Communicate by MediaquestCorp.

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The marketing and advertising resource • April 2010 • Issue N° 64 • www.communicate.ae Creative thinking: The Art of the Idea by TBWA’s John Hunt Page 82 reviewed

Saatchi becomes… Saatchi. Eli Khoury explains his agency’s new affiliation Page 74

No more static: Saudi opens its airwaves to commercial radio Page 56 stations

ADVERTISING Egypt examined Co mm u n ic a te ta k e s a l ook a t Egyptian advertising. The market is dominated by one man and his jingles, but other agencies are making a move. All are speaking with a distinct voice. (Page 36)

ADVERTISING Trunk call Elephant Cairo’s Grands Prix at the Dubai Lynx Awards were the talk of the industry this year. It makes a nice change from discussing ghost ads. We look at the other surprises from the Lynx, and some bits that stayed the same. (Page 50)

AGENCIES Gold class Leo Burnett invites students from Abu Dhabi Women’s College to show how they’d handle real-life clients World Gold Council, Special K and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank. Communicate is enlightened by the results. (Page 8)

CAMPAIGN Customs made

ANTOINE CHOUEIRI The industry remembers a founding father

(Page 88)

A MediaquestCorp publication

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR | APRIL 2010

Predictably popular A

t college I had a friend. Well, I had more than one, honestly I did, but only one is relevant right now: Robby. Robby was predictable. In most people that attribute is damnation by faint praise, but in Robby it was a good thing. He often told the same stories, but he told them well and they were always funny. He was interested in the obvious things: football, movies, music. And though he brought them into conversation often, he did so without force. His main, winning attribute was his ability to laugh at himself and put himself down. He never took himself too seriously. Of course, Robby could be wearing if you weren’t in the mood for him. But at least you knew what you got from day to day. In much the same way as my college friends and I liked Robby, awards judges coming to the Middle East seem to have begun to like Egyptian advertising. This showed at the Cristals in February, where Leo Burnett Cairo took the Grand Cristal for its work with Melody Aflam. And it showed last month, too, with a series of Egyptian wins at the Dubai Lynx (see page 50). I went to Egypt and spoke to agencies about what’s going on in Egyptian advertising, and the answer was: Not as much as in the Gulf. There’s less digital, there’s less outdoor, and there’s less breakaway, out-of-the-box, blue-sky

thinking. But there’s plenty of solid TV work (page 44), and while Egyptian agencies might not be jumping into as many conversations as their Gulf brethren, they are – as industry-watchers have been saying for a couple of years now – speaking with a distinct voice (page 36). The jokes are the same, the topics are the same (like Robby, Egyptian ads are content to laugh at themselves, and talk about football, cinema and music), but at least you know what you’re going to get from Egypt. That’s a good thing. At the Lynx, Burnett’s Melody work won the Film Grand Prix. And while the whole region was represented, Egypt did well across the board; there were wins from Leo Burnett Cairo, Starcom Mediavest Egypt, JWT Cairo, TBWA/Egypt, and Elephant Cairo. In fact, four out of eight Grands Prix went to Egypt: two to Burnett, and two to Elephant Cairo. Team Communicate weren’t the only awards attendees to be asking who Elephant is. The agency’s Web site says simply, “This is not an ad agency.” And according to Maged Nassar, the agency’s writer, who collected the awards with his colleague Ali Ali, Elephant consists of only the two of them and an office boy. According to the ghostbusters patrolling the Lynx nowadays, however, Elephant has strong ties to FP7 Egypt. That agency, like the rest of Fortune

Promoseven, didn’t enter any awards this year after the network was stripped of numerous titles following last year’s investigation into ghost ads. Nassar and Ali were both previously with FP7 Cairo. Perhaps Elephant is so named because it represents a big grey area. Though I think it’s because elephants are big, solid, predictable and popular – just like Egyptian advertising. And my mate Robby’s conversations, of course.

Austyn Allison, managing editor editor@communicate.vg

Communicate I 3

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APRIL 2010 | CONTENTS

Contents

COVER: ANTOINE CHOUEIRI 24

Antoine Choueiri remembered: A look back at the life of one of regional advertising’s founding fathers. And tributes and memories from those who worked with him as the industry developed

SHORTS 6 8

A rested ed’s development: Communicate’s resident invalid reports from the frontlines of daytime TV A local look: Leo Burnett gives Emirati students clients to work on, and we see what the women come up with

NEWS 12 14 18

44 50

62 66 68 72

Public relations. TBWA signs international afﬁliation with Ketchum Television. Fox International Channels moves into Abu Dhabi Digital. Is Bubbly the new Twitter?

FEATURES 36

CONTENTS | APRIL 2010

Advertising. Work out: A showcase of this year’s Lynx Grands Prix Radio. No more static: Saudi Arabia has opened its airwaves to private radio stations for the ﬁrst time. What’s going to change? Digital. Buzz and grind: Starbucks’ social media strategy is paying off Digital. Driving loyalty: Toyota’s cars might be off the streets, but they are still in the tweets Digital. Make way for a lady: What’s Lady Gaga doing online to keep her brand top of the charts? Digital. Steering strategy: Who should organizations put in charge of their social networking? Digital. Poker payers: How can Facebook and other social sites turn fans into ﬁnance?

DEPARTMENTS 74 82

Advertising. Work like an Egyptian: Communicate takes a look at the agency scene in Cairo Media. Unwrapping the media mummy: We play Carter to the King Tut that is Egyptian planning Advertising. Out of Africa: Egyptian agencies do well at the Lynx, with wins for Leo Burnett and newcomers Elephant Cairo

84 86 90

Q&A. Two become one. Eli Khouri, head of the agency formerly known as Saatchi & Saatchi Beirut tells us he hardly needs to change his business cards Review. Observation deck: The ideas in The Art of the Idea by TBWA’s John Hunt seem obvious. That’s the book’s charm Media Work. Ticket stamps and a giant sun Work. Selections from the regional and international creative scenes The Dish. Jobs for journalists, a record for wrecking, and cash for coverage

APRIL 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 DEPUTY GENERAL MANAGER Ayman Haydar FINANCE DIRECTOR Dinesh Kumar CREATIVE DIRECTOR Aziz Kamel ONLINE DIRECTOR Rony Nassour MARKETINGDEPARTMENT marketing@mediaquestcorp. com, Tel: (971) 4 391 0760 DISTRIBUTION & SUBSCRIPTION MANAGER JP Nair, jp@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: (971) 4 391 0765 COUNTRY MANAGERS Lebanon: Nathalie Bontems, nathalie@mediaquestcorp.com, (961) 149 2801/2/3 Saudi Arabia: Tarek Abu Hamzy, tarekah@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: (966) 50 814 50 90 North Africa: Adil Abdel Wahab, adel@medialeader.biz, Tel: (213) 661 562 660

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FOUNDER Yasser Hawari MANAGING DIRECTOR Julien Hawari EDITOR Nathalie Bontems MANAGING EDITOR Austyn Allison CREATIVE DIRECTOR Aziz Kamel ART DIRECTOR Janett Kheil SENIOR JOURNALIST Rania Habib SUB EDITOR Samuel Potter ART CONTRIBUTORS Aya Farhat, Maysam El Houry ART CONTRIBUTORS Alvin Cha, Jean-Christophe Nys, Aya Farhat, Maysam El Houry EXTERNAL AFFAIRS Manuel Dias, Maguy Panagga, Catherine Dobarro, Randa Khoury, Lila Schoepf, Laurent Bernard PRINTERS Raidy Emirates Printing Group ((Lebanon) U A E ) 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

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APRIL 2010 | SHORTS

The vampire-watching diaries Communicate continues its recuperation from a motocross accident. Confined to home for a month, we turn our expert eye to the world of Middle Eastern television by Sam Potter

arhaba. Read about Saudi radio, for the first time only in Communicate. Communicate, you can see, has decided to advertise its contents in its own pages. It’s genius. After all, what better target audience than Communicate readers themselves? Every now and then we’ll simply break from an article, mention a completely different one, then return to the first as though nothing happened. It’s brilliant. Unfortunately, we can’t really take credit for this marketing leap. The truth is, television companies have been doing it forever; TV channels routinely advertise their own shows during their own shows in a bid to drum up audience numbers. It’s all part of the game: Audience bang means advertising buck. But to our well-(s)trained eyes, MBC has taken this to the next level lately. Every one of their new, imported US shows has not only acquired a trailer advertising the next episode (fair enough), but each of these is followed by a slick promo ad featuring a

character from the show. “Marhaba,” they say, before confirming their show is on MBC. Communicate doesn’t object to these extra ads in principle, or the practice of promoting shows, but must they occur in every single break? They’re almost as prevalent as the “behind-the-scenes” movie fillers used to a criminally high degree by UAE channel Dubai One, among others. These several-minute-long trailer-cum-promo programs feature clips of a current cinema hit and brief interviews with the stars and the director. They’re cut to fill those awkward minutes between one show ending and another beginning. And yes, the first time you see one it can be mildly interesting. The second time it’s tolerable; but from the third viewing onward you begin to think you know more about James Cameron’s vision of Pandora than you’d really like. We know the use of these fillers and ads for shows has always been fairly common, but they seem more

frequent than ever. We suppose the tough financial times have reduced the amount of airtime occupied by old-fashioned commercials, and the broadcasters need to fill the space. Marhaba. The Dish. Read it first, only in Communicate. Thanks also to those tough financial times, another imperative for the TV broadcaster of today seems to be maximizing the use of its content. In a given week, channels will show the same programs multiple times. Communicate knows this because we watched one episode of The Vampire Diaries four times. All we’ll say is, Damon is definitely up to no good, and the sulky main girl Elena really doesn’t pass for 15 (or whatever age she’s supposed to be). The Vampire Diaries is one of MBC’s imports, and yes, it boasts its own Marhaba ads. It’s a show that has a strange attraction for Communicate, because it seems to have been commissioned purely on the back of the Twilight saga’s success. After all, the popular books on which it is based have been around since

1991. You can almost picture the studio executives’ creative meeting: “This Twilight thing is huge. I want teens, I want vampires, I want high school, and I want it by tomorrow morning.” Credit to them, the result is pretty slick, though we’re not convinced it’s slick enough that people need to see it four or more times in a week. We’ll give the TV companies the benefit of the doubt for their policy of multiple showings, though; not everyone is confined to their homes 24-7. And those of us who are are certainly not obliged to watch the same shows over and over (we just have a weird obsession with vampires). Besides, we’re hardly in a position to criticize broadcasters for using repeats, or for coming up with un-original ideas – this is the second post-accident article we’ve handed our editor in as many months. Alas, it’s time to go; the latest episode of Vampire Diaries is about to start, and after today there will only be four more chances to see it.

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APRIL 2010 | SHORTS

Gold, banking sense and blur Young Emirati women demonstrate their advertising prowess, and in the process remind us of an uncomfortable fact: The marketing industry still doesn’t have a clear picture of the Emirati mind by Rania Habib

itting through two hours of anything normally proves a very challenging task for Communicate. But when we visited Leo Burnett’s Dubai offices to hear 15 students from the Higher Colleges of Technology (HCT) present campaigns for Kellogg’s Special K, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank Ladies’ Banking and the World Gold Council, the time flew by. The three clients really are on Leo Burnett’s books, but this wasn’t a pitch; it was a research event, a rare chance to gain an insight into the Emirati mindset. The students are all UAE nationals between the ages of 18 and 22. They’re part of the Faculty of Applied Communications at HCT Abu Dhabi Women’s College, and they were asked to present their own versions of campaigns for three brands as part of their final projects. One by one, the groups explained their target audience, their perception of the product, the mediums they used, and showed the creative work they scripted, filmed, photographed

or recorded on their own. The Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank Ladies’ Banking team took a dull brand and created television and radio ads that made the assembled Leo Burnetters chuckle. The ads focused on the privacy and exclusivity sought by women banking with the ADIB, and the team’s radio effort (spoken in an Emirati accent) was well received – even if it did drift into predictable territory by the end (branch and service details). The group was praised for venturing into the medium, a notoriously tough nut to crack. The Special K team was a little luckier with their assigned brand, and though the students related to the brand’s existing identity, they chose a new slogan: “Time to change.” Their TVC showed a transparent girl becoming more and more visible to her peers as she added Special K to her diet. The importance these young Emirati women place on their friendships was beginning to emerge in the Special K campaign, but it be-

came even clearer in the World Gold Council (WGC) campaign. The team worked on a brand – L’Or – which both Leo Burnett and Communicate assumed would be as attractive to the students as Special K was. But what transpired from the project and presentation was that 18-to-22-yearold Emirati girls are not interested in gold – they consider it old fashioned. These modern young women relate gold to tradition, and only intend to buy it or wear it when they get married. So, in an effort to reach their age group, the team split their campaign to focus on two relationships: marriage and friendship. Their ad revolved around a friendship gone sour, which is eventually rekindled with the giving of gold. To wrap up the meeting, Leo Burnett showed their own (still unreleased) television spot for L’Or to the students. The beautifully executed, styled, and shot ad – which is aimed at a pan-Arab audience – prompted one of the girls to say she felt her eyes sparkle while watching it. But overall

a different consensus was reached: The ad is esthetically beautiful, but the girls just did not relate to the beautiful woman walking around her apartment all dressed up and in heels, alone, going out on the street, alone, getting into a taxi, alone. Giving Leo Burnett the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the L’Or ad is not specifically targeted at 18-to-22year-olds. But the evidence of this experiment seems to confirm what many suspect: Advertising agencies don’t know enough about UAE nationals, and while Emiratis may like the ads presented to them, they don’t necessarily relate to them. Communicate left the Leo Burnett offices feeling a little more knowledgeable, and also a little guilty for not understanding better one of the cultures we operate in. Perhaps advertising for “pan-Arab audiences” should be reconsidered; this little slice of the UAE population proved that what may work for the rest of the Arab world doesn’t necessarily work for them.

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APRIL 2010 | REGIONAL NEWS

Ketchum and TBWA create joint venture Tie-up formalizes four-year partnership

VERY BRIEFS Memac Ogilvy Bahrain to host Portfolio Night Ripple Effect Communications partners with Orient Planet Tag Heuer hosts first ice race in region

Infusion Magazine launches INTV BPG Kuwait celebrates a decade of success Arab Media Forum Web site launched Ipsos signs on as research partner for Media and Marketing Show KETCHUM UP. (Left to right) Ramzi Raad; Hania Tabet; Jon Higgins; Reda Raad (managing director, TBWA/Raad) Dubai. The public relations wing of regional advertising agency TBWA/ Raad and international public relations company Ketchum have announced a joint venture. TBWA/Raad/PR has been acting as Ketchum’s exclusive affiliate in the Middle East and North Africa since 2006. The new, backslashfree firm is called Ketchum Raad Middle East, and will operate in 14 cities across 12 countries in the region. In a release, Jon Higgins, Ketchum senior partner and CEO of international operations, says, “The Middle East is an increasingly important region for

our clients, with an excellent growth trajectory, and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to invest with a partner. … As Ketchum Raad Middle East, we can deliver. We look forward to working together to help our clients communicate effectively across the MENA region and globally, to help them reach their business goals.” The company says it will work on a MENA expansion strategy. “The fit is perfect and the timing is right for TBWA/Raad/PR to take our wellestablished relationship with Ketchum to the next level,” says Ramzi Raad,

U I ADVERTISING Director’s agony and STC Madrid. Director Mazen Fayyad has talked about the challenges of shooting a television commercial for Saudi Telecommunications Company (STC) that involved the Real Madrid football team. In a press release, he says, “Arranging and managing time were the most important problems we had to face. Shooting with international celebrities always has to be done in short order.” Fayyad says he has previously worked with Manchester United stars, and this experience helped him. “The difficulty of shooting with stars lies in timing and the way of implementing the ad,” he says. “Deciding what to shoot with high speed and accuracy.”

The ad was shot in Madrid, Spain, Fayyad says, in a studio belonging to Real. The ad was rehearsed before in another, similar studio. In the release, Fayyad hints at prima donna behavior of some of the players, saying, “If they discover any mistake, they will leave the scene and never return.” Cristals launches poster competition Faraya. The MENA Cristal Festival has launched its annual poster competition. Agencies are called on to

chairman and CEO of TBWA/Raad. “More and more we see companies in the MENA region placing public relations at the heart of their marketing programs, and the new company, Ketchum Raad Middle East, is ideally placed to offer client advice and insight.” Hania Tabet, managing director of the agency, says, “Our TBWA/Raad/ PR team adds a significant level of expertise across Arab markets and a professional approach that aligns exceptionally well with Ketchum’s collaborative culture and creativity.” create a poster to promote the event. If their work is chosen, they will get prizes – in the form of accommodation, waived entry fees, and network-wide discounts – to the tune of $15,000, say the festival’s organizers. For more details, including the brief and examples of past posters, go to menacristal.com. The closing date for entries is May 7, 2010. IAA UAE chapter launches education series Dubai. The UAE chapter of the International Advertising Association last month launched its professional development series of paid workshops at its Media City headquarters. Nicholas Chidiac, strategic planning director for Leo Burnett Dubai, ran a workshop entitled “Death of Continued on page 14

GS Fitch appoints Dan Dimmock as senior brand strategist Asda’a unveils youth survey Fifth Ring hires Kate Doherty, Emily Houltram and Mary Kamasmieh Omani lifestyle titles sign up for BPA audit Manoramaonline.com launches Gulfmanorama.com Fragrance Foundation partners with Euromonitor La Moda Dubai Web site launches Majid relaunches in eco-friendly guise to celebrate 32nd anniversary Happy Design Studio signs alliance with Arabian Jets Go to our Web site for the full stories: www.communicate.ae

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Continued from page 12 an insight.” In a statement, the IAA says it was “designed to develop knowledge and build expertise in the media activities of agency- or client-side organizations.” “The quality of the participants was excellent, really high,” says Chidiac (pictured, above). “There was a positive level of engagement and heated debate.” The series, moderated by industry professionals, will run until September. The IAA says coming topics will include a master class in digital media, the role of PR, and “the media/customer journey.” For rates and more information, contact iaauae@emirates.net.ae. 2 I DIGITAL ADMC makes two appointments Abu Dhabi. Abu Dhabi Media Company has announced two new appointments in its digital media team. Akram Youssef will be managing director of football site Super.ae, and Zoya Sakr is managing director of Zahramag.ae, the online presence for Zahrat Al Khaleej magazine. Youssef (pictured) has previously been editor-in-chief of Modern Sport TV, a desk editor at Al Ittihad, and a columnist for Sport magazine and Al Ahram newspaper. Before joining ADMC, Sakr was head of sales and marketing at Al Aan, where she launched the Al Aan TV channel and Web site. Connect Ads announces alliance with Facebook Dubai. Connect Ads, which bills itself as the region’s leading digital advertising company, has become the official representation partner for social networking site Facebook. Under the terms of the partnership, Connect Ads will offer direct access to advertising products available through the site. Advertisers will still, however, be able to use Facebook’s various self-service offerings to put their ads on the site. Connect Ads is a subsidiary of Internet service provider Link Dot Net,

wholly owned by Egyptian telecoms giant Orascom Telecom Holding. S I AGENCIES

Fox moves into Abu Dhabi Abu Dhabi. Fox International Channels (FIC), a wholly owned subsidiary of News Corporation, announced on the eve of the Abu Dhabi Media Summit that it has formed a strategic partnership with Abu Dhabi’s media hub twofour54, involving three projects. FIC is headquartering the Middle East operations of its global online ad network business, Dot Fox, in Abu Dhabi in cooperation with twofour54. In a release, FIC says Dot Fox is the second largest online media provider in the UAE, and the third largest in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The company hopes to win representation agreements with local sites in the region, and will build a sales force to work across the Middle East. The network’s specializations include online video, display, and branded advertising. Secondly, FIC’s production house NHNZ will set up a production office in Abu Dhabi, from which it will manage Middle East-specific productions, with an emphasis on building up 3D production capabilities and expertise, says FIC. The NHNZ

production office will offer skill training and workshops to help develop Arab talent and production infrastructure. It will also look to develop projects with local producers for international broadcast. Lastly, FIC will move the operations of some of its channels available in the Middle East from Hong Kong and other locations to a new location in twofour54. FIC’s free-to-air satellite channels in the region include the National Geographic Abu Dhabi Channel, Fox Movies and Fox Series. FIC also operates nine pay-TV channels in the Middle East. David Haslingden, CEO of FIC (pictured, above), says, “This inaugural Abu Dhabi Media Summit is the ideal forum for us to announce this exciting collaboration between FIC and twofour54, and to underline the important role that such strategic alliances have in the development of the enormous potential of the region’s media sector.” Twofour54 CEO Tony Orsten (pictured, left) says, “The world’s media industry is increasingly focusing on the MENA region. This announcement reinforces our vision, which is to establish Abu Dhabi as a regional centre of excellence for the Arabic media industry, and adds to the media ecosystem we have created.”

BPG partners with Metaphor in Bahrain Manama. Dubai-based BPG Group has announced an affiliation with Bahrain-based marketing company Metaphor. The announcement means BPG, which is part of holding company WPP Group, is now present in 10 regional locations, says the company. Avi Bhojani (pictured below, right), CEO of BPG, calls the affiliation “a perfect fit,” and adds, “This is a highly complementary scenario. Metaphor will get access to BPG Group, which services businesses across different sectors in the GCC, and BPG will leverage on capabilities and brand equity created by Metaphor in the Kingdom of Bahrain.” Metaphor Communications’ chairman, Premal Patel (pictured below, left), says the kingdom has felt the pressure of the economic downturn, but is coming back fast. “With Bahrain in an energetic mode, our association with BPG enables us to play in a larger field and inject globally recognized integrated communications services into the kingdom,” he says.

JC Decaux hires John Todary Dubai. Outdoor supplier JC Decaux has appointed John Todary, previously sales director on Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC) broadsheet The National as deputy sales director. Before that, as group sales manager at Arab Media Group, Todary ran sales of Emirates Today (now Emirates Business 24-7) and Emarat Alyoum. At JC Decaux Middle East, the outdoor supplier that runs Dubai Airport as well as other locations in the UAE, Qatar and Algeria, Todary will report to Yoann El Jaohari, the company’s sales and marketing director.

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APRIL 2010 | INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Is Bubbly the new Twitter?

Service takes off in India; Brazil and Japan are next

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In India, thousands of consumers are going from tweeting to bubbling. A hot new social-networking service dubbed Bubbly, which is essentially a voice-based Twitter, is quickly gaining popularity among Indians. And thanks to Bollywood celebs being early adopters, Bubbly is growing virally and with virtually zero marketing spend. Bubbly is the brainchild of fiveyear-old mobile and social app firm Bubble Motion, which is based in Silicon Valley and Singapore. In rolling out Bubbly, Bubble Motion’s CEO Tom Clayton plans to skip North America and Europe and focus on fast-growing, mobilesavvy markets such as India, Japan and Brazil. Anyone can sign up to follow a friend, family member, celebrity or brand. Posting messages and following is free, and once a

new message has been recorded and sent out, users get an alert. If they choose to listen, they pay for the airtime. Most messages are less than 30 seconds long, and there is currently a cap of one minute. Bubbly hasn’t launched officially, but the service saw an estimated 500,000 users in about four weeks after some of Bollywood’s biggest stars started using it, including Aamir Khan (pictured, left) and Kareena Kapoor. “It’s personal and it’s easier for a celeb” to connect with their fans using Bubbly rather than a Webbased service in which an agent or PR firm might be writing messages, says Clayton. Bubbly’s business model is based on its revenue-sharing partnerships with telecoms companies. In India, that includes two giants, Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel.

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APRIL 2010 | INTERNATIONAL NEWS

was involved in last November. The beverage brand is the third sponsor to walk away from the embattled golfer. “We no longer see a role for Tiger in our marketing efforts and have ended our relationship,” says a Gatorade spokeswoman.

Gatorade drops Woods It seems Gatorade was less than impressed with Tiger Woods’ public apology. The sports-drink giant has dropped Woods (pictured, above), who in a televised news conference in February publicly apologized for his transgressions after details of his numerous extramarital affairs surfaced following a one-car accident he

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French Connection launches Chatroulette marketing push What kind of brand would want to associate with Chatroulette? Well, French Connection – of FCUK fame – would. The UK-based clothing retailer is embracing the site that connects people to random strangers through webcam chats. In the promotion, the first person to prove they have used Chatroulette to set up a date wins $375 of vouchers to spend at a French Connection store on a “real-life-date-worthy outfit.” The prize may be small, but the risks are huge, considering that much of what happens on Chatroulette, set up in November 2009, is pornography at best. William Woodhams, director of marketing at French Connection,

isn’t too concerned about the possible pitfalls of sending people to hook up with strangers online. He says, “We’ve hijacked the site; we’re a fashion brand and we wanted to get involved in an irreverent way.” CCTV pulls 730 million viewers China Central Television’s Spring Festival gala may not be the world’s most sophisticated variety show, but it packs a punch with both viewers and advertisers. With a heavy emphasis on non-stop product placement, the program generates $95 million in revenue from advertisers. Altogether, a whopping 730 million viewers tuned in across the country for this year’s gala, says Beijing-based Zuo Hanying, associate director of marketing at CSM Media Research. Advertisers buy packages that range from $500,000 to $1 million. They typically include a few 15-second ads during pre- and post-show programming on various CCTV channels and a combination of on-air greetings, close-ups on brand logos

during the show, segment sponsorships and mentions of the brand during a segment by a performer or host. Beverage giants team up to remove soda from schools As the beverage industry comes under assault with proposed sugar taxes in several parts of the USA, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group have begun running print and TV ads touting their joint initiative to remove full-calorie soft drinks from schools across the country. The normally fierce rivals are collaborating on a threeyear commitment that has led to an 88 percent decrease in calories from beverages shipped to schools since 2004. Kevin Keane, senior vice-president for public affairs at the American Beverage Association, says, “What the beverage industry is doing is leading and recognizing that they need to be part of the solution, especially when it comes to a complex issue like obesity.”

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COVER STORY | APRIL 2010

Antoine Choueiri.1939 to 2010 On March 9, the regional advertising industry lost one of its founding fathers. Communicate looks back at Antoine Choueiri’s life by Nathalie Bontems ntoine Choueiri, the founder, chairman and president of pan-Arab media representation agency Choueiri Group, succumbed to cancer on March 9 at the age of 70. Choueiri had been battling the disease for several years. Despite surgeries and periods of remission, in recent months he had withdrawn from public life. His absence will be felt by a wide array of people who were used to turning to him for advice and analysis. Until the end of his life, media-shy Choueiri remained one of the most respected personalities in the realm of regional advertising. When he talked, people listened.

DEDICATION. Antoine Choueiri was born in Beirut on Aug. 3, 1939 to a family of five. His father was a railway mechanic and his mother a housewife. He had to leave school aged 15 and didn’t have the chance to go to university, but early on he made up his mind that he would one day run his own company. He knew that, in order to achieve his goals, he would need an education, so what he couldn’t initially afford he acquired through sheer will and dedication. He

Antoine Choueiri left his mark on whatever endeavor he felt compelled to embark on. put himself through night school, and ended up with Lebanon’s top accountancy qualification at the time. Around the same time, in 1961, he married Rose Salameh, who would remain by his side for 49 years. Antoine Choueiri’s future wasn’t in accounting; he won a job at Abou Adal Group, a luxury goods distribution company that also had a publishing arm producing two magazines at the time, and within 10 years he had become head of sales in Abou Adal’s media division. Some men would have been content with this – climbing the ladder quickly inside a wellestablished company – but Choueiri had other plans. In 1970, he created his own company, Regie Generale de Presse, a media representation house that, as Choueiri Group, would grow to

become the most powerful in the region. The company started by selling space for Al Mawaad magazine, a challenge that was made tougher by the Lebanese civil war that raged for 15 years and all but destroyed Lebanon. Choueiri was forced to flee to France along with thousands of other Lebanese. That’s not to say he turned his back on his home country, however. By giving sales representation to major Arabic newspapers such as Al Watan al Arabi, the Paris-based Choueiri Group opened doors to an advertising market that had remained widely overlooked until then. On top of this, Choueiri came up with a business model that hadn’t been seen before in the Arab world; his sales agency Video Force sold space on video tapes in Saudi Arabia, while his Arabian Outdoor built up the MUPI and outdoor business in the kingdom. ARAB WORLD. The year 1985 was crucial for Choueiri and his company. Coming back to Lebanon, Antoine Choueiri not only turned to the rest of the Arab world at a time when few others had an interest in it, but also expanded

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ROSE CHOUEIRI Antoine Choueiri’s wife

PIERRE AND LENA Antoine with his two children

horizontally over the year, through a wide array of media including print and, most importantly, television. It was in 1985 that LBC was launched, and Pierre El Daher, chairman of the LBC Group, remembers Choueiri’s pitch. “The LBC station had been launched around three months earlier, and Antoine stormed into my office, telling me, ‘You have something good here, and I’ll be your media rep.’ I simply couldn’t turn him down,” he says. The Choueiri Group was immediately appointed media representative of a nascent station that was to become one of the region’s most successful endeavors. Today, the Choueiri Group and its 500-strong staff represent 17 satellite television stations, 11 print titles, seven radio stations and a lot of outdoor. It works with MBC, LBC, An Nahar, Al Hayat, Al Safir and Dubai Media Incorporated – to name just a few. It operates in 11 markets and has 14 subsidiaries, and is said to control around 70 percent of the region’s television spend. And its founder worked closely with the GCC Advertising Association, which was founded in 2005 and later became the Advertisers’ Business Group, representing the region’s biggest spenders. PASSION. Antoine Choueiri left his mark on whatever endeavor he felt compelled to embark on. Take sports, his other passion. Without his

involvement, Lebanon’s basketball scene would not be what it is today. Indeed, when Antoine Choueiri became president of basketball club La Sagesse (pictured, above) in 1992, few would have bet that this team would win 19 championships in 10 years, including twice winning both the Asian Club Championship and the Arab Basketball Cup. He gave up his interest in 2005 out of disappointment at the way the Lebanese basketball industry was managed. Success such as Choueiri’s cannot be achieved without generating criticism and making some enemies. But despite accusations that he pursued his own profit to the detriment of his partners, Choueiri wouldn’t shift his position. And for many, Antoine Choueiri’s most appreciated quality was his loyalty. Clients often became close friends of his; he was, for example, the godfather of LBC chairman Pierre El Daher’s daughter, and his friendship with late publisher and MP Gebran Tueini (assassinated in 2006) was unwavering. Choueiri enjoyed time with his seven grandchildren and all the people close to him, either in his East Beirut office or in his house in the mountains. He leaves an impressive heritage. He will be remembered and missed – by his family and friends, first and foremost, but also by a whole industry that, through his death, has lost some of its spirit. He is survived by his wife Rose, his two children Pierre and Lena, and his grandchildren.

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AC Communicate.pdf

22/03/2010

10:44:58 AM

Great leaders build a legacy that survives them C

CMY

As we bid farewell to Antoine Choueiri and express our sympathy to his family, relatives and colleagues, we salute a great family man, a passionate leader and a visionary businessman whose legacy extends far beyond his professional life. As a true architect, he has built an ediďŹ ce and a culture that will stand the test of time.

Dubai Media City, PO BOX 34404, Dubai, UAE

Tel: +971 4 390 4323 . Fax: +971 4 391 8069

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A life remembered

The industry looks back at Antoine Choueiri and how he changed advertising in the region MAZEN HAYEK MBC GROUP DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, PR AND COMMERCIAL You either loved Antoine Choueiri or hated him; he never left you indifferent. He earned all kinds of mixed emotions, yet truly deserved one reputation: as a workaholic top-achiever who believed in the principle of “never say die.” He was often the engine behind business and political discussions: sharp, witty, street-smart, a lover of figures, a tough negotiator, a risk-taker, and an optimist and with a unique sense of humor. He also came across as a modest and emotional man, someone who stuck by his friends and allies at all times, yet who fiercely fought his opponents until they surrendered. He rarely under-delivered, even when it came to a verbal, non-written agreement. Choueiri had the same kind of appreciation for advertisers and agencies, coupled with his obsession with enlarging the ad market in the MENA region while striving to help advertisers and agencies meet their business objectives and reach their desired bottom lines. The media-representative, outsourced-ad-sales business model in the region would not have survived the global trend of advertisers conducting business straight with the media had it not been for Choueiri’s clout, added value and proven indispensability in the market. The gradual split between brand agencies and media buying units in the late ’90s would probably not have made business sense without Choueiri’s sustained support and backing. Choueiri gave charities and needy individuals the kind of moral and financial support that only a self-made man from modest origins would know how to give, in dignity and silence.

GEORGES CHEHWAN CEO OF GROUP PLUS I have the utmost respect for Antoine Choueiri, someone I’ve worked with closely for seven years. He gave a lot to advertising in the Middle East. He helped to increase the volume of the market by making sure that ad spend would grow. However, even though he has passed away, I don’t think anything will change for now; the structure he established has sound foundations and his son is a good person. Of course, some people will try to approach the media, but we won’t be witnessing any radical change in the near future on top of the global changes that are already happening. RAJA TRAD CEO OF LEO BURNETT, MENA In the 30 or so years that I knew him, I learned that any relationship with Antoine Choueiri involved more than just agency-media interaction. In dealing with Antoine, I was dealing with someone in whom the professional and the human being were inseparable. His big heart, his warm personal approach to building business relationships, and his commitment to do all he could to improve the industry made Antoine a friend, a colleague and a great business partner. Antoine was a man of his word. He was honest, giving, and driven to better the industry. Antoine contributed immensely to the communications industry at large. He was always concerned about what could be done to improve the standards of the industry, and worked tirelessly to achieve these improvements over the years

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APRIL 2010 | COVER STORY

PIERRE EL DAHER CHAIRMAN OF LBC GROUP The regional advertising industry wouldn’t be what it is today without Antoine. Before him, advertising in the Middle East was mere child’s play. He’s the one who had the will to devise and implement a whole system that – up until now – does very well and will keep doing well even though he has passed away. We’ll keep working with the Choueiri Group without a doubt, just like before. However, reducing Antoine to what he achieved in his business would be unfair. He was a man with a vision, who had such courage that I sometimes marveled at the risks he took. At times, I would try and talk him out of it, but he would go ahead, no matter what other people said. FARID CHEHAB CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF CREATIVE OFFICER OF LEO BURNETT CEEMEA With Antoine Choueiri’s passing, a monument of the industry has disappeared. He was with us from the start, when we were just young beginners. I believe that Antoine has gone at a time when the major media, as we used to know it, is also disappearing. What Antoine represented is an era that’s almost over. Those media buying companies that Antoine established will soon be a thing of the past. We’re moving towards a new world, and Antoine would have been quite sad to see this new world grow and be different from what he created. Those figures that were emblematic of a certain way of advertising will be gone forever: the Leo Burnetts, the Ogilvys, and, in the Middle East, the men such as Antoine. JAMALE RASSI FORMER PARTNER IN CHOUEIRI GROUP, NOW GENERAL MANAGER OF MEDIA REP ADLINE IN LEBANON I have lost a big brother, a friend, a mentor. He was the star I followed for more than 16 years. He was passionate, intense; his drive was success not glory, he used power to achieve more. He was a builder not just of his media empire but of a big family, his own and all the people moving around him, be it in his companies, in the media business, in sports. He hated losers but was nevertheless tolerant with fragile people. The media world has lost a star and the people around him have lost the solid backup he always provided to everyone. Anyone in his close circle will feel as an orphan. We learned a lot from him; he was a school of success and his life could have been transcribed as a new version of The Art of War. How strategic his thinking was, and what a clear vision he had of things, businesses and people. He lived intensely and passionately every second of his life, fulfilling his ambitions and enjoying his hobbies. After all, he achieved so much and so many things.

GEORGE JABBOUR PRESIDENT OF THE IAA LEBANON CHAPTER AND CEO, NEAR EAST, OF FORTUNE PROMOSEVEN Each and every one of us perceived the death of Antoine Choueiri as a major loss and we are all very sad. Whether you liked him or not, whether you were with him or against him, you can only agree that he was an outstanding figure of the advertising world in the region, and that over the past 35 years he left his mark on everything that was related to advertising. Ever since I got into this business 25 years ago, Antoine was there, so it’s not easy to all of a sudden imagine the industry without him. Time will tell. The only thing I know for sure is that it won’t be the same. He was a man with a vision, who was generous, who had the will to fight until the very end, who was smart and strong on so many levels in personality, business, sports, and politics. There are many ways to approach such a personality beyond business. FADI SALAMEH PRESIDENT AND CEO OF MIDDLE EAST COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK Antoine Choueiri, for the 30 years that I knew him, was a friend, a guide, and a mentor. He will remain the shining icon of our media and advertising industry – not just because he was one of the founding fathers in the region, but because he helped shape its destiny. Antoine was a change agent. He believed in expanding horizons, creating opportunities, and working on making the impossible possible. He had the courage to work with opponents from yesterday and turn them into friends for tomorrow. For me personally he was much more than just an industry pioneer; he was a beacon of Lebanese entrepreneurship, and he always held the cedar and Lebanon very close to his heart. His commitment to the Cedar Nation is legendary. EDMOND MOUTRAN CHAIRMAN OF MEMAC OGILVY Antoine Choieiri was an impressive man by any account and most knew him as a pillar and pioneer of our industry. Antoine was not just a brilliant businessman, however; he was also an extraordinary family man, an integral part of his community and he was my dear friend. His loss is a tragedy and he will be deeply, deeply missed. LOUIS HAKIM CEO OF PHILIPS MIDDLE EAST AND ARAB BUSINESS GROUP CHAIRMAN. The death of Antoine Choueiri is a big loss to all of us and to the industry as a whole. He was a friend to everybody and a man of great vision, who led the industry to where it is today. Antoine was one of a kind and will certainly be missed.

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They say you are judged by the company you keep. In the respected Society for News Design annual competition held recently in the USA, The National won the 4th most individual awards. The contest, held by the leading international organization for visual journalists has been running for 31 years. The awards attracted more than 10,000 entries from 374 publications across 40 countries.

LANCE DE MASI PRESIDENT OF THE IAA UAE CHAPTER, AND PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN DUBAI Does anyone believe for a second that the passing of Antoine Choueiri lessens his impact on the communications industry? The business model he invented helped shape an industry, fueling its prosperity in good times and survival in times bad. His efforts caused the pie to grow and provided advertisers and consumers with media options that would never have been sustainable without his commercial imagination and support. Many a communications agency owes its size to Antoine Choueiri. I remember him as innovative, pragmatic, fair, and generous in his dealings. As an industry and personally as people and professionals we owe him a debt of gratitude. JOSEPH GHOSSOUB CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF THE MENACOM GROUP Antoine Choueiri was a trailblazer; we, like boy scouts, follow the path he cleared for us. For many of us, the hesitant entrants to the business of media in the ’70s, Choueiri was our inspiration, model and hero. He rolled out before us the Middle East mediascape and flagged where the opportunities lay. His life and achievements were a lesson for us in not only shaping the media industry perspective but also in understanding and assimilating the demanding work ethos. Choueiri was a keen basketball enthusiast. He almost singlehandedly built an active interest for the game in Lebanon. I was not surprised by his passion for the game; basketball has that sort of dynamism. It has all the elements of an elaborate boardroom drama. You tackle challenges, you

dexterously make your way, and you dunk the ball to clinch a point. Isn’t that what every business is all about? He was influential. After all, his business represented some of the world’s leading names in the industry – from Lebanon’s LBC Sat to the MBC Group, Al Jazeera Network, Al Hayat daily and Dubai Media Incorporated. But in building this business empire, he was also creating room for others to grow and prosper. That, I believe, is his legacy. ELIE KHOURY REGIONAL MANAGING DIRECTOR, OMG Like most leaders, Antoine Choueiri will leave a great legacy behind, which extends way beyond his professional life. He will always be remembered as human, modest, generous and a bold thinker. He managed to balance work and fun, living life to the fullest, and dedicated the right amount of time to family life and building family values. We’ve worked with Antoine and his company for the last 20 years and I am confident that the team he has built and the leadership structure he has groomed will build on his legacy and lead the company to even greater heights. MARK BUTTERFIELD HEAD OF MEDIA AT UNILEVER NAME Choueiri’s death marks the passing of an industry icon who dragged Middle East media on to the world stage and shaped how media transactions are carried out today. He was a man who saw the bigger picture – not just for his clients but for all clients. His death marks a sad and regrettable loss of a business partner and friend.

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APRIL 2010 | COVER STORY

RAMZI RAAD CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF TBWA/RAAD March 9, 2010 is surely a turning point in Middle East media history, as it will always be remembered as the day when its knight in shining armor exited the battlefield for the last time. From the days of the pan-Arab magazines’ dominance, to the development of the prerecorded video cassette as a lead advertising medium, to the spread of satellite TV, Antoine Choueiri charted new courses for advertisers, advertising agencies, media owners, publishers, planners and buyers across the Arab world. His reconciling spirit and generosity touched the majority of players in the communications industry in this part of the world; his loss will continue to echo for years to come. ALEX SABER EXECUTIVE VICE-PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER AT PUBLICIS GROUPE MEDIA Antoine was a visionary who laid the foundation stones of the Arab media landscape – after all, he created what we have today. Antoine is an institution, a glowing torch for the industry, and leaves a legacy in very safe hands. MARWAN KAI HEAD OF MIS GULF I have had the privilege of knowing Antoine for as long as I can remember. Before he became the great media mogul and pioneer the industry knew, Antoine was family. Antoine and my late father [Elie Kai, another industry pioneer] were friends and brothers well before they were partners. Antoine, Rose, Lena and Pierre were always around when I was younger, and my most vivid memory was the cursing that he and Elie engaged in over their endless backgammon and biriba sessions. From a professional perspective, Antoine was as influential in my career as my father was. His impact and influence on the industry are there for everyone to see; when we talk about the media and advertising industry, some might argue that Antoine was not one of the pioneers, as there was a generation before him. But few would disagree that he’s had the biggest single impact and influence on this industry. He was instrumental in shaping how the media evolved in this part of the world. He was a great champion of growing this industry and of developing and rewarding human talent. But all the industry and professional attributes are nothing compared to the human side of Antoine Choueiri; the man was the most compassionate, humble, caring person one could meet. He cared about people, people he knew well and people he hardly knew. I cannot ever recall anybody approaching Antoine for a cause and being turned away; he used everything in his means to help and do good.

MUSTAPHA ASSAD CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF PUBLICIS GRAPHICS The world has lost a great man, but Antoine Choueiri has left his mark. He was a leader, a fighter, an innovator, a husband, a father, a colleague. To me, he was a dear friend, a brother. I consider his family to be my family. I could tell you how Antoine was known as the “Godfather” of media in the Middle East. I could also tell you that he was highly intelligent, possessed an endless generosity, and was very pragmatic. I could tell you that he developed and maintained excellent personable working relationships with his agencies and clients. And that he was a fighter, with business acumen and outstanding salesmanship, who never stopped until his mission was achieved. I could also tell you that he founded the Choueiri Group, a very successful, wellstructured organization. And he treated each friend and business partner with great care and attentiveness. This is how the world will remember Antoine Choueiri. He liked to excel at everything he did, and he usually succeeded, with the exception of predicting football results. Over the years we had ongoing football bets for a small sum paid to the winner after each match played. I was unlucky a couple of times, and handed over cash when my teams lost. Antoine, on the other hand, would write me a check every time he lost – and he lost many times. I couldn’t bring myself to cash the checks, as I knew these were occasions to be cherished. So, instead, I framed every check and hung it on my wall. I never let him live it down, especially when he would visit and I would proudly show him more than 25 framed checks hanging on my wall. From the years our families spent living together in Paris, escaping the Lebanese war, to all the memories and laughter we shared, I will never forget Antoine. He left us too soon, but he left us while he was at the top of his game. Antoine Choueiri made his mark on the world, and he will always be remembered.

Owing to space constraints, we have shortened many of the tributes above. Many contributors remembered Antoine Choueiri at much more length. To see these contributions in their entirety, go to communicate.ae.

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ÂŠ Getty/Gallo Images

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ADVERTISING | APRIL 2010

Jingle all the way Commercials for Cairo, ads for Alexandria; Egypt has become a major marketing playground. Communicate speaks to the agencies behind the ubiquitous jingles by Austyn Allison

n 1968 Egyptian television viewers found themselves humming a new tune. It was the jingle from an animated ad for Al Misr Dairy, composed by Ahmed Kamal Awad. Egyptians liked the jingle, and the notion of tying a brand to a catchy melody had arrived in North Africa; the fate of Egyptian advertising for the next forty years was sealed. Awad may have brought the jingle to Egypt, but another man made it the foundation of Egyptian advertising: Tarek Nour. His first jingle, produced in 1973 for a Zamalek clothes store called Playboy, cost the advertiser 20 Egyptian pounds (at today’s exchange rate, that’s a bargain $3.65). It was a line of business that would move him from being a musician, radio DJ and computer programmer at Cairo’s Al Ahram newspaper, and start him on his journey to become synonymous with Egyptian advertising. “Tarek is now less of a man, but more of a school,” says his son – and heir apparent – Karim, who in his role as Tarek Nour Holding’s corporate officer oversees the group. Tarek Nour Communications (TNC) is now a conglomerate of companies encompassing buying, creative, and – with the recent introduction of a Ramadan-only television channel, Cairocentric – media. Think of Egyptian advertising, and you think of Tarek Nour and his jingles. He is also the voice of Egyptian advertising – literally, as he has spoken and sung many of the commercials his company has produced over the years, and still does today.

Think of Egyptian advertising, and you think of Tarek Nour and his jingles. This, needless to say, is a point that infuriates other agencies. Even though many of their founders have, at some point, worked for Tarek Nour Communications.

CAIRO CALL. International agencies have been drawn to Cairo’s advertising scene lately, and numerous independent agencies have sprung up, all of them attracted by a burgeoning market. Between 2007 and 2008, according to Dubai Press Club’s Arab Media Outlook report, the value of the Egyptian advertising market grew by 43 percent. In 2009 the advertising market was worth an estimated $719 million. Karine Barakat is managing director of Starcom MediaVest Group in Cairo. She reckons there was still 10 to 15 percent growth between 2008 and 2009. Optimistic media houses raised their rate cards by 40 percent. The recession has hit Cairo’s advertising, though, and agencies have suffered. Grey and Look merged last year, and Lowe was swallowed by fellow Middle East Communications Network agency Fortune Promoseven. Other names maintain their sister agencies, keeping two shared-ownership shops running side-by-side to allow competing clients

to send their spend to the same place. BBDO, for example, saw its sister agency Strategies break away sometime around 1998, under the leadership of managing director Ahmed Badie. However, Saatchi & Saatchi’s client service director in Cairo, Wael Nazeem, says not all agencies observe non-competition clauses. “You go to Tarek Nour, and instead of one bank, you have three or four, and instead of one real estate project you have them all.” Brands often prefer to go with the biggest or best-known agency, he says. “Some of the clients look at size; others want the most popular agency in town. They come and ask who’s the biggest. It’s Tarek Nour.”

TAXING WORK. Being a big character in the Egyptian ad scene, Nour has his detractors, and many are jealous of his agency’s relationship with the Egyptian government. In 2005, Nour took on the task of persuading Egyptians to pay taxes (see “The maestro of Cairo,” Communicate, June 2007). That might sound like a tough brief, but luckily for TNC, there followed a 1,000 percent increase in people filing returns. “If you can get Egyptians to pay taxes, you can do anything,” says Karim Nour. In 2008, TNC signed an official partnership with global holding group Omnicom. The firm had been affiliated for 12 years with creative shop DDB, but Omnicom now owns a 49 percent share (leaving the Nour family with the controlling stake).

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APRIL 2010 | ADVERTISING

RANDA ABOUD CEO of Creative Lab

MOHAMED KHALIFA Managing director of Creative Lab

TAREK NOUR President and CEO of Tarek Nour Communications

While a cult of personality – a powerful factor in a country that wears its emotions on its sleeve – has helped Tarek Nour maintain TNC’s status as the poster boy of the business, so has the group’s desire to strongly protect itself from competition and criticism. TNC has come under fire for what many see as a heavy-handed approach to seeing off critics. At 6am on Oct. 25, 2009, Tamer Azab, a 20-something computer programmer and student, was woken by his father. Six men from the Mokafhet Gara’em El Ma’alomat, the Egyptian government’s cyber crimes unit, wanted to talk to him about a Facebook group he had started a few months before, called “Cairocentric stolen ads.” The premise of the site was that the trailers TNC had been using to hype its new television station, Cairocentric, were copies of old ads and comedy sketches that had been translated and “Egyptianized” shot-for-shot. Nour himself went on Egyptian television shortly after the group formed, and explained he had merely been “quoting” international ads he admired. TNC announced a spot-the-difference competition where viewers were encouraged to see what had changed between the original ads and the Cairocentric promos. The day after his arrest, Azab was released without charges; he met with Tarek Nour, and later sent Nour an open letter, apologizing for any defamation. Karim Nour says, “In terms of legalities, there is a huge legal team here. We wouldn’t broadcast something like that if there was anything illegal about it.” “Some people took it in a bad way,” he adds, “and this guy on Facebook started a group called ‘Stolen Promos.’ And this group blossomed into

a hate group ﬁlled with death threats and full of things like that. We took legal action because of slander and libel and because they took our logo and altered it, which is copyright infringement.” For his part, Tamer Azab says, “I met Karim and Tarek. For an hour and a half Tarek was explaining to me why he did what he did. He said he wanted to make people laugh. These ads make people laugh, and simply all he did was take a joke and translate it.”

JINGLE SOCIETY. TNC’s power is reflected in the ubiquity of jingles – something all local agencies have to cope with. Impact BBDO’s managing director in Cairo, Karim Khouri, calls the jingle “a double-edged sword.” “We don’t like to use it,” he says, “but the truth of the matter is that it works. It is a jingle society. People like the catchy tune, they have a sense of humor, they like anything that touches the emotions.” In a developing and maturing creative community, progressive creatives are loath to churn out what they see as a hackneyed and anachronistic form of advertising. Randa Abdou, CEO of indie shop Creative Lab, is quick to emphasize that popularity does not necessarily equate to effectiveness. “Egyptians love jingles,” she says, “but if it’s not strategic, if there’s no strategy behind the whole thing, the whole country will be singing the jingle but not buying the brand.” The same goes for comedy, she says. “Humor is definitely something that makes consumers tick, but not necessarily buy.” Saatchi’s Nazeem says that many jingles aren’t even original; they are “stolen” popular tunes. Nazeem says Saatchi rarely produces

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APRIL 2010 | ADVERTISING

EGYPTIAN EXAMPLES. Campaigns for the National Bank of Egypt and FedEx jingles. When pushed, he says that when the agency does them, it does so “with taste.” And it never steals songs. However, the agency will sometimes “recompose” songs (he gives the example of “Help,” by the Beatles) to sound similar to the original, but different enough to make them distinguishable.

DINA HASHEM Managing director of media agency UM Cairo

HIRE POWER. Talent is a hot topic among agencies the world over, and Egypt is no exception. Although it’s easier to find client-servicing staff than creatives, according to Mohamed Khalifa, managing director at Creative Lab, all talent is hard to find. Karim Khouri agrees, saying, “In the A-B class, the well-to-do families, there is an expectation that you are going to be a doctor, that you are going to be in banking, you are going to be in business, you are going to be an engineer, you are going to be in marketing. But there isn’t an expectation that you will be working in anything remotely creative.” Creative Lab hires two fresh graduates for every ten new employees, say its management. The other eight will be brought in from other agencies. Because Egyptian advertising is largely run by Egyptians (whereas in the Gulf, and much of North Africa, it is run on imported, expatriate talent) there is more poaching between local agencies. While Communicate was in Egypt, we kept hearing comparisons between Egypt and Dubai. But Dubai sells itself as a technologically advanced creative hub, in contrast to more conservative, less developed markets like Egypt. Khouri, though, suggests the whole region is underexposed to creativity. “I think what differentiates people in New

York from the people in Dubai and the people in Egypt is the environment, and ultimately we are all products of our environment,” he says. “When you are working five blocks away from Times Square, which is perhaps the outdoor capital of the world, the bar is quite high, and the level of your exposure is quite high.” Poaching is rife among Egypt’s creative and media agencies, but it’s often done on an emotional level as much as – sometimes more than – a financial one. Employees are often fiercely loyal, but when a rival company succeeds in tempting them, they seldom hang around to negotiate. And if one person goes, you are likely to lose a lot. It keeps Dina Hashem, managing director of media agency UM Cairo, awake at night. Since the end of 2007, she says, “I am currently – by numbers and by reputation – the No. 1 media agency in Egypt, and what worries me is how I’ll stay the No. 1. … It involves a lot to stay No. 1. It involves retaining the people, in short.” The agency has increased wages to become, she says, the highest-paid agency in the market. “For a long time it had nothing to do with the salaries,” she says. “It was the culture, it was the people, it was the company, the name. But after a while, when you get headhunted two or three times, doubling or tripling your salary, you have to say, ‘OK, enough for the company; I love the people and the culture but I want to get paid.’” She says UM now tends to hire people without experience, but with promise, and teach them the mysterious ways of the buying agency. This can be a challenge, as advertising education in Egypt is sorely lacking. Private universities are developing, and this might

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Again unlike the Lynx and the Cristals, the Rameh Awards only reward work from Egyptian agencies. But, along with the American University in Cairo’s own Annual Advertising Awards, the trophy cabinets of many agencies seem proud to display Egyptian awards. The Egyptian Adverising Association (which is closely allied with the International Advertising Association, the IAA) was started in 1984 and currently has around 3,000 members, says Hamdy. As well as organizing the awards, it puts out a magazine, runs courses for its members, takes delegations of its members abroad, and organizes a pension scheme, he adds.

FREE STYLE. Work by Media Marquee, Cairo, for Egyptair Duty Free help in five or 10 years, says Creative Lab’s Aboud. But at the moment, finding fresh talent is a lottery. Nazeem says the American University of Cairo and the October University for Modern Science and Arts (MSA) are the best of a bad bunch in terms of local education. When recruiting, “A key factor is to look at the school, not just the university,” he says. “It makes a lot of sense to hire someone from the likes of the German School. They are quite structured, they have very open minds and their backgrounds are often good. The French school is OK, but they are a bit complicated. They turn out to be seriously complex individuals.”

IAA IN ACTION. When Communicate visited Cairo in October last year, we attended the International Advertising Association Al Rameh Awards. Compared to regional events such as the Dubai Lynx and the MENA Cristal Advertising Awards, the event was low-key, with perhaps 400 people attending a dinner at the Cairo Opera House. The event had already been postponed, and chairman of the Egyptian Advertising Association Hassan Hamdy (who is also general manager of the advertising department of Al Ahram newspaper) apologized for some last minute changes.

REGIONAL RELATIONS. Local branches of international agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi that deal largely with international clients spend a lot of time adapting work from international branches and other regional offices such as Dubai. Localization is key, says Wael Nazeem. For example, when Saatchi worked on Ariel’s “behind every success” campaign, the concept was that behind every successful family, there is a woman using that washing powder. The ads featured men in a variety of jobs. Some, like a doctor, were universally used. Others were country specific: Egypt got a maker of fateer (a local, pizza-like pie), and Morocco got a clothes merchant. Because Egypt has a deeper-rooted, less diluted culture than most of the advertising hubs of the Arabian Gulf, there has been more opportunity for stereotypes to crop up. Everyone in Cairo can relate to the doorman who calls all his tenants “bashmahandis,” the symphony of cabs that honks at you whenever you set foot on the street, cops sleeping in their cars, and lorry drivers who keep their lights off at night to save fuel. For some people, Egypt is a hub for North Africa. But many in the industry say it is a world apart from the Maghreb countries bordering it to the West. “When you talk about ‘North Africa,’ that’s a myth,” says Dina Hashem. “We don’t belong to each other. They speak French, and we don’t. We don’t have anything in common; not in the culture, not in the traditions. They are more European by far than us. … The closest country we could be compared to is Lebanon. We are close geography-wise, and we have a lot of similarities to the people themselves, the culture, the traditions.” But Egypt’s advertising scene has developed its own way, and has got its own distinct voice over the years. Egypt hums its own tune. And that tune is the ubiquitous jingle. It is now part of the heritage and personality of a country that puts a lot of sway in heritage and personality. And while there are many personalities around, the man who still dominates is the man who made the jingle Egyptian.

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KEEPING IT REAL In the time it has taken to build Burj Khalifa, an independent animation house has risen alongside, to stamp its own mark on the Dubai map.

lockworkVFX was started by three friends from South Africa. When they stepped off the plane at Dubai International Airport in 2005, all they had was their life savings and an unwavering belief that they had something different to offer. It may sound like a Dubai cliche, but where else could three young creative minds grow a company from nothing, to become one of the leading 3D animation studios in the region. In less than 5 years. “The crux of this company, what makes it different from the rest, is that it’s run by artists, for artists”, says Jason Tomlins, Managing Director of ClockworkVFX. “Our focus has always been per-

sonal – being an artist and always being completely hands on, you invest a lot of yourself into each project. This has never changed as we have grown.” Marc Greyvenstein, Head of Animation, says “We are more excited about 2010 than any other year and we feel that we are perfectly placed, in terms of talent, capacity and location. We want to push boundaries and help put Dubai on the map as a creative powerhouse, not just in the region, but internationally as well.” In terms of capacity, ClockworkVFX has a highly skilled team of digital artists who are experts at capturing a director’s vision and bringing it to

life. On offer is a depth of knowledge and experience that comes from the diversity of international exposure and experience gained over their careers. In addition, clients benefit from having VFX, 3D animation and online/offline expertise under one roof. The studio is equiped with the latest software and hardware tools available, backed up with considerable rendering power which allows efficient management of assignments. The Clockwork team can handle a range of work, from TV branding to high-end commercials, while at the same time close ties with a pool of independent international artists provides the flexibility to quickly

ramp up for larger projects. The close collaboration between these teams also brings creative, technical and cost benefits to clients. “Going forward,” says Producer, Mia Harvey, “Clockwork is here to stay. We grew up here and we believe in the region. Dubai has been our training ground and as such we understand the culture and unique challenges of working in the Middle East. Add to this a team of artists who are dedicated to their craft and you have a winning product. Its all good!” You can read more about ClockworkVFX and view their website www.clockworkvfx.com

CLIENT: GM AGENCY: Leo Burnett

Clockwork’s biggest challenge for 2009 was GM’s Chevrolet In Motion spot. A five minute, full CG video, with over 96 shots - generated in only 3 months. Marc Greyvenstein and Leo Burnett Creative Director Stephen Harris worked closely together to develop a simple yet striking graphic treatment for each of the car categories. GM’s Aveo 5 picked up best visual effects at the Production Mena awards last year and was another great example of good live action integration. “It was great fun working with Filmworks production on this job. RC cars and trained dogs are always ingredients for great mood on set “ comments Marc. CLIENT: The National AGENCY: Impact BBDO

Another creative challenge was “The National” newspaper launch. Clockwork had to find a way to weave a wide range of shapes and forms with one white color palette into a distinct TV and print campaign. “This kind of work we don’t get to do everyday, its pure design and it’s a style we hope to see more of this year” explains Marc. CLIENT: Almarai AGENCY: Memac Ogilvy

“Our team really enjoyed getting their teeth into Almarai “Bully” TVC”, notes Jason. An animated character spot with a Saudi super hero kid, “most of this kind of work used to be done overseas, but we are proving that we can generate animated content that is fun and relevant to the region.”

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Engaging Egypt

Newspapers are gaining traction in Egypt, but Communicate finds that television is still number one for both the marketing industry and the audience by Austyn Allison

TAREK NOUR COMMUNICATIONS One of Egypt’s biggest agencies

ubai Press Club’s Arab Media Outlook report cites Zenith Optimedia/Value Partners data saying that advertising spend in Egypt is focused on print, with 55 percent of the country’s advertising money going to newspapers. But those on the ground beg to differ. Television has traditionally been predominant, says Randa Abou, CEO of independent Cairo ad agency Creative Lab. But times are changing. “In the past, 90 percent or 95 percent of the budget would go into television,” she says. “It’s not the case any more. Clients go with the press, with billboards, and radio is becoming very popular now.” But Karim Nour, corporate officer at TN Holdings, the holding company behind Egyptian advertising behemoth Tarek Nour Communications (TNC), guesses television still accounts for 65 to 70 percent of advertising outlay today. He admits, though, that monitored spend is often inflated, especially when it comes to the Egyptian government. TNC handles government accounts including its campaign to make people pay their taxes (see “The maestro of Cairo,” Communicate, June 2007). Nour estimates that the government spends $10 million to $15 million each year, and with a media largely owned by the state, this can go a long way. (By comparison, though, the UK government spends a lot more – around $300 million in 2009, according to the BBC.)

CONTENT AND CONSUMPTION. Media agency UM’s managing director for Cairo, Dina Hashem, says television is certainly the most consumed media in Egypt, as it is the cheapest source of entertainment in a country with a population just shy of 80 million and a per-capita gross domestic product of only $2,160. The Arab Media Outlook says 93 percent of Egyptians watch television, and 43 percent of the country has access to satellite stations. Egypt is a major content producer, unlike most other countries in the Middle East region, and although the government’s Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU) owns all 17 of the country’s terrestrial channels, the quality of their programming has risen with the appointment of a new managing director of Sout Al Qahira, ERTU’s media representative. Walid El Essawey founded the new department and is widely credited with significantly raising the standard of television in the country. Essawey rebranded two of the broadcaster’s channels, ETV 1 and ETV 2, and lowered their rate cards in an acknowledgment of the growing pressure from satellite television. Coming from the private sector, he also sliced through much of ERTU’s governmental bureaucracy, and eased off the censorship of advertising that government channels previously practiced. He also improved the content of the government channels, again to compete with satellite. It was Channel Two that had exclusive

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broadcast rights to the football match that put Egypt out of the World Cup after a 1-0 defeat by arch rivals Algeria. And he programmed some good soap operas during Ramadan. The increase in sports programming on government channels, as well as the introduction of private satellite channels, allows Egyptian TV to compete with the continuing success of outside broadcasters such as Jeddah-based Arab Radio and Television Network (ART), which helped drive up satellite penetration by carrying coverage of last year’s African Cup of Nations. As well as pushing the bar higher, competing channels with attractive programming can drive up viewership across the board. Other private stations such as businessman Ahmed Bahgat’s Dream 1 (the Dream network was launched in 2001) and Modern Sports (which is owned by the Deabes family, who are behind Egypt’s educational network of Modern schools and universities) have also moved in to try and tap the lucrative sports market; Modern carries the Egyptian League. With increased competition, the football federation has raised its prices to match. Another new station is the general entertainment channel Al Hayat, run by businessman Said Badawy, and launched only a couple of years ago. A Nielsen study for the Arab Media Outlook found that 57 percent of respondents listed this as their “top” channel – it has the highest approval rating for any channel. LOST LOYALTY. Content is now becoming key, says Hashem. Viewers are becoming less loyal to channels and are instead following television programs and actors. “You can no longer buy something and then force them to watch it,” she says. For example, last Ramadan, spending was down by around 30 percent – thanks, in part, to the crisis – but there was a boom in content, with four times as much programming as the year before. “This Ramadan was a big mess for Egypt,” says Hashem. More than 56 Arabic serials were produced for the Ramadan season in Egypt alone. And the cost to stations is going up; last Ramadan, one show was sold to Dream for $3.5 million. It was also sold to Cairocentric and Egyptian TV. This makes life harder for planners, says Hashem, as media agencies mix art with science to predict and book the most attractive slots. It is also in part responsible for the dwindling numbers of expats in an industry that was dominated until five years ago – as media buying is elsewhere in the Middle East – by Lebanese executives. Media buying units are now hiring Egyptians almost exclusively, says Hashem. “Egyptians know Egyptians.” Karine Barakat, managing director at media agency Starcom MediaVest, herself Lebanese, says she agrees. She is currently grooming an heir who will one day take over the reigns. Her successor will be Egyptian, she says, but refuses to give a name. (She does reveal,

FLOODED MARKET. Competition for Ramadan viewership is heating up however, that when the time comes, whoever steps into her shoes will have his or her own private elevator as one of the job’s perks.) MEDIA IN EGYPT: WHAT’S HAPPENING BEYOND TELEVISION? RADIO. The rumor is that Essawey is now turning his hand to reinventing Egypt’s state-run radio stations, Radio Misr and Agahani, starting with revamped rate cards. Elsewhere on the Egyptian radio scene, Good News Group launched two channels around four years ago: English-language Nile FM, and Nagoom FM, an Arabic-language station. Creative Lab’s managing director, Mohamed Khalifa, calls these stations “the MTV of radio,” saying they offer a refreshing break from the more staid, conservative programming that went before. Good News is run by three brothers: Amr, Adl and Emad El Adib. All were well-known media personalities before they launched their own station. Amr presents the talk show Al Qahira Al Youm on Orbit; Emad also hosts a chat show, Ala Al Halawa; and Adel is the producer behind films such as The Yacoubian Building. There are also rumors that Rotana is preparing to launch radio stations in Egypt. NEWSPAPERS. First published in 1876, Al Ahram is the biggest newspaper in Egypt. Whether or not its claimed circulation of more than a million copies daily is accurate, it is a clear leader over the competition. On Friday its circulation rises further still, and so does the page rate:

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According to Hashem, space in Al Masry Al Youm is less than half the price of Al Ahram, at 80,000 Egyptian pounds ($14,600) per page. On top of this, it’s not controlled by the Mubarak government and is therefore seen as being more unbiased in its coverage (in a country that rates 143rd out 175 on the Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index). It also has less clutter. “On Friday, Al Ahram is just ads,” says Hashem.

KARIM KHOURI Managing director of Impact BBDO Cairo

from 218,000 Egyptian pounds ($39,800) to 249,000 Egyptian pounds ($45,400). Rival publication Al Akhbar has an advertising peak on Saturday, and boasts a daily circulation of 800,000. Both those papers are owned by the government and are regarded as establishment titles. However, alternatives are emerging. Al Masry Al Youm was launched in 2004, and only has a circulation of 180,000 (according to the Middle East and North Africa Media Guide). However, in the Arab Media Outlook’s survey on readership habits in Egypt (conducted by Nielsen), 34 percent of respondents said they regularly read Al Masry Al Youm. Al Akhbar got 29 percent, and Al Ahram 50 percent.

INTERNET. Internet World Stats Web site puts Internet penetration in Egypt at almost 16 percent of the population. The Arab Media Outlook predicts online advertising activity will rise from accounting for 0.7 percent of Egypt’s total ad spend in 2009 to 4 percent in 2013, a compound annual growth rate of 67 percent over five years. Nonetheless, Internet usage is held back by illiteracy. The CIA World Factbook estimates that only 71 percent of the country is literate. However, the government is trying to get its citizens connected. In 2006 it re-launched its “Computer in Every Home” drive, offering subsidized PCs and low-cost or free Internet access to households that would otherwise have been unable to get online. The use of digital advertising is growing, say the agency execs Communicate spoke to. Starcom’s Barakat says there is a shift in client perspective to Internet and digital. “Digital is growing,” she says. “The execution is still pretty basic, but in terms of banner advertising I think most of the plans that get out of Starcom have a Facebook and an MSN Arabia on them.” There is a sizable Egyptian community on both Facebook and MSN Arabia, and clients are starting to move some spend there. This ought to be good news for Connect Ads, a subsidiary of Link Dot Net (which is owned by Orascom Telecom Holding Company, a gargantuan Egyptian telecoms company). Last month Connect Ads announced a contract to be Facebook’s official advertising representative in the MENA region, on top of its status as exclusive media agent for MSN Arabia. “[Advertisers] are not dealing with digital in a consumer-generated way or doing the big ideas,” says Barakat. “But they are at an awareness level, so their brands are there.” Mobile, however, is doing better than broadband. Egypt has a mobile phone penetration rate of 72 percent, according to the Arab Media Outlook, and marketers have attempted to capitalize on this. In a country where advertising has traditionally been music- and jingle-led, some marketers have started using ring tones as a selling platform. Soft drinks brands 7-Up and Pepsi have both distributed their advertising jingles as ring tones during Ramadan, says Karim Khouri, managing director of Impact BBDO’s Cairo operations.

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HASSAN HAMDY General manager of Al Ahram’s advertising wing, and chairman of the Egyptian Advertising Association

KARINE BARAKAT Managing director, Starcom MediaVest Cairo

MAGAZINES. Newspaper readership might be huge in Egypt, but magazines are still fairly niche. The Arab Media Report lists magazines as receiving 6 percent of spend. Khouri says there are a lot of magazines, but they are “quite niche.” “I don’t think they are very effective here,” he says. Hashem goes as far as to say, “Magazines are a dying medium in Egypt. Dying.” They generally have low circulations and are faced with more than 200 competing titles as well as the Internet. Egypt just isn’t a magazine market.

she says. “We had three meetings and then everyone disappeared.” Thanks to the low cost of staff in Egypt, agencies working in the country can afford to employ their own monitors. It only costs around $200 per month, says Barakat, to pay a part-timer to drive around Cairo and carry out proprietary measurement. “In every agency we have an outdoor guy who does the monitoring with a camera,” she says. “And we have a guy who looks into magazines and does the clippings and sends them to clients.” In many other countries, this work would be prohibitively expensive for an agency to carry out.

MONITORING. Monitoring is an issue that comes up again and again in Egypt. For TV monitoring, TNS provides diary research, where viewers keep a journal of what they watch. PARC and Ipsos both supply computer-aided telephone interview (CATI) data, where subjects are called up and asked about their viewing. Barakat says CATI tends to work better in the market. “Usually, on a global level, between day-after-recall CATI and a diary, diary is a better measurement,” she says. “But in Egypt specifically, knowing the consumers, I don’t think they will take the time every 15 minutes to fill up a book. So I would rely on a phone call. At least they are being probed, asked and cross-checked.” But, like elsewhere in the Middle East, the industry acknowledges the flaws of both systems, and is keen to implement people meters, which can give live feedback on viewing habits. Barakat says the industry made steps toward introducing the boxes, and that key agencies were on board, but then the government became involved. “When the Minister of Information interfered, because he said he wanted to take the lead, I formed a committee,”

OUTDOOR. Because of Egypt’s size, little goes on in the long tail of media planning outside the main cities of Cairo and Alexandria. Even the latter tends to be seen as a remote outpost, and the media industry is focused tightly on the country’s capital. Much of Cairo’s outdoor is controlled by Pyramid, part of Al Ahram newspaper. General manager Hassan Hamdy tells Communicate his company owns 65 percent of the outdoor in Egypt. It owns the airport concession, the underground concession, and the bus concession in Cairo – a city where nail-biting traffic makes public transport all the more attractive. Pyramid has a production house and also owns sporting events. It can therefore sell space on football teams’ stadiums and t-shirts. As if to emphasize the company’s ties to Egyptian football, when Communicate asks for a photograph of Hamdy, his secretary gives us an A5 print, laminated with plastic and strung on a ribbon, to be worn round our neck. Hamdy is also chairman of Cairo football club Al Ahly (a team he played for in his youth) and fans are wont to wear his image when the squad does well.

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Elephant in the room

The 2010 Dubai Lynx Festival tried desperately to escape the shadow of 2009’s debacle. It almost succeeded by Rania Habib

TILL HOHMANN Executive creative director, GCC, Memac Ogilvy

AMIR KASSAEI Chief creative officer, DDB Group

nother Dubai Lynx Festival is now done and dusted, after the Lynx Awards finished off the event with a new venue, some familiar faces, and the memorably disruptive noises of the region’s advertising industry folk cheering their winning work. The 2010 Lynx Awards made no official mention of last year’s scandal. But, though it did not enter this year, the offending agency’s ghost seemed alive and well in Elephant Cairo (“This is not an ad agency,” says its Web site). Elephant, a boutique agency based in Cairo, picked up two Grands Prix: one in Print for their “Out of this World” campaign for Lika Gum, and the second in the Integrated category for their “89 Fans from 89” for Coca-Cola (a well-known FP7 client). The agency – apparently made up of two people, Ali Ali, (former FP7 Cairo creative director), and writer Maged Nassar – also picked up two Golds in the Outdoor and Television categories. The little agency’s wins came as a bit of a surprise, though the wave of creative work coming from North Africa certainly didn’t. With Leo Burnett Cairo winning the TV/Cinema and the Craft Grands Prix for the third year in a row thanks to its partnership with Melody (this time for their Melody Entertainment “Arabic Films – The Mother of all Foreign Films” campaign), Egypt fared well at this year’s Lynx. Memac Ogilvy Label Tunisia won the Grand Prix in the Interactive category for work on Boga Cidre. Till Hohmann,

executive creative director, GCC, at Memac Ogilvy, had predicted Tunisia’s win in these very pages (see “Eyes on the prize,” page 46, Communicate, March 2010). In total, North Africa bagged five of the eight Grands Prix awarded, laying down the gauntlet to Lebanon, which dominated last year’s Lynx. As for the host city, Dubai cleaned up the Media Agency of the Year and Agency of the Year awards, with Starcom MediaVest Group Dubai – who also won the Media Grand Prix for Chevrolet’s “Confessions of a Corporate Spy” – and Memac Ogilvy & Mather winning respectively. Saatchi & Saatchi Dubai made a surprise comeback at this year’s awards, with their dust-based campaign, “Abandoned Cars,” for the Dubai Metro winning the Outdoor Grand Prix. Another dustbased campaign made the cut for the Direct & Sales Promotion Grand Prix: Memac Ogilvy’s “Dustvertising” for BP/Castrol. A GOOD SPREAD. Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai may have only won one Grand Prix throughout this year’s Lynx Awards, but the agency won a slew of Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards across categories, making it a clear Agency of the Year winner. Hohmann had previously told Communicate that most of the agency’s entries were spread across categories, a strategy that is testament to the agency’s commitment to 360 solutions, and likely

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what pushed Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai to the top agency spot. TBWA/Raad Dubai, which did not win a Grand Prix but did pick up Gold awards in the Print and Outdoor categories, came in second after Ogilvy for the Agency of the Year award. TBWA/Raad Dubai was also one of only two agencies awarded a Silver Lynx for their radio campaign for Nissan, joining Leo Burnett Beirut – who won for their “Ehkineh Interruptions” campaign for Alfa – in a category that saw no Grands Prix or Golds. The TBWA/Raad Dubai team was out in full force at the awards, mainly to honor their chairman and CEO, Ramzi Raad, who was awarded the Advertising Person of the Year Lynx. Raad took to the stage to accept his award, while his team cheered him on with flags and what looked like a pink feather boa. He immediately paid tribute to Antoine Choueiri. “I stand here with a bittersweet feeling,” said Raad. Joseph Ghossoub, chairman of Menacom, and Pierre Choueiri, Antoine’s son, also paid tribute to Choueiri and his life’s work at the start of the ceremony. While entries were down 34 percent on last year, festival organizers claim that the number of delegates doubled from last year thanks to decreased attendance fees. There were mutterings around the industry about the jury being entirely made up of international members, a fact that provoked concerns over its capacity to fully understand local and regional advertising. But with judges acknowledging the dire state of radio advertising, noting the cultural relevance of Saatchi & Saatchi’s Dubai Metro campaign, and Amir Kassaei, chief creative officer of the DDB Group in Germany (and Lynx jury president), saying that the Melody Entertainment Arabic movies campaign by Leo Burnett Cairo was “one of the best pieces I’ve ever seen in my life,” it seems the jury silenced the industry’s doubters.

THE FILM. The 2010 Dubai International Advertising Festival opened on March 14 with a screening of Art & Copy, a documentary which details the work of some creative legends, including George Lois of DDB and Esquire, Mary Wells, founder of Wells Rich Greene, Dan Wieden of Wieden+Kennedy, Lee Clow of TBWA/Worldwide, and Hal Riney of Publicis & Hal Riney. The film was presented by The National, and was introduced by the paper’s founding editor, Martin Newland, who spoke of bridging the gap between the creatives and those who provide advertising space to a room full of advertising folk who just wanted to watch the documentary and be inspired. And inspired they were, as Communicate saw starry eyes and dumbfounded smiles after the screening.

THE ACADEMY.

THE FESTIVAL.

Leo Burnett, in collaboration with the Dubai Lynx, held its second Dubai Lynx Academy throughout the festival, inviting 20 students from the region to attend a three-day educational program focusing on the communications industry. The students’ program included seminars, screenings, exhibitions, workshops, and master classes with industry experts including Mark Tutssel, Leo Burnett’s global chief creative officer. He spoke to the students about HumanKind, Leo Burnett’s philosophy, which involves putting people and human behavior at the forefront of a brand’s strategy. The students were also split into four groups, and given a brief to work on throughout their stay, and presented their campaigns to Raja Trad, CEO of Leo Burnett Group Mediterranean, and Kamal Dimachkie, managing director of Leo Burnett Dubai, Kuwait and the Lower Gulf. Three of the twenty students were offered internships at Leo Burnett at the end of the three-day program.

The fourth edition of the Dubai International Festival certainly provided delegates with an impressive line-up of speakers. And for those in the industry, all the show-and-tells must have been energizing and inspiring, hopefully making every regional advertiser want to create the kind of advertising magic they saw on screen. But, while the speakers were top-notch experts from Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, a regional touch was noticeably absent, not to mention a female one. Communicate felt that, while the package was very pretty, there wasn’t much substance to it. Most of the seminars revolved around the need to go digital and engage consumers and activate brands. But two debates did steer away from the digital craze. The first, hosted by the IAA, was moderated by Mazen Hayek, group director of marketing, PR & commercial at MBC, and included Malek Ghorayeb, executive regional creative director at Leo Burnett, Nirmal Diwadkar, regional creative director (MENA) at TBWA/Raad, Ahmed El-Azizi, vice-president of

MARTIN NEWLAND Founding editor, The National

RAJA TRAD CEO, Leo Burnett Group, Mediterranean

marketing at Pepsico MEA, and Ashish Banerjee, vice-president of brand and communications at du, discussing the question, “Blame it on the client, the agency, or the consumer?” While Hayek promised the debate would steer away from conventional industry politeness, it didn’t quite deliver. It was tense at its best, though ultimately it was inconclusive. The Lynx debate (pictured, above) saw three creatives and a managing director on the stage. Moderated by Motivate’s Alistair Crighton, Peter Vegas, creative director at Impact BBDO Abu Dhabi, Ramsey Naja, chief creative officer for JWT MENA, Till Hohmann, executive creative director, GCC, at Memac Ogilvy, and Hubert Boulos, regional managing director at MAC DDB Doha, discussed the question of creative hubs: how they happen, should they happen, or should the industry kill the idea? Some audience members left the debate feeling awkward after Vegas very obviously championed the capital city, and mocked regional advertising standards. Communicate was simply amused.

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APRIL 2010 | ADVERTISING

Dubai Lynx showcase Here are all the Grand Prix winners from last monthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dubai Lynx. For a full list of winners, see Dubailynx.com

Media Grand Prix Title: Confessions Of Corporate Spies. Advertising Agency: Starcom Mediavest Group Dubai. Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Client: GM. Product: Chevrolet.

Print Grand Prix Title: Living Room. Advertising Agency: Elephant. Location: Cairo, Egypt. Client: Sima Food Industries. Product: Lika Gum.

Outdoor Grand Prix Title: Stop Writing On Me. Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi. Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Client: Dubai Metro. Product: Dubai Metro.

Direct and Sales Promotion Grand Prix Title: Dustvertising. Advertising Agency: Memac Ogilvy & Mather. Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Client: BP/Castrol. Product: BP Visco Engine Oil.

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2010

gemas

mena

Prove it deadliNe for eNtries: 19th sePtember, 2010

4th November 2010 - madiNat Jumeirah, dubai For more inFormation, please contact: basma@mediaquestcorp.com www.gemaseffie.com EffiE® and “E Logo” arE rEgistErEd tradEmarks of EffiE WorLdWidE, inc. and arE usEd undEr LicEnsE by mEdiaquEstcorp. aLL rights rEsErvEd.

APRIL 2010 | ADVERTISING

Dubai Lynx showcase Interactive Grand Prix Title: Boga Cidre. Advertising Agency: Memac Ogilvy Label. Location: Tunis, Tunisia. Client: SFBT. Product: Boga Cidre.

TV/Cinema Grand Prix Title: Braveheart. Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett. Location: Cairo, Egypt. Client: Melody Entertainment. Product: Melody Aflam TV channel.

Integrated Grand Prix Title: 89 Fans From 89. Advertising Agency: Elephant. Location: Cairo, Egypt. Client: The Coca-Cola Company. Product: Coca-Cola.

Craft Grand Prix Title: Rocky. Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett. Location: Cairo, Egypt. Client: Melody Entertainment. Product: Melody Aflam TV channel.

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Communicate GCC.ai

CMY

3/23/10

3:00:42 PM

APRIL 2010 | RADIO

Sounds of Saudi

The kingdom’s radio market has entered a brave new age. As the latest private radio license is granted, Communicate finds out exactly how the industry is changing. by Rania Habib

RADIO DATA FROM IPSOS STAT Top 10 Categories. 2009 ad spend on MBC FM and MBC PANORAMA in Saudi Arabia by category (Amount in $1,000) Telecommunication Theater & Cinema Internet Restaurant Publishing & Catalog Television Frozen Food Park Attraction Men Clothing Cars

12047 5072 4092 3452 3305 3072 3023 2867 2345 2324

Top 10 Brands. 2009 ad spend on MBC FM and MBC PANORAMA in Saudi Arabia by brand (Amount in $1,000) Saudi Telecom Mobily Doux Jungle Land Al Arabia Zain Rashed Al Majed Al Hayat Man Divan Saudi British Bank

8462 4793 3208 2624 2490 1517 1326 1324 1279 1136

t’s been a long time coming; about five years, to be precise. But Saudi Arabia has finally started awarding licenses in the kingdom to private radio operators. The latest was awarded just last month; Riyadh Electronic Resources secured the fourth new license this year at a cost of 68 million Saudi riyals. The whole process is being heralded as the beginning of a new era in Saudi radio, and comes years after companies such as Rotana (also recently awarded a license) began pushing for a more liberal and competitive Saudi radio market. The first new license was awarded at the end of January to Alf Alf, a Saudi Arabian media company that produces a newspaper and is planning to launch a television station, for the price of 75 million Saudi riyals. The second was granted two weeks later to Ghayat Al Ibdaa Innovation Holding for 66 million Saudi riyals, and the third one in early March to Rotana for 67.35 million Saudi riyals. The four companies are entering a market that has been monopolized by MBC since 1994, and it’s a change that the media industry is very much looking forward to. “From a buyers’ perspective, the more the merrier,” says Choucrallah Abou Samra, managing director of Omnicom Media Group in Jeddah. MARKET GAINS. Mazen Fakhoury, managing director of Mindshare in Saudi Arabia, agrees that the more choices available, the more interesting work becomes for those in the advertising and communications industry. “By having a competitive market, we will

have more variety of content and much more innovation, and ultimately consumers will gain from that,” he says. “And advertisers will gain by having more options to reach consumers and more interesting ways of reaching them, and from a media buying unit perspective, we have a medium that is going into an interesting phase.” “This is where you play around with negotiation tactics and you put vehicles against each other,” says Abou Samra. “From a buyer’s perspective, the more you have, the more you negotiate, and from a planner’s perspective, the more you have, the more it will increase fragmentation. This is where analysis of research becomes critical, to assess which is the best vehicle for reaching your target audience.” Firas Khashman, general manager of emerging business at Rotana, says he expects that the Saudi radio market will grow rapidly once the new stations begin operating (which is expected to be in about six months), simply because it could not grow while it was dominated by MBC. “Because they were alone in the market, MBC didn’t have to compete and be the best,” says Khashman. “We believe what is currently being offered in the market is not really up to the expectations of listeners, as Saudi listeners deserve to have the choice to listen to more than one offering. MBC will now be obliged to work on their offering.” Khashman adds that, with MBC currently monopolizing the market, the media giant isn’t making an effort to attract what he calls the “neighborhood advertiser.” “Usually, radio advertisers are not only big

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Desig is on companies; there are small businesses here and there that rely on radio stations, and this happens the world over,” he says. “MBC is not doing that; their spot prices are very high, and they are already sold to those who can afford them.” POTENTIAL UNLOCKED. Mindshare has started approaching clients already, and Fakhoury says that the awarding of the licenses to private radio operators will unlock the potential of the medium in Saudi Arabia. “We are proactively waiting and seeing,” he explains. “We are doing our homework while we wait for the mediums to be ready. Radio deserves the same attention as digital does, so we are having conversations with our clients, and even doing some number crunching. The only thing that is limiting us is that we don’t know what the content will be, and how the stations will position themselves. Once we know the quality of the content, we’ll take it from there.” Rotana has a great advantage over other license winners in terms of ad sales because it has an in-house media buying company, Rotana Media Services, which covers the region extensively. “We can now offer Rotana radio in Saudi Arabia with other radio stations as packages, or with television channels like our Fox channels, and we also have outdoor media,” says Khashman. “So it will be a comprehensive package for any regional advertiser.” The Saudi radio market is undoubtedly about to change, and Abou Samra says that if newcomers come on board with a compel-

FIRAS KHASHMAN. General manager of emerging business at Rotana ling offering, then existing stations (MBC FM and MBC Panorama) will lose audiences. At Rotana, Khashman says the company’s policy is to localize every station it operates, making Rotana Lebanon different from Rotana in Jordan or in Syria. “Saudi Arabia will be the fourth market that we operate in, and it will have a local touch along with the support of our head office in Beirut. We believe Rotana radio will be the number one radio station in

the kingdom, as we are expecting to attract a big share of the market.” A positive Fakhoury says that Mindshare is “very excited” by the opportunities that the licensing scheme will bring forth. “We’re really looking forward to this, and we believe in the process that’s been put out,” he says. “Consumers will definitely gain from it, brands will gain from it, and the media will gain from it; it’s a win-win situation for everybody.”

ACTION STATIONS How the Saudi private radio license scheme works in practice According to the Ministry of Culture and Information in Saudi Arabia, all license holders must cover the entire country, broadcasting out of no less than 15 cities and a maximum of 30. “This will not be easy, unless companies enjoy great human and technical resources, and are deemed as fully equipped with technical cadres and radio programs, to succeed in attracting different categories of listeners from around the country,” says Dr. Riad Ben Kamal Najem, assisting undersecretary for engineering affairs at the Ministry. “Companies should also establish upon implementation a Saudi company, with a 100 percent Saudi capital, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, and responsible for operating the network,” he adds. “One party cannot acquire more than one permit for the time being.” Mazen Fakhoury, managing director of Mindshare in Saudi Arabia, is very optimistic about the changes happening on the Saudi radio scene, and says that the way the process has unfolded is highly credible. “I have no doubt in my mind that the Saudi market, when it comes to competitive frameworks, is the best in the Middle East,” says Fakhoury. “From a legal perspective and from the demands they are making, it’s the most credible framework I have ever seen in the region.” Fakhoury says that the Ministry of Culture and Information has ensured that the tender documents make for a level playing field, where all of those who bid and are awarded licenses will be able to compete with each other. “Rotana will, of course, have some sort of advantage in terms of content, as they own a lot of the rights to Arabic songs,” he says. “But as far as the spirit I’ve seen from the tender documents; I would have to say kudos to the ministry for creating a level playing field where all stations will have to come up with innovations.”

VALUE ADDED. Nasr El Beik, general manager of Ghayat Al Ibdaa Innovation Holding, says that acquiring a radio broadcasting authorization has been part of company concerns and priorities for a while. “Listeners need a greater variety of channels,” says El Beik. “This is what incited us to be a part of the competing companies, particularly when the media sector in the kingdom is going through a lot of changes and developments to go international. Media officials in the ministry are pushing to grant the private sector a proper opportunity to fulfill its potential and add value to the broadcasting business both locally and internationally.” As part of the process the Ministry has offered to buy the land and erect the antennas required for the new stations, and Firas Khashman, general manager of emerging business at Rotana, says that he believes the infrastructure will be set up in less than six months. “We are ready to broadcast tomorrow, because we have our studios set up in Lebanon,” says Khashman. “So if they give us the frequencies we can start broadcasting immediately.” Khashman says the process may have taken a long time to roll out, but this is a breakthrough in the kingdom. “It takes a long time to get the regulations and right laws in place, but fortunately we are here now,” he says. Najem says that censorship will be carried out by radio channels themselves, and that the ministry will not interfere with the quality of the programs. Though he adds that, “When live coverage is conducted for some events, certain arrangements will be agreed upon between the Ministry and the radio channels.”

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APRIL 2010 | DIGITAL

Starbucks gets brewing again How the company turned around sales by finding the “intersection between digital and physical” by Emily Bryson York

HOWARD SCHULTZ. The Starbucks founder is returning to handle day-to-day management

et’s get this straight right away: Return on investment in social media is not measured in how many friends you have on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter. It’s not calculated in trending topics or YouTube comments. It should, in fact, be held to the same criteria other marketing channels are: Did it move your business? It’s done just that at Starbucks, which is a digital marketer worth watching. No one would have guessed at that turn of events during the chain’s dark days of early 2008. Sales and traffic had begun to slip for the first time in its history as a public company. Founder Howard Schultz, returning to handle day-to-day management, even admitted that Starbucks had lost its soul. As part of Schultz’s multifaceted turnaround plan, the chain launched MyStarbucksIdea.com in July 2008 as a forum for consumers

to make suggestions, ask questions and, in some cases, vent their frustrations. The Web site now has 180,000 registered users. Some 80,000 ideas have been submitted, 50 of which have been implemented in-store. Chris Bruzzo, Starbucks’ vice-president of brand content and online, says amassing Starbucks’ 5.7 million Facebook fans and 775,000 Twitter followers could be tougher for a dentalfloss brand. “Maybe we have an unfair advantage because in so many ways Starbucks and the store experience is like the original social network,” he says. Consumers “come in, hang out and talk to our store partners. They sort of got to know us as a brand in a very social way.” But he’s quick to point out that Starbucks’ advantage could easily have been squandered. “If we had approached it not from ‘what you know and love about Starbucks’ but as a mar-

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keting channel, we would have taken this down a path that would have been very different,” he says. “This was not [built as a] marketing channel, but as a consumer relationship-building environment.” More important than the number of fans, however, is that the coffee chain is beginning to see sales lifts following social-media promotions. RESULTS. Starbucks posted its first US samestore sales gain in two years for the last quarter during a time when the company relied on digital and social-media promotions instead of what had become an annual TV blitz. The chain partnered with Pandora to sponsor holiday playlists, staged a Facebook sing-along and leveraged its partnership with Project Red to drive traffic to a dedicated microsite – and its stores, offering a free CD with a $15 purchase. Bruzzo says that the company is benefitting from a trend “toward this intersection between digital and physical.” “We’re seeing the beginning of that,” he says. “The experiences you have online can translate to rich offline experiences.” The first time Bruzzo noticed this intersection was on Starbucks’ “Free Pastry Day” last summer, when consumers could visit the company Web site or its Facebook page and download a voucher for a free pastry. Bruzzo, who visited multiple stores that day, says he was amazed at the number of people standing in line holding coupons they’d printed out. He said the impetus for free pastries was the volume of faithful online followers asking to be included on new products or other company news. The secret to Starbucks’ social-media success is, at least in part, the fact that it plays it cool. “It’s not like we started our Facebook community, got to a million people and started pushing offers at them,” he says. “We built up a community of people who enjoy engaging with our photo albums from our trip to Rwanda, who loved to have these shared moments around their favorite drinks.” Then, fans started asking the company what was going on, and how they could be included.

“STRAIGHT SCOOP.” An added benefit of Starbucks’ social-media progress has been the ability to quickly manage rumors that could have dogged the company for days. Last January, a story spread that Starbucks was donating its profits in Israel to fund the country’s army – even though Starbucks doesn’t have any cafés in Israel. These days, Bruzzo says, when misinformation gets out, it’s easier to nip it in the bud. Internally, it’s called the “embassy strategy.” Starbucks strives to make MyStarbucksIdea and its Facebook and Twitter pages places that “when you go there you know you’re going to get the straight scoop,” he says.

After ceding its usual first-to-market status to competitors, Starbucks launched two iPhone apps in September. The first was for general café purposes, with store locators, details about specific blends and nutrition information, and the other was to support its loyalty card. Bruzzo says the company will be looking for ways that consumers can connect with each other from inside the apps. In the meantime, Starbucks is testing functionality that allows loyalty-card holders to pay with their phones. Starbucks’ agencies are BBDO, PHD and Blast Radius.

STARBUCKS’ TWEETER IN CHIEF Unlike many marketers, Starbucks doesn’t run its Twitter feed out of its PR department. The chain’s voice on Twitter is Brad Nelson (pictured, left), 28, a former barista who rose through its IT ranks. When the company was looking for ideas to reengage with its core customer in 2008, Nelson suggested that he begin a Twitter handle for the brand, and it now has 775,000 followers. The brand relies on the 28-year-old to translate the Starbucks experience for the online community, search out confused or disgruntled consumers, chat about store offerings and even crack jokes. Chris Bruzzo, vice-president of brand, content and online, says that Starbucks was beginning to institute its turnaround plan in early 2008 when Nelson announced he was ready for something new and wanted to get involved in the chain’s online efforts.

“I sent him away and said ‘Fine, sure,’” Bruzzo says. But about two weeks later, Nelson gave him a presentation about Twitter and the opportunity to communicate directly with consumers as questions arise. Nelson sweetened his pitch by adding, “It’s a lot like being a barista on the Internet.” Bruzzo recalls greenlighting the project and, after a period of working with Nelson, he let him loose on Twitter. Bruzzo gives credit to Nelson and his “willingness to take smart risks,” but shares some of the kudos for Starbucks. “I guess you have to have a brand like this and an environment that’s open to innovation and someone like Brad with the passion and personality.” Now Starbucks is finding more ways to use Nelson. He took a week-long cross-country drive last fall with comedienne Erin Foley and an Edelman entourage to help launch Via, Starbucks’ instant coffee. The group made stops for a Web series along the way, passing out product samples.

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APRIL 2010 | DIGITAL

The cult of Toyota

Even after recalls and hearings, the brand has die-hard loyalists – and it’s working overtime to keep them by Michael Bush

oyota might be telling Washington’s Capitol Hill it wants to regain the public trust, but judging from Facebook it may not have lost it. According to Doug Frisbie, Toyota Motor Sales USA’s national social media and marketing integration manager, the automaker has actually grown its Facebook fan base more than 10 percent since late January, around the time of the marketer’s Jan. 21 recall announcement and its Jan. 26 stopsale date. In fact, Frisbie said the automaker has been somewhat surprised by the large number of customers who have leapt to Toyota’s defense in “an authentic way.” That’s a testament to the resilience of the brand, but also to Toyota’s ability to quickly pick up one of the most important tools in a crisis-communications handbook: social media. The marketer has been faulted for communicating too little and too late in traditional media, but it’s gone all-out when it comes to Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social-media channels. Prior to the recall, Toyota didn’t have a reputation as an aggressive social-media adopter, yet it’s managed to increase the number of fans on its main Facebook presence over the past months and it’s become a far more active user on Twitter. On Feb. 22, for instance, it tweeted 34 messages. RESPONSE TEAM. Toyota has been able to be so aggressive in social media largely because around Feb. 1 it created a social-media response room, always staffed with six to eight people monitoring the online conversation and responding at

all times. It’s answering consumers on its four Facebook pages; it created a Twitter chat with Jim Lentz, Toyota Motor Sales USA president and chief operating officer; and it created two new platforms, one with Digg and the other on Tweetmeme, called “Toyota Conversations” to aggregate online chatter and allow Toyota to respond directly. Frisbie said the Digg dialogue attracted nearly 1 million views in its first five days after launching on Feb. 8. Moreover, Toyota has approached online brand loyalists and asked if it can repost their tweets, blog posts and videos on its platforms. “We have proactively reached out to those creating some higher-volume conversations online,” he says. “We are creating a series of video interviews with customers, associates at our plants and some dealership personnel to tell those stories proactively on our YouTube channel and other outlets. They provide that frontline perspective and an authentic response to some of the issues we are facing right now.” Those loyalists may get harder for Toyota to hang on to, as headlines have emerged suggesting Toyota covered up its flaws. Loyalists may also disappear as they realize the resale value of their vehicles has gone down – or get a letter asking them to join a class-action lawsuit, says Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate. “How loyal will Toyota fans be, once they receive a letter announcing: ‘You are entitled to x-dollars from Toyota’? How much is their devotion worth, exactly? Will they reject compensation from the auto manufacturer?” Frisbie recalls seeing the first tweets about

the automaker’s unintended acceleration issue toward the end of 2009, when Toyota recalled more than 4 million cars to fix and replace accelerator pedals. “The minute news hits the wires, it becomes a conversation,” Frisbie says. “It’s just a question of how high [the] volume [of] that conversation will become.” It didn’t take long for Toyota to figure that out. According to Radian6, on Jan. 22, the day after the recall, buzz within the social web skyrocketed, with the number of posts about the automaker going from less than 100 to more than 3,200. With the stop-sale announcement four days later, online chatter shot from about 500 posts that morning to more than 3,000 by that afternoon. SOCIAL MEDIA CRITICAL. “Just by virtue of the volume of conversation you see out there online, [social media] is probably the most important [crisis-communication] element in many cases,” says Frisbie. “How you respond and react to those [social-media] conversations really has become perhaps the most important platform for dealing with a crisis like this.” Frisbie says his team’s priority is to listen to how customers are responding to the hearings and other news. “That’s the primary tenet of good social-media strategy – listen,” he says. “There’s been a wide range of concerns given the coverage this has received, so we’re just trying to address all of them across all our platforms.”

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VALENcIA, SPAIN, 18-20 APRIL 2010

REWRITING THE RuLE BOOK Communication will never be the same again

GLOBAL SPEAKERS INcLuDE • Stephen Allan, CEO, MediaCom • Richard Beaven, CEO, Initiative

GLOBAL DEBATE

• Jerry Buhlmann, CEO, Aegis Media

The Festival of Media will set the agenda for debate as rapid change rewrites the rule book. The conference programme will tackle the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the industry as we emerge from the global recession and plan for a brighter future. Topics for debate include:

• Simon Clift, CMO, Unilever • Mike Cooper, President & CEO, PHD • Mainardo de Nardis, CEO, OMD • Kester Fielding, Global Media Procurement Director, Diageo

• Is media a commodity?

• Kevin Joyce, Worldwide VP Sales & Marketing, Digital Solutions, Eastman Kodak

• When will we lose the printed page?

• Jack Klues, Managing Partner, VivaKi

• Life in the carbon economy

• Maria Luisa Francoli, CEO, MPG

• Should media & creativity re-integrate?

• Antonio Lucio, CMO, Visa

• Is this the end of the broadcaster brand?

• Scott McCune, VP Integrated Marketing, Coca-Cola • Ben Silverman, Founder, Electus • Geert van Kuyck, CMO, Philips

HEADLINE PARTNERS

MEDIA PARTNERS

• David Wheldon, Global Brand Director, Vodafone

FOM2010_Communicate_FP_120210.in1 1

12/2/10 16:06:55

APRILÊ 2010Ê |Ê DIGITAL

GagaÊf orÊ Gaga

LeveragingÊd igitalÊme diaÊan dÊ creativeÊ partnershipsÊ makesÊ artistÊ aÊu niquelyÊ2 010Êp opÊst arÊ by Andrew Hampp

s far as breakout musicians go, few artists have had quite the zero-awareness-to-ubiquity time-warp of Lady Gaga. And as far as brands go, few marketers of any kind have leveraged social media the way she has to drive sales of their core product – in her case, albums and digital singles. Lady Gaga, with her army of nearly 2.8 million Twitter followers and more than 5.2 million Facebook fans, can move product. Since the fall of 2008, her digital-single sales have exceeded 20 million and her album sales hit 8 million, all at a time when no one under the age of 60 buys CDs anymore (see Susan Boyle breaking the record for highest first-week album sales last year). Now, she’s being courted by marketers to do the same for their products. Gaga’s rapid ascent to the pop-culture stratosphere is often compared to Madonna’s, right down to their shared beginnings in the downtown New York club scene before their big record deals. But what makes Gaga’s star status, particularly in the marketing community, so uniquely 2010 is that she has achieved as many milestones (if not more) in 18 months than her idol did in nearly a decade. Madonna’s notorious endorsement for Pepsi in 1989 – cut short after her controversial “Like a Prayer” video aired on MTV – came seven years after the debut of her first single in 1982. Within a year of her out-of-the-box rise to fame in September 2008, Gaga had already lined up Virgin Mobile as a sponsor of her Monster Ball tour; created her own brand of headphones, Hearbeats by Lady Gaga, with record label Interscope;

and landed her own (cherry pink) lipstick as a spokeswoman for Mac Cosmetics’ Viva Glam, benefiting Mac’s AIDS fund. And by January, she was tapped by Polaroid to become the brand’s creative director, hired specifically to create new products and inject life into a brand that hasn’t been hip for years – save for maybe a popular reference in Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” OLDÊ SCHOOLÊ MEETSÊ NEWÊ MEDIA.Ê How did a 23-year-old singer/songwriter achieve so much in so little time? Two words: social media. Sure, Gaga had a fair share of old-school artist development – radio play – to become the first artist to score four consecutive No. 1 singles in the US from a debut album. But she’s also put a newmedia spin on her distribution strategy. The November premiere of her video for “Bad Romance,” for example, debuted on LadyGaga. com before MTV or any other outlet could play it – resulting in a Universal Music server crash, a Twitter trending topic that lasted all week, and a cumulative 110 million (and counting) views on YouTube to date, more than any viral music video of yore (OK Go, anyone?) could ever claim. Vevo, a music video site co-founded by Universal Music Group (and financially backed by Abu Dhabi Media Company), also recently reported a whopping 20 percent of its traffic came from just Lady Gaga videos – as in 1 in 5 videos streamed on the site was likely to be a song such as “Poker Face,” “Just Dance” or “Love Game.”

Gaga has already had a similar halo effect on her Mac Viva Glam lipstick. Less than a week into its launch, the lipsticks created by Gaga and her campaign cohort Cyndi Lauper have outsold any launch in Viva Glam’s 16-year history, says Estée Lauder Group president John Demsey, thanks to a groundswell of social-media impressions. The launch day of her Viva Glam lipstick ad campaign alone generated nearly 20 million unique views in traditional media, including print and Web buys and an appearance on The Today Show, as well as an additional wellspring of social-media hits per Gaga’s tweets to her fans. “Her fan base and our customer base are very similar in that they are drawn to the outrageous and outspoken, so we could not ask for a better partnership,” Demsey says. Taking credit for Gaga’s sudden assault of the zeitgeist is a relatively easy task, as all parties who work with her on her label, management and marketing teams cite Gaga herself as the ultimate brains behind many of her creative and socialmedia ideas and tactics. “When you’re dealing with someone as good as Gaga, a lot of it is how to stay out of the way,” says Steve Berman, Universal Music’s president of sales and marketing. “Gaga has worked tirelessly in keeping up daily if not hourly communication with her fans and growing fanbase through all the technology that exists now.” GAGAÊ INÊ CONTROL. Troy Carter, Gaga’s manager since 2007, described their dynamic as “95-5.” “The only thing I do is manage the vision,” he says. “Ninety-five percent of the time I won’t comment on creative, and 95 percent of the time she lets me run the business. The other 5 percent is where we debate about things like, ‘Do you really want to bleed to death on stage at the [MTV] VMAs?’ She wins even when we do have those debates 5 percent of the time.” Dyana Kass, who heads pop-music marketing for Universal, has teamed with marketing firms like Flylife for Gaga’s outreach to the gay community and ThinkTank to supplement her online efforts, but otherwise lets Gaga maintain a hands-on relationship with her fans and marketing empire. “Lady Gaga has truly turned culture on its head and has done so from the ground up on her terms,” she says. “You can’t buy that kind of authenticity, and as a result the demand for her involvement in projects is staggering.” Carter, who manages Gaga’s marketing partnerships, added that he doesn’t want Gaga to ever look like she’s endorsing a brand – hence why she’s created products for Universal’s Beats By Dre headphones line, Viva Glam and now Polaroid as its new creative director. “You won’t see her face plastered on any packaging or anything. We’re comparing it to when Tom Ford went to Gucci or Steve Jobs went into Apple and brought a different thought process and taste level in. We’re looking for her to do the same exact thing at Polaroid,” he says. “It’s not about her putting her name on something – it’s reinvigorating a brand.”

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Running the social show

With marketing, sales, research-and-development and customer-service reps involved, the task is to get everyone working together by Kunur Patel

KEVIN SMITH. The director tweeted that Southwest Airlines kicked him off a plane because he was too fat.

ocial media is undoubtedly shaking up the digital landscape, but it looks to be shaking up the corporate suite as well. As brands try to foster loyalty with Facebook pages, show innovation on blogs and address customer concerns on Twitter, social media is threading its way through the marketing and sales, researchand-development, customer-service departments and more. All of which gives rise to the question: Just whose job is it anyway? Answer: everyone’s – so it’s important to get all those disciplines working together. Take Ford Motor Co., for example. The automaker saw $2.7 billion in profit for 2009 – a huge turnaround from a record loss the previous year – and it smartly used social media to help disassociate it from the bankruptcies and bailouts of its rivals. But that required breaking with custom at Ford and pooling the resources of marketing and corporate communications. “We’ve been living this for the past year,” says Scott Kelly, Ford’s digital-marketing manager.

“Historically, we had very little interaction with public affairs, but ever since the congressional bailout for the other two automakers, we needed to combine marketing and public-affairs forces to get the right message out around Ford so we didn’t get dragged down by GM and Chrysler.” GETTING IN EARLY. In late 2008, Ford brought together the teams from what was then called public affairs (now corporate communications) and marketing to plan all efforts simultaneously. That means Ford’s Global Digital and Multimedia communications director Scott Monty is now involved in marketing’s launch-planning meetings. “In the past, public affairs were brought in at the end,” says Alex Hultgren, Ford’s digital-media manager. Now, Kelly says, “I talk to people in public affairs daily, where it used to be monthly.” Ford’s social-media efforts include FordStory. com, which went from a political advocacy site when the automaker appeared before Congress in

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2008 to a social-media hub today. The automaker also launched the Fiesta Movement last spring, in which Ford lent out 100 cars, along with gas and insurance, to YouTube bloggers for free. The Fiesta videos attracted 3.5 million views and won 38 percent awareness among 16- to 24-year-olds last fall. As of today, Ford reports that the campaign has computed to 6,000 reserved cars – months before the Fiesta goes on sale this summer. Sometimes it’s also about dragging non-marketing types into social-media meetings. “Our client contact has stayed the same, but now new people are in the room, like from R&D or merchandising,” says Ketchum’s Jonathan Bellinger, vice-president of social-media strategy. “Whether or not they’ve been volunteered, we’ve been asking for those people because it’s not necessarily the marketing people that audiences are most interested in.” Southwest Airlines, for example, has tapped some flight-crew members to blog for Nuts for Southwest, which aggregates photos and videos. The blog also addresses news stories, such as the

one that erupted recently when film director Kevin Smith tweeted that the airline kicked him off a plane because he was too fat. The blog is primarily a brand and PR tool, but customer service is also brought in and given a social-media bullhorn. “If your goal is customer care, you need people inside [the company] who can take action and do something about it,” says Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice-president of emerging media and client strategy for 360i. Best Buy has made this model famous with Twelpforce, its customer service handle on Twitter. The retailer’s employees sign up to field customer tweets and respond to service questions or requests for recommendations. Any employee can sign up, but all are subject to company-wide protocol and guidelines. Best Buy did not respond to multiple calls and e-mails for comment. That’s not to say marketers can navigate social media without agencies. Digital and public relations agencies are vying for ever-increasing social-media budgets.

AGENCIES NEEDED. “In 2010, we are starting to see funded conversations,” says 360i’s Hofstetter. “Instead of funding a particular campaign, they are funding an investment in an ongoing conversation with consumers. That’s a big shift.” And that change isn’t expected to slow anytime soon. Forrester Research forecasts social-media budgets will on average grow 34 percent yearly from 2009 to 2014 – faster than other kinds of digital advertising. Ford’s Kelly doesn’t see social media as something for PR and digital shops to fight over, since both types of agencies bring different skills to the table. “We consider it one budget,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a marketing or publicaffairs budget.” Ford has been less susceptible to the tug of war between digital and PR agencies for social media because its agency, Team Detroit, houses multiple shops under one roof. The WPP collective, dedicated entirely to the automaker, houses agencies spanning media, PR and creative. For Ford,

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creative and digital are responsible for building content for social-media channels (like apps for Facebook), while PR keeps up social page dayto-day management. Ford has also looked to small social-media boutiques like New York-based Undercurrent for programs such as those for Fiesta. Social-only shops are the newest breed in the agency landscape and are proliferating rapidly. In January, Austin-based Powered acquired Joseph Jaffe’s agency Crayon for strategy, events agency Drillteam, and Facebookfocused StepChange to create a full-service socialmedia agency with a national footprint across the USA. “We may look at a boutique agency to manage a piece of social media,” says Ford’s Hultgren. “Boutique agencies can be singularly focused on something. But if we want a pure focus on some social-media task, we want a boutique to focus on a pilot. Once we’ve proven out that model, we’ll hand off to Team Detroit to integrate.” Social media has helped change perceptions of Ford, but the biggest test is whether it sells cars. “Social media can fall anywhere in the range of the selling cycle,” says Monty. “In our case it’s on the broader end: awareness and perception. It’s more of a branding tool than a sales tool. But on the local level, where the dealer gets involved, that’s where it get can work for lead generation and CRM.” THREE MARKETING MODELS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA A look at how Ford, Kodak and Best Buy run their programs CENTRALIZED The social-media department functions at a senior level, reporting to the chief marketing officer or CEO, and is responsible for all social-media activation for the brand. “We work with a lot of clients that have appointed one person,” says Ketchum’s Jonathan Bellinger, vice-president of social media strategy. “It’s nice to have a celebrity; it puts a human face on a company. You can achieve that by having one person being the public face both externally and internally, but it can get distracting because it becomes about those people.” Dangers: Having a social-media head means departments outside that person’s scope might not benefit from efforts in the medium. For example, is customer care being considered if social media is centralized under marketing? This model doesn’t necessarily take into consideration social media’s influence on the entire business. Essential roles: The social-media lead. Marketers with this model: Ford. Scott Monty, global digital and multimedia communications director, joined the automaker from social boutique Crayon and has been a visible proponent of social media for the brand. Monty operates within the corporate communications department, which reports directly into Ford’s CEO.

DISTRIBUTED In this setup, no one person technically owns social media. Instead, all employees from customer care, marketing, media and beyond represent the brand and work social media into their roles. This is often implemented through training and encouraging social media use across an organization. Dangers: If there’s no standardized practice, social media can veer a brand off-message. For example, Jet Blue senior vice-president of marketing Marty St. George brought Twitter into the agency-ofrecord pitch process – tweeting the news of the search to see how many agencies were digitally savvy enough to find it there. “That experiment is over – and not to be repeated!” he tweeted after his tweet blew up into media coverage. Without a leader, learning about new social technology or sites then also falls on individuals. Essential roles: Senior leadership that champions social media; training and internal communications around social-media policy is necessary. Marketers with this model: Best Buy is decentralized because everyone in the organization has a role in social media, as Twelpforce demonstrates. Any employee can sign up to respond to customer queries on Twitter. The retailer does, however, have protocol and guidelines in place for tweets, and it has social-media experts in marketing. Last summer, CMO Barry Judge crowd-sourced a job description for a senior manager for emerging media marketing. Brands like IBM, Intel and Kodak have published social-media policies.

COMBINATION This involves centralized best practices and decentralized execution. A brand maintains a committee of social-media stakeholders to work up its position and voice, which it disseminates to the company at large. From there, each discipline is left to incorporate social media into its individual executions. Dangers: How do you hold departments accountable to a research council? Also, when a social-media program goes sour, who ends up as the fall guy? Those who built the social-media strategy, or those who implemented it? Essential roles: A team of social-media experts plucked from various departments. Marketers with this model: Ketchum’s Bellinger cites his client Kodak as a company that’s found a good balance. It employs Jenny Cisney, chief blogger, in marketing, but she’s tasked with steering the company’s social-media presence rather than owning it entirely. Kodak has published online its social-media policy for employees within a guidebook for marketers looking for lessons in social media. Starting in 2005, IBM used a wiki to crowd-source guidelines for a company blog and has asked employees to collectively revise the rules for new forms of social media. Those efforts ultimately feed back to IBM’s social-media head Adam Christensen, who most recently spearheaded the company’s Smarter Planet blog.

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Can e-commerce help Facebook? Deals with PayPal and app developers help marketers reap profits – and give the social Net a chance to get a cut by Kunur Patel

DAVID BERKOWITZ 360i’s director of emerging media

here’s been a lot of talk about whether social media can drive sales, but one thing is clear: Sales are starting to happen in social media – specifically with Facebook. As it builds out its own store internally, strikes a deal with online-payment platform PayPal and allows marketers to test e-commerce apps, the 400-millionmember social-networking site is starting to look more and more like a giant, global shopping mall. Last month, for example, Procter & Gamble’s Pampers became the latest marketer to sell product on Facebook, dropping an e-commerce application in a “Shop Now” tab on its 200,000-fan-strong fan page. Within an hour, it sold out of the 1,000 Cruiser diaper packs it was offering at $9.99 a pop. The question is: Does the proprietor make any money off such sales? So far, the answer is no. “Once a number of marketers are doing commerce on their own, you have to wonder how Facebook is going to get a piece of it,” says David Berkowitz, 360i’s director of emerging media. To that end, last month Facebook announced it

will now collect 30 percent on purchases of virtual goods made with Facebook Credits, according to its developer blog. While the in-app credits program is still in closed beta, it already includes developers like Playfish and Zynga – two of the biggest players in the estimated $5 billion global virtual-goods market. With the fee, it looks like Facebook is taking Apple’s lead: Apple takes a 30 percent cut of paid applications in the App Store, a fee levied to the developer, not the user. The announcement did not mention revenue collected on apps outside the credits system – like Pampers’ and 1-800-Flowers’ commerce apps – though the virtual goods economy is comparatively much more developed. It also illustrates Facebook’s interest in getting a cut of revenue collected in its house. Regardless, being a place where goods are sold could actually help Facebook’s primary revenue strategy, advertising, as ads on the site will be closer to a potential purchase – moving it from being seen not just as a marketing tool but as a

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FRIENDS ONLY. Digital-shopping company Fluid recently launched a Flash-based Facebook sales app for Nine West, which is only open to the accessories retailer’s fans. Users can browse items from the Jones Apparel brand’s spring collection, add items to a shopping cart and check out on the retailer’s own commerce site with 15 percent off. This followed an e-shop for another Jones brand, Rachel Roy, which sold out a limited quantity of jewelry in the first six hours on Facebook in a similar execution earlier in February. And Minneapolis-based tech startup Alvenda has created an e-commerce platform within Facebook for 1-800-Flowers. It also built a friend-to-friend sales app in December for Avon’s beauty and accessories brand, Mark. Annemarie Frank, Mark’s director of digital and strategic alliances, says Mark makes money on its fan page through sales, but it didn’t work with Facebook to implement the sales widget. And while Mark has run ad programs in the past to drive its Facebook fans, it isn’t spending with the social-networking site today. Facebook became profitable in 2009 and reaps the majority of its revenue from advertising. An executive with knowledge of the matter says Facebook is focused on buoying the business via advertising. To that end, Facebook announced a partnership with eBay’s PayPal in February to pipe the payment platform into the site’s ad and developer tools. Because PayPal conducts transactions in 24 currencies, Facebook will be able to collect revenue from small, international advertisers. Of Facebook’s nearly half-billion users, 70 percent live outside the US. As for consumers, they’ll be able to purchase Facebook Credits – currency redeemed for virtual goods or gaming – through PayPal. Before the deal, PayPal, which collects fees from merchants, had already been on Facebook facilitating payments in games such as Zynga’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars. “We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service,” says Dan Levy, Facebook’s director of payment operations, in a statement. PayPal transacted $71 billion worldwide in 2009. ONE SHOPPING CART. With Facebook integrating an online pay system for its users, PayPal’s open development platform could tie together purchase behavior across the site. Third-party developer Payvment recently used PayPal’s API to build an

sales tool. It may also help prove how closely social media can be tied to sales, something just about every marketer is wondering. Facebook has given developers and agencies free reign to develop commerce apps. The Pampers Facebook sales app used Ohio-based digital agency Resource Interactive’s Off the Wall e-commerce technology, which retailer The Limited used to sell scarves during the holidays.

app anyone can use to set up a retail store on a Facebook page. If the app takes off and consumers are buying on multiple pages across Facebook, Payvment allows all purchases to aggregate in one shopping cart for one check out. A fraction of Facebook’s revenue does come from the sale of virtual goods – icons of objects such as Champagne bottles and hugging penguins that Facebook users buy to post on friends’ walls. Facebook has started to add real gifts and brands to that virtual-goods economy, which has been largely tied to gaming. Last year, Facebook starting selling music files, charitable donations and licensed icons from sports organizations such as the NBA and college teams. For advertisers, Facebook launched branded virtual-good ad units, which are gaining increasingly more interest from brands such as Skittles and P&G. Facebook also opened shop for physical goods last year, when it launched Real Gifts, a startup funded through its venture-capital arm to sell real things through the gift store right alongside the virtual ones. Right now, the real goods for sale are primarily generic gifts – Fandango movie tickets and the Slanket blanket are the only branded items on display, though Dave Sanguinetti, Real Gifts’ co-founder and CEO, says there’s been “significant interest from big brands” and we can expect top-tier brands on sale soon. As for its business model, Real Gifts buys goods at wholesale prices and sells them at retail.

PROCTER & GAMBLE’S PAMPERS. Within an hour, the brand sold 1,000 Cruiser diaper packs on Facebook

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Q&A

Quantum leap

Eli Khoury speaks to Communicate about his agency’s split with Saatchi & Saatchi and its new alliance with M&C Saatchi by Nathalie Bontems

he split between Quantum Holding and Saatchi & Saatchi caused quite a stir last December. Wild rumors flew, and there was speculation as to what exactly happened and what would become of the Lebanese agency. Well, the suspense is over: Eli Khoury, chairman and CEO of Quantum Holding, tells Communicate all about his divorce with Saatchi & Saatchi and, more importantly, about his agency’s surprise engagement – with none other than M&C Saatchi. What exactly led to the split between you and Saatchi & Saatchi, after 18 years of partnership? Within the Quantum group management, we were questioning the validity of networks belonging to mega groups in the context of the current global meltdown and the constant evolution in media dynamics. Why is it that, if New York or London or Paris is hurting, the subsidiaries should suffer elsewhere? The other question was, what does a regional or a global client really mean? What happens when a local client goes regional or global, and who draws the line here? What if the network agency there lacks the required level of performance? Can I campaign in the Gulf, let alone Turkey, Morocco or Malaysia, or do I have to handle a network situation? So the issue was mostly territorial? Yes, to some extent, on where I could go, though the real issue is who takes decisions related to the region and what these decisions can be. At one point, there was some sort of schizophrenia: Here was Saatchi & Saatchi Levant doing

things totally differently to Saatchi & Saatchi Gulf. And if you are walking one way, it means both your legs should be going in the same direction. Meaning? I’ll give you an example: Let’s say that a given network has an office in a Gulf country and, as a Beirut agency, my client requires me to be there. Instead of me sending a relevant portion of the business there and having it handled at the same level that it would be handled at here, I will have to actually send my own team there because, for one reason or another, the situation there doesn’t allow the network to have the same level of talent. What does one do? Wait until somebody in some foreign country decides to make things better? You have on your desk a regional magazine with the headline, “Talent crisis until 2012.” Could lack of talent be at the core of the issue? In fact, what this headline means is, “Excuse me, clients, I’m going to give you rubbish for two years because my management in New York or London isn’t allowing me to buy the talent you want.” Well, guess what? I have all the talents I need, I don’t have to buy them, and if I would, I don’t need to get any clearance from anybody. Besides, talents are nurtured, not imported. This is not to say that I’m not for acquiring foreign talent where needed, but that should be the exception, not the rule. One should benefit from good foreign talent while simultaneously growing the region’s own.

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To my knowledge, the London management wouldn’t have agreed to such an off-balance statement. Though it broke the agreement that I had with them, I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. As to the network’s destiny in the region, I have no idea what plans they have for that.

Do you mean that the region doesn’t always enjoy the respect it deserves from networks? Exactly. But my real client is the one in this region, investing here and trying to go outside of the Middle East. Frankly – and I doubt that any of the other agencies would contest this – global clients are no longer profitable. Their biggest worry is probably the US and Europe, and China if we’re talking about new markets. The Middle East comes as an accommodation. It’s like, “You know what? Why don’t you run this copy that was done for Greece maybe, save us some costs and, by the way, I’m only going to give you this much of your fees.” Just to be able to drop names, you might agree. But we must realize that globalization isn’t a one-way street, it’s a two-way highway. It’s only if we don’t fill it with anything outbound that everything comes inbound. The mega groups were inundating the region with their ways. I thought that it is about time that one sends something outside: A client in Jordan wants to be regional; a client in the Gulf wants to be global. That client deserves the same service that a multinational in New York or in Europe requires. The day following the split announcement, Elias Ashkar, Saatchi & Saatchi’s CEO for the Middle East & North Africa at the time [he was ousted last January, roughly one month after the split], indicated that the network wanted in fact to “be in control of its own destiny,” and to expand rapidly across the Levant region. Why the separate statements? The plan was not to have separate statements. In fact, the only official statement issued was joint. When we decided to part ways, it was at our request, and the agreement was to do it in an amicable way – we would issue a joint statement. Which is what happened. Unfortunately, the person they had in the region chatted away his feelings instead.

There were rumors flying that Saatchi & Saatchi was in fact displeased with your personal commitment in politics. That’s an interesting speculation; this was never raised. Though it is known that my socially active side isn’t about politics but rather about socionational issues. I don’t have a political career in mind, I have a good country for a dream. Besides, being a businessman doesn’t stop you from having an opinion or being a citizen. Some people may confuse me, as a person, with the agency sometimes, but that would happen out of ignorance, not facts. There were also speculations that we were broke, or that some 50 people resigned. My theory, as a communicator, is that you don’t answer rumors. When a tangible fact needs to be addressed, then you just address that. You retain all your clients but P&G. How is this going to affect you? This has nothing to do with P&G itself; they have lovely people here and it was fun working with them. Again, it’s a global client syndrome coupled with a global network syndrome in general. Any global client requires a lot from the network at a minimum cost. Any network, in turn, has costs and wants to keep most of the revenues to itself and leave subsidiaries and partners with the crumbs. In general, when you pay peanuts, you should get monkeys. We were trying to offer lions for the peanuts we were getting. It was never financial, just pure advertising. What was the reaction of your clients to the split? This was the most charming part. Before the announcement, we sent a memo to our clients to tell them what was going to happen. I also met with my top clients and most of them asked me if I was going to call the agency Khoury & Co. or something of the sort. What about going back to your original “The Agency” name? That option also crossed our mind, as well as using Quantum. But to work on a wider stage than the region and cater for our ambitious clients, you’d need a partner in key areas around the world. Just a few weeks ago, you won the Gold Pikasso award, and had a number of entries in the competition under the Quantum Communications name. Why was that? We used our sister company to receive the award, because we weren’t ready to announce anything. We were still debating the options we had on the table, and there were many of them, fortunately. Some we wouldn’t even think about and others we actually pursued.

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What were the options you wouldn’t consider? Some surprising offers from other networks and other agencies. They were all lovely and decent, but we had a different thought in mind. What were you looking for? First and foremost, an independent agency, one that is a network but is not a part of the mega groups. We went after what we thought would resemble how we would want to work. We were also looking for a competency partnership, not just a network membership. So you finally partnered up with M&C Saatchi. Funnily enough, you sometimes end up going back to your roots. I took our various options to my management, and the vote was in favor of M&C Saatchi. Just talking to these guys, it felt like family again. What are the terms of the deal? M&C Saatchi has minority equity participation. Whether we’ll need to get married later on will depend on how the market goes. But it is mostly an alliance with an agency that has similar advertising concerns to ours. They’re the largest independent network with 22 offices around the world, they’re present in places where we may need to be, and we’re making them available in places where they need to go. That is the Middle East and North Africa. Who initiated the negotiation? Thanks to a common acquaintance, I ended up

visiting the old friends. It brought back memories and then I wrote to them proposing to discuss this. They really got me hooked on their concept of “brutal simplicity,” and all the ingredients were there. For all I know, they’ll never sell to a group and they’re as much in love with the art of advertising as we are, rather than how much you are making out of it. What are your plans now? M&C Saatchi will be all about doing good advertising. We want to work for a very limited number of clients, of certain size and with a certain willingness to do the right thing in communication. That’s not too ambitious, especially now. Secondly, we don’t want to be in every market just because there is some sort of ad expenditure happening there. We’ll go only where our client want us. We’re already in Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and soon in Bahrain and other places, but don’t expect announcements; they’re not agencies, they’re extension offices sitting next to our primary clients. From a Quantum perspective, in addition to Brand Central (the identity company), Fusion (multimedia), Vertical (media), Cube (digital art) and Firehorse (TV content production), another recent addition, Comtrax, provides offline and online media content and reputation analysis. Add to the mix cyber communications and you get what it takes to have a comprehensive consulting offer, not just servicing, for challenging tasks and demanding clients. This is what we will be doing for a few years to come.

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GD Computer Systems (Egypt)

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APRIL 2010 | DEPARTMENTS

Review

The art of the matter

John Hunt’s new book is a good idea. Why didn’t we think of it? by Rania Habib

ver read a book and thought to yourself, “I could have written that”? Communicate has – many, many times. And after reading The Art of the Idea and How it can Change Your Life, the latest book by John Hunt, worldwide creative director of TBWA, we thought it again. Except, on second thoughts, we really couldn’t have written that. It just made us think we could have. The Art of the Idea looks as effortless as it reads; it’s beautifully packaged and punctuated with 20 original artworks by internationally acclaimed

South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa. Divided into 20 observations, the book is essentially about the power of the idea and how to nurture it to maintain its strength. At the official launch of his book (held at the Dubai TBWA/Raad headquarters last month), Hunt presented his book to colleagues, students, and guests. He’s a soft-spoken creative with a knack for storytelling, and at the launch he used those skills to present some of his 20 observations. Observation 01: You get sunrise or sunset people. Hunt has worked with Nelson Mandela,

a man who kept a positive outlook in spite of the fact he spent 27 years in jail. Hunt says it’s that kind of sunrise person with positive energy who will let ideas flow and flourish. Observation 06: I Google therefore I am (not). Hunt says ideas do not come from Web searches, which many people become reliant on. Information does not equal ideas, he writes, and information can camouflage as much as it can illuminate. Observation 10: Embrace diversity; it’ll hug you back. While it sounds a little hippy-ish and simplistic, it rings true. For an idea to flourish, it cannot be bounced off people who will not challenge it. “We need others to take our blinders off, mainly because we don’t realise we’re wearing any,” writes Hunt. (This is the kind of stuff that makes you think, “We could have written that.” Maybe we could have, but we didn’t realise we were wearing blinders.) Observation 15: Idea apartheid is dead. Hunt says that the place where ideas come from cannot be rigid, and that categorising ideas is nothing but a creative killer. “It might work for wine, but being anal about the provenance of an idea is incredibly stupid and guaranteed to stunt any new perspectives.” Observation 18: We don’t know what we don’t know until we do what we don’t usually do. This observation is accompanied by an illustration of a nun playing the saxophone. During his presentation, Hunt spoke cheekily of breaking out of the habit. It’s a simple observation, one that makes sense, but also one that’s easily forgotten in the creative world. The Art of the Idea really did make Communicate feel like we could write something similar to Hunt’s 20 observations. But we think that’s probably the power of a good book: it’s relatable. By no means is it a dense and moving novel, but it’s a valuable read for anyone looking to play around with his or her creativity. And not only did Hunt makes us wish we could write a similar book; he also made us want to work for him.

JOHN HUNT

RAMZI RAAD

The author tells Communicate how The Art of the Idea applies to the region. “Don’t fall in love with the fact that you have a big budget. You can have a big budget and everyone can avoid it, or see it but not have it go into their brain. A big idea with a big budget is a nice combination, but too many times in the region there’s a need to be big, flashy, and ornate. Keep asking what the size of the idea is, not just how big stuff is. “The region is becoming more sophisticated in terms of how it thinks about itself. It’s becoming much more self-confident, and the old world is beginning to look at all the developing countries with a lot more respect. Places like the Middle East no longer think they have to ape what’s done in Europe or in America; they’re getting their own sense of identity, and that can only be good.

Chairman of TBWA/Raad, on The Art of the Idea. “A base to inspire the creative people of TBWA, and the normal reader, on how to handle situations and how to generate big ideas…. Because ideas are not to be found on search engines, or by simply getting people together and saying we have to brainstorm. The big ideas are sometimes very simple ones.”

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APRIL 2010 | MEDIA WORK

Media Work For Tropicana, the sun also rises Juice brand Tropicana wanted to highlight the fact that it played an important role in the morning ritual of millions of Canadians, to coincide with the launch of its newest juice, Tropicana Essentials, with added calcium and vitamin D. The brand wanted to elevate its role beyond simply being a brand of orange juice and increase loyalty amongst its consumers and become Canada’s “National Provider of Brighter Mornings.” In order to do this, Tropicana spent a month in Inuvik, one of the country’s northernmost towns, during the coldest and darkest days of the winter. The 3,500 residents of the Arctic town in the Northwest Territories live without a sunrise for several weeks every winter. Tropicana brought a brighter morning to Inuvik with a giant artificial sun that emitted 100,000 lumens of light. A team of Canadian filmmakers captured the raising of the “sun” in Inuvik

for a series of documentary-style commercials. The lights were affixed to a 36-foot-wide helium balloon which then rose and illuminated the town. The Tropicana Brand’s “sunrise” coincided with Inuvik’s annual Sunrise Festival, which celebrates the return of sunlight after weeks of relative darkness. The brand also provided 1,200 free cartons of Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice – one for every household in the community. The Tropicana team worked with local leaders to identify community-based breakfast and nutrition programs in need of financial support. Contributions were then made to Sir Alexander Mackenzie School, Tot Spot Daycare and the Inuvik Food Bank. In addition to TV advertising, the campaign features blogged commentary and behind-the-scenes imagery from Inuvik to provide a catalyst for conversation on a new Tropicana Brighter Mornings Facebook page.

Ogilvy work for Berlitz tickets the boxes When the Berlitz Language Center in Dubai needed a low-budget solution to publicize their Arabic classes and make them a topic of conversation among expatriates in the UAE, the center went for a guerilla campaign. Memac Ogilvy created a campaign that would target 74 percent of the UAE’s population: expatriates who the agency says don’t understand Arabic. The campaign used administrative papers like parking tickets, which are always written out in Arabic. Memac Ogilvy produced a stamp to be used on all Arabic-only documents, mainly focusing on parking fines. With hundreds of thousands of parking tickets issued every year, the team had easy access to only-Arabic documents throughout the city, and stamped them with “Want to learn Arabic?” signs all throughout January 2010.

Creative Director: Ramzi Moutran. Copywriter: Sascha Kuntze. Art director: Rafael Rizuto. Executive creative director: Till Hohmann.

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APRIL 2010 | WORK

Regional Work

Client: Band-Aid. Agency: JWT Dubai. Location: UAE. Executive Creative Directors: Russell Heubach, Chafic Haddad. Senior Art Director/Copywriter: SM Ziyad. Illustrator/3D Artist: Tarek Samaan. Planner: Prabhakar Iyer. Account Manager: Rochelle Barreto.

“Detects up to 16 faces.” Client: Viewty Smart Phone, LG Electronics. Agency: Y&R Dubai. Location: UAE. Executive Creative Director: Shahir Zag. Creative Directors: Shahir Zag, Kalpesh Patankar, Parixit Bhattacharya. Creatives: Kalpesh Patankar, Parixit Bhattacharya. Illustrators: Lee Sin Eng, Tan Kee Hong. Planner: Nadine Ghossoub. Photographers: Wizard Photography, Ralph Baiker

“Died 06/12/09 of complications arising from old age.” Client: Neenah Paper, Papers Worldwide. Creative agency: Y&R Dubai. Executive Creative Director: Shahir Zag. Creative Directors: Shahir Zag, Komal Bedi Sohal. Creatives: Shahir Zag, Komal Bedi Sohal. Planner: Nadine Ghossoub. Retouching: Jomy Varghese.

“Skittles Sour: scatter your senses” Client: Skittles. Agency: Impact BBDO, Dubai. Location: UAE.

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WORK | APRIL 2010

Regional Work

“Dinner tonight?” “Here boy!” Creative Agency: Y&R Dubai. Executive Creative Director: Shahir Zag. Creative Directors: Shahir Zag, Komal Bedi Sohal. Illustrator: Céline Artigau. Planner: Nadine Ghossoub. Retouching: Jomy Varghese.

“The Harvey Nichols Sale” Client: Harvey Nichols. Creative Agency: Y&R Dubai. Executive Creative Director: Shahir Zag. Creative Directors: Shahir Zag, Kalpesh Patankar, Parixit Bhattacharya. Creatives: Shahir Zag, Parixit Bhattacharya. Illustrator: Remix Studio, Bangkok. Planner: Nadine Ghossoub. Photographer: Anuchai Secharunputong.

Client: Viva. Creative Agency: Unisono. Location: Bahrain. Creative Director: Liam Farrell. Art Director: Bradford Pretorius. Creative Consultant: Khaled Al Malki. Copywriter: Ram Hariharan. Director of Strategy: Amy Morgan.

“Control P” Client: SABB(HSBC Bank). Agency: Team Y&R. Location: Riyadh. Creative Director/Art & Copy: Manoj Manohar Mahalley.

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APRIL 2010 | WORK

International Work

“Effective headache relief.” Client: Panadol. Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, Beijing, China. Creative Director: Wilson Chow. Art Director: Shiyang He. Copywriter: Lianhui Hao. Illustrator: Feng Liu. Photographer: Tinghu Ye.

“Get to know the city you want without passing through time zones.” Client: Editora Europa Viaje Mais Magazine. Advertising Agency: Longplay, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Creative Director: Fernando Luna. Art Director: Eduardo Basque. Copywriter: Marcel Petroff. Illustrator: Eduardo Basque. Photographer: Ale Torres.

“There’s a new hospital drama in town. Our state-of-the-art animal hospital is now open. New episodes daily.” Client: Wellington Zoo. Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi. Location: New Zealand.

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WORK | APRIL 2010

International Work

“Not even a speck of dust.” Client: Condor Brooms. Advertising Agency: OpusMúltipla, Curitiba, Brazil. Creative Directors: Denilson Pucci, Renato Cavalher. Art Director: Gregory Carniel. Copywriter: Lucas Borba. Illustrator: AcidStudio. “Great ideas start mini. HP mini notebooks.” Client: HP Phone. Advertising Agency: Publicis India Gurgaon. National Creative Director: Emmanuel Upputuru. Creative Director: Anindya Banerjee. Art Directors: Raylin Valles, Rajit Gupta. Copywriters: Sudhir Das, Binoy S. Sarkar. Illustrators: Rajit Gupta, Raylin Valles.

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APRIL 2010 | OFF THE RECORD

The Dish A store of substance When fashion retailer Iconic sent us an invite to the launch of its new store, we were impressed by the sheer pinkness of the extravagant box the invite came in. Inside was a series of coasters with messages such as, “Get metal,” “Get denim,” and “Get Soho.” These presumably refer to the range of styles on offer. But we were surprised at the other offerings implied by a couple of the cards. Literally watch “James is the reason some of you are here today, literally.” – Former Advertising Age editor Jonah Bloom sends delegates running for their birth certificates as he introduces James Hogan, CEO of Etihad Airways, at last month’s Abu Dhabi Media Summit. Stat’s the way to do it “Majority of Qatar residents are diabetic,” proclaims the headline on a release from research and analysis company YouGov Siraj. Communicate’s not very good at maths, we’ll admit. But we’re pretty sure that statement should mean that a majority – more than half – of Qatar’s residents are diabetic. Apparently not. The survey reveals that 52 percent of respondents “are personally diabetic or know someone in their immediate family/friends who suffers from diabetes.” It turns out that only 9 percent actually have the disease. The rest just know someone with it. The majority of Communicate is unimpressed.

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Good job Communicate was pleased to catch the breaking news on the Web site of Dubai newspaper Emirates Business 24-7. Under “Top headlines,” the site revealed that, “Dubai-based media house is hiring.” A top headline indeed during the financial crisis. The article, which consisted of a job description and an e-mail address for applicants to send their CVs to, did look suspiciously like a recruitment ad, though. Tick tick tick “Time is running out to solve your problems,” says an e-mail attempting to scare us into signing up for an IIR course on “solving complex business problems.” “This is your last chance,” it tells a now panicking Communicate. It continues, “Would you like to deal with uncertainty and complexity?” In the end, we can’t decide. It’s the pressure.

crushed at one time (that’s 61,106 cans in three minutes, in case you were wondering). Communicate is sure that Guinness thought the event was a big deal, as they dispatched one of their adjudicators to observe the record in person (not something they do for every record, given the sheer challenge of covering the globe). It probably had nothing to do with Dubai’s sunshine, sand and sea. “This is definitely one of the biggest, most memorable shows that I have experienced in a while,” said the adjudicator. No doubt as he slipped on his flip-flops, picked up his inflatable dolphin and set out for the water park. Objectivity no object “Gulf News collects seven DSF prizes,” crows the paper. These prizes were awarded by the Dubai Shopping Festival to media that covered the Dubai Shopping Festival. Gulf News won several photography prizes and a handful of journalism prizes too. Criteria, according to the DSF, include writing style, quality of research, creativity in news angle, and overall impact of the story (“will it be remembered?” the entrant is asked in brackets). Other journalistic staples like objectivity and refusing payment for favorable coverage don’t seem to be mentioned. “Every year Gulf News dedicates its resources to cover DSF attractions the event is the region’s

largest shopping, tourism and entertainment extravaganza,” says the paper (without punctuation). Gulf News’s editor in chief, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, tells his reporter, “When we do our work, we don’t put it in our heads to win prizes.” He adds, “Our happiness lies in the hands of our readers.” “It’s not about the prize money,” says reporter Cleofe Maceda, no doubt as she thumbs idly through her winnings of between $5,000 and $7,000. “It’s about the sense of pride I feel when I stand back and look at what I’ve done and how my stories have touched many readers.” Photographer Hadrian Hernandez tells the paper, “I love the fact that during DSF families go out and spend with their families.” We hope the omission of the word “time” in that quote was a typo, but, tragically, we fear it was not. Snap When it comes to original ideas, every creative knows that no man is an island. However, sometimes campaigns are. Or at least feature them. And sometimes those islands look remarkably similar to ones that other brands have used. When Emirates NBD realized it was wearing the same outfit as the Financial Times, it must have been mortified. At least the campaign’s tagline is unique; it’s nothing like Lulu Hypermarkets’ “Where the world comes to shop.”

Can you believe it? Coca-Cola relaunched its energy drink, Burn, by smashing a load of product in what looked to be the most specific world record ever. “The 69th new Guinness World Record in UAE,” it trumpeted, was “for having the highest number of Burn energy drink cans crushed during a monster truck show in Dubai, UAE.” Naturally, we asked who held the record before. It turns out that the record was neither brand- nor geography-specific, but was simply for the number of cans 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

4/5/10 4:38 PM

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