will: • Develop your personal leadership capabilities and understand the key coaching principles • Establish rapport with employees and create a trusting relationship • Help teams or individuals cope with and manage problems • Use a coaching process to employ in your own company • Discover barriers to learning and how to overcome them • Give effective feedback in a way that encourages positive change

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Call 04 345 3353 Fax: +971 4 345 3356 E-mail: michelle@ismdubai.com

Mob: +971 55 922 9635 Web: www.ismdubai.com

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SEPTEMBER 2010 | DEPARTMENTS

International Work

McDonald’s: MacFries pedestrian crossing.

Advertising Agency: TBWA Switzerland. Creative Directors: Michael Kathe, Martin Friedlin.

Copywriter: Michael Kathe. Art Director: Dominique Magnusson.

150th anniversary of Cologne Zoo Advertising Agency: Preuss und Preuss, Berlin, Germany. Creative Director: Michael Preuss. Art Director: Zuzana Havelcova.

Who had no color, now can have 7.

Advertising Agency: Neogama/BBH, Brazil. Chief Creative Officer: Alexandre Gama.

Executive Creative Director: Alexandre Gama. Creative Directors: Márcio Ribas, Wilson Mateos. Art Directors: Paulo Lemos, Fábio Astolpho. Copywriter: Eduardo Andrietta.

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

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DEPARTMENTS | SEPTEMBER 2010

International Work

My world. My way. Allen Solly Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Bangalore, India. Creative Directors: Vipul Thakkar, Shamik Sengupta. Art Directors: Ajesh N, Sangeeta Shirali. Copywriter: Kunj Shah. Photographer: Abhitabh Kame. Illustrator: Nitin Rao Kumblekar.

Liberation! Happy Women’s Day guys. The Axe Effect.

Advertising Agency: Lowe Bull, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Creative Director: Rui Alves. Art Director: Heidi Kasselman.

Copywriter: Lee Naidoo. Photographer: Des Ellis.

We made loggers cool. You’ll be a snap.

Advertising Agency: Rethink, Vancouver, Canada.

Creative Directors: Ian Grais, Chris Staples. Art Director: Carson Ting.

Copywriter: Rob Tarry.

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

Communicate I 57

SEPTEMBER 2010 | OFF THE RECORD

The Dish Literally watch “On its part, the militarist regime in Tel Aviv will do well not to further increase tensions in the region with persistent threats of attacking Iran – an attack that will open the gates of hell, literally.

– From a Gulf News editorial on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Sense and censorability When Dubai daily Emirates Business 24-7 announced it was to shift to an online-only format, it also prepared to move away from its business focus.

It looks like it’s already resorting to some well-established non-businessy ways of attracting readers.

A grave proposal It’s always nice to be headhunted, although when we get an e-mail from “a manager of the HR department of a large multinational company,” with “vacancies to be filled by European residents only,” we’d like to think that we’re being approached because of the skill we’ve shown writing about marketing, media and communications.

Or perhaps there is a more sinister agenda; one of this company’s lines of business is “private undertaking services.” Perhaps it’s because we’ve shown that deep down marketers, flacks, and hacks are nice people.

Poet’s corner

brand into a giant balloon, how can you argue?

The best, bra none We’re sure we’ve seen this one before, but it’s obviously so important to Communicate readers that Pencell PR has seen fit to send it to us again: “According to international research, up to 80 percent of women are wearing the wrong size bra,” says an e-mail on behalf of lingerie client Naomi.

The e-mail contains comprehensive instructions on how to make sure a bra fits. Pencell must know the industry is on a drive for better measurement.

An odd bunch “In the street or office, people using mobile phone as long as walking or moving can be seen everywhere,” begins an e-mail from Shenzhen YDT Co. Ltd, a Chinese company that has a great solution for that problem (we assume it must be a problem, as Shenzhen is offering solutions).

“If someone who is using a Phone or banana bluethooth headset there, will attract a lot of eyeballs.”

Of course. Why didn’t we think of that? The accompanying images make the banana “bluethooth” headset look particularly attractive. We’ll keep our ears peeled.

It’s his passion for the unknown that inspired the expeditions of Pierre de Brazza. 1880, in his house of Udine, a large map of Africa hangs on the wall with a blank in the middle: no white man, no missionary, no explorer, no merchant nor cartographer have ever dared attempt at going through this territory.

And it is precisely that little point, circle in red pencil at the heart of Africa under the mention “an interesting country to visit” that Pierre decides to explore.

Brazza, the explorer with a big heart, the gentleman officer, the idealist who walks barefoot and unarmed and who yet does not forget to wear a high uniform in front of the African kings.

Brazza, who, at the end of a long walking journey, along with a few men on a night of full moon, discovers the Congo river, as extended as the sea. Brazza, photographed by Nadar, who sells his image for packs of cigarettes, chocolates and soap bars in order to finance his expeditions. Pierre de Brazza, who fights against colonial exploitation and whose memory accompanied me during this trip, as well as inhabited my dreams …

Antonio Marras – From a press release by Kenzo, announcing its new collection of men’s accessories

Overblown assertion Some might take exception to the idea that “Business has only two functions: marketing and innovation.” Perhaps making money might come in there.

Also, logistics are apparently important.

And production. And management.

And sales. Perhaps.

But when the message comes from a firm that offers to turn your

58 I Communicate

Communicate cannot guarantee the accuracy of the rumors, innuendo and idle gossip that appear on this page.

Send your anonymous Dish tips to editor@communicate.vg

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