Communicate | October 2011 by MediaquestCorp.

The marketing and advertising resource • October 2011 • Issue N° 82 • www.communicate.ae Write on: What makes Saatchi creative (and novelist) Sion ScottWilson tick? Page 82

Untogether now: Leo Burnett’s Ahmad Abu Zamad on inconsistency Page 84

Planning in pods: Avi Bhojani’s BPG plots restructure, with new dedicated units Page 14

RESEARCH Follower figures We team up with research company YouGov Siraj to find out how consumers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia interact with brands online. Find the facts for Facebook and the totals for Twitter here. (Page 40)

DIGITAL Thumbs up More and more Saudi consumers are playing games – on consoles, on Facebook, on their phones, and anywhere else they can. Even pirates are offering to ad ads to the titles they copy. We see how marketers are cashing in. (Page 48)

MARKETING The new media As every aspect of marketing, advertising and communications becomes more and more digital, Communicate talks to agencies and key players in the industry to find out what this evolution will mean for their business. (Page 28)

DIGITAL SPECIAL

CAMPAIGN On message

How new technology and connectivity are changing marketing

(Page 90) A MediaquestCorp publication

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

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

october 2011 | Letter from the editor

Nazis, pirates and trolls W e go through the looking glass for this month’s cover story and look at all things digital. It turns out that covers quite a lot. So we’ve tried to fit quite a lot into this issue. On page 28 we look at how the ubiquity of digital media has blurred lines between marketing disciplines, between media channels, and even between paid, owned and earned media. We speak to media agencies and industry experts to find how the market is coping and adapting. On page 40, you can find the results of a survey we commissioned from research agency YouGov Siraj on the ways Web users in the UAE and Saudi Arabia interact with brands on social media. Turn to page 48 to see what the explosion of popularity in gaming means to marketers in Saudi Arabia. And on page 52 we look at how marketers are appealing to bloggers to reach a new target audience. But digital’s not all rosy. In that story on video games in Saudi Arabia, we see that the seas of opportunity are patrolled by pirates. These guys are even trying to board the marketing ship by selling

ads into the titles they illegally alter, copy and distribute. In our short on page 8, we find out why Andrew Keen, a tech commentator and guest speaker at BPG’s annual offsite gathering, thinks the Internet is as bad as Nazism. And in a piece borrowed from our partners at Advertising Age, on page 64, we meet the trolls who haunt blogs and chat rooms, upsetting the delicate sensitivities of creatives and management by making free with put-downs of work and executive decisions. But we can see in the overall cover package how agencies, clients, media and all those in between are managing to plot a course through the perils and pitfalls of the digital landscape. It’s a tough new world out there. And although digital may look, at times, like a fairytale, it’s still got its villains and bad guys. Let’s hope that once we’ve found our way around we can live happily ever after.

Austyn Allison, managing editor editor@communicate.vg

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Contents | OCTober 2011

Contents

COVER: The digital issue

NEWS

THE COMMUNIQUESTION

26 28

40 44 46 48

56 58 60 62 64

Communicate takes a look at all things digital Blurry times: When the edges are smudged between media, creative and PR; television, print and online; and even media, message and marketing, how are media agencies adapting? How much? If digital media is so measurable, why are measurements of regional online spend so unreliable? Research. Friends in figures: We team up with research agency YouGov Siraj to see how people interact with brands on social networks X-pert Files. Coming soon: Golin Harris’s Jeff Beringer flags up five trends to look out for Paper click: We pick apart OMG’s white paper on digital media in MENA Game on: Gaming is picking up in Saudi, and marketers are starting to cash in. When even the pirates are offering tailored advertising, how can the medium be ignored? First post: Marketers are starting to embrace bloggers as a new way to get their messages out. We talk to agencies, bloggers and brands to find out how that’s working out for them Making a move: Why digital is becoming an important factor in major marketers’ agency shifts Slow burn: Why has Omnicom been quiet about its interactive options internationally? Location, location, location: What can we learn from Facebook’s Places replacement? Cut and paste: Will the Web destroy scrapbooking, or reinvent it? Who’s been badmousing you? Have forums heralded “the Dark Ages of Advertising?”

SHORTS 8

Back to the Führer: Is the Internet really worse than Nazism? Really?

12 14 16 18 20

Television. New Fox channel, FX, launches Agencies. BPG plans restructure Agencies. MEC wins General Mills and DIFF accounts Digital. Yahoo fires CEO Carol Bartz We ask the industry to complete the phrase, “Creativity is…”

FEATURES 66 72 74

Agencies. The name game: Why are agencies called what they are? We speak to their founders and find out Marketing. Coupon trucking: How vouchers and discounts fit into the marketing mix Branding. In the can: Campbell Soup Co. has used some pretty sophisticated technology to tweak its branding

DEPARTMENTS 76 82 84 88 86 90 98

Q&A. In the game: How Zynga’s head of marketing Jeff Karp plans to take the company to its imminent IPO and beyond Profile. Call away: Saatchi’s top creative, Sion ScottWilson, doesn’t believe in calls to action X-pert Files. Not so simple: Leo Burnett’s Ahmad Abu Zamad says a little inconsistency can go a long way Media Work. Sites within sites from Microsoft, and a graffiti-led campaign by Calvin Klein Profile. Rising star: The Emirates’ account win is not the only thing taking off for SMG boss Philip Jabbour Work. Selections from the regional and international creative scenes The Dish. A man who cuts, a release that pastes, and an ad that can’t handle its copy

OCTOBER 2011 Published by: Medialeader FZ/MediaquestCorp Medialeader, P O Box 72184, Dubai Media City, Al Thuraya Tower 2, Office 2402, Dubai, Tel: (971) 4 391 0760

CO-CEO Alexandre Hawari CO-CEO Julien Hawari Managing Director Ayman Haydar CFO Abdul Rahman Siddiqui Regional director of business development Bassel Komaty creative DIRECTOR Aziz Kamel Head of circulation Haries Raghavan, h.raghavan@mediaquestcorp.com Marketing Manager Maya Kerbage, m.kerbage@ mediaquestcorp.com KSA GM Walid Ramadan, walid@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: +966 1 4194061 Lebanon GM Nathalie Bontems, nathalie@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: +961 1 492801 North Africa GM Adil Abdel Wahab, adel@medialeader.biz, Tel: +213 661 562 660 France Sales Director Manuel Dias, dias@arabies.com, Tel: +33 1 4766 46 00

Founder Yasser Hawari Managing Director Julien Hawari Group managing editor Siobhan Adams Managing editor Austyn Allison journalist Sidra Tariq senior sub editor Elizabeth McGlynn ART DIRECTOR Sheela Jeevan ART CONTRIBUTORS Aya Farhat, Jean-Christophe Nys External Affairs

Manuel Dias, Maguy Panagga, Catherine Dobarro, Randa Khoury, Lila Schoepf, Laurent Bernard PRINTERS Raidy Printing Group ADVERTISING The Gulf MEDIALEADER, PO Box 72184, Dubai Media City, Al Thuraya Tower 2, Office 2402, Dubai, Tel: (971) 4 391 0760, Fax: (971) 4 390 8737, sales@ mediaquestcorp.com Lebanon Peggy El-Zyr peggy@mediaquestcorp. com, Tel: (961) 149 2801 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Walid Ramadan, walid@mediaquestcorp.com, Tel: (966) 1 419 40 61, Ghassan A. Rbeiz, ghassan@mediaquestcorp.com, Fax: (966) 1 419 41 32, P.O.Box: 14303, Riyadh 11424, Europe S.C.C Arabies, 18, rue de Varize, 75016 Paris, France, Tel: (33) 01 47 664600, Fax: (33) 01 43 807362, Lebanon MEDIALEADER Beirut, Lebanon, Tel: (961) 1 202 369, Fax: (961) 1 202 369 WEBSITE www.communicate.ae

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OCTOBER 2010 | shorts

SSing the situation Is the Web really as bad as Hitler? One of BPG’s guest speakers argues it just might be by Austyn Allison

ANDREW KEEN. Author of The Cult of the Amateur

he Internet is worse than the Nazis, said Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley pundit and author of The Cult of the Amateur. He was talking at regional agency network BPG’s offsite training session on the east-coast UAE emirate of Fujairah last month. Keen went on to explain his much-quoted assertion that he first made on the US TV show The Colbert Report. “I don’t know where [BPG boss Avi Bhojani] found the quote, but my guess is he found it on my Wikipedia entry,” says Keen. Bhojani had introduced him by mentioning The Colbert Report incident. “My Wikipedia entry, of course, wasn’t mediated, wasn’t curated by an expert editor. Someone slapped it up because anyone can put anything up on Wikipedia.” And that, says Keen, is why the Internet is at least as bad as Nazism. It’s a new totalitarianism. Once we were watched by the state. Then we were watched by corporations – Google and Facebook, for example. We are now entering an era when we are watched by one another. “We will all walk around in 2020 with devices that know everything about us,” he says. “We will walk around with so much personal data packed into these little devices. It may well be sewn into our clothing, in our shoes, be in our hair, necklaces and ornaments, and other kinds of jewelry, so that wherever we go, everyone will know who we are.” In Keen’s 2006 book, The Cult of the Amateur, he argues that user-generated media is “destroying our economy, our culture and our values” (according to its jacket). On the wall behind him in Fujairah, a slide read, “Yes, the Internet is worse than the Nazis – from the cult of the amateur to the cult of social.”

“What we are threatened with – and this is a very serious threat if we are concerned with that future of mankind – is a new kind of totalitarianism. It may not be the Nazis, may not be the death camps, may not be little men with mustaches screaming. But it could be a new age of digital totalitarianism. Where everywhere we go, the world knows who we are, what our habits are, what our identities are, who our friends are, what we like, what we don’t like, and where we’ve been.” Around the room sat 255 people. Bhojani, in his opening speech, had pointed out that 33 nationalities were represented at BPG’s annual offsite. In an echo of Keen’s totalitarianism warnings, all attendees wore white t-shirts and caps, like a media and marketing army. Or prisoners. Even Communicate squeezed into the provided polo shirt. Our unease was compounded when someone took a photograph of the bar code printed on the back. He showed us his smartphone. It had our name and facts about us on the screen. Keen’s threat had come true. When BPG’s creative director marched around the room where the buffet was laid out, barking orders for employees to assemble outside for the company photograph, Communicate hid. All those identically dressed disciples looked ominously cult-like. But perhaps a cult isn’t always such a bad thing. The offsite’s theme was “Digital, digital, digital,” and its aim was to indoctrinate the network with a digital understanding. Bhojani said in his introduction, “Our DNA is not digital, but hopefully within the next 24 months we will get there.” A bit of offsite eugenics might just be the way to do that.

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OCTOBER 2011 | Regional news

FIC launches FX ME

 I media

New offering from Fox International Channels is geared to male audience

Mindshare Bahrain bags Gulf Air account Manama. Media agency Mindshare Bahrain has won Gulf Air’s global account for three years. “Gulf Air is a strategic win for Mindshare Bahrain, but more than that we believe we have the passion, ideas and professional commitment to be true partners in achieving [the airline’s] vision,” says Johnny Khazzoum, managing director of Mindshare Bahrain.  I AGENCIES

Dubai. In September, Fox International Channels (FIC), in partnership with Rotana, launched FX ME, a male-skewed channel and the third free-to-air offering from the News Corporation-owned broadcaster. The channel, which had been broadcasting in a test format over Ramadan, was launched with a marketing push that includes print, online, radio and activation in GCC countries including the UAE and Saudi Arabia. In March this year, FIC transformed its Fox Series channel into the female-oriented Fox. At the time it introduced a dual-audio option, dubbing shows from their original languages (including English, Spanish and Hindi) into Arabic. However, Athreyan Sundararajan, marketing director for FIC MENA, says there

are no plans to do the same with FX in the immediate future. Nor will there be dubbing applied to Fox Movies, the first channel launched by FIC in the MENA region three and a half years ago. FX is present in most international markets, says Sundararajan, adding that it is tailored to each country. The channel’s branding, handled locally by Leo Burnett, works to guidelines set by FIC’s international branding team in Rome. “The idea is that if a guy switches on FX there will always be something great for him on the channel,” says Sundararajan. “It’s as simple as that; it’s a one-stop shop for great male programing.” That programing will include sports shows such as Strike Force,

Monster Knock Out and Prime-time Boxing; first-run series including Sons of Anarchy and The Walking Dead (season two will be on FX ME in mid-October, mere days after first airing in the US); and the return of The Simpsons, which was dropped from Fox Series when it became Fox. Sundararajan says that now FX is live, we are unlikely to see more free-to-air FIC channels launching in the near future. “We launched three English-language entertainment channels in three and a half years, and that’s a big thing,” he says. “One always wants to launch more channels and to do more, but our current focus will be on the channels’ great potential to be big successes in the region.”

awards, and in the past two years four of those awards were won at Cannes, says JWT in a statement. “Seyoan brings a perfect blend of forward thinking and strong creative

management – not to mention the kind of creativity that made him a highly sought after talent,” says Naja. “I am delighted to have him on board.” Michiel Hofstee, managing director of JWT Dubai, adds, “I am convinced that Seyoan’s entrepreneurial skills and management of big international businesses are the right set of experiences to suit the range of needs in our local and international clients extremely well.”

 I AGENCIES JWT names Seyoan Vela as ECD in Dubai Dubai. JWT MENA has appointed Seyoan Vela as executive creative director of its Dubai office. Vela, 43, reports to Ramsey Naja, chief creative officer of JWT MENA. He joins JWT from Grey Amsterdam where he was executive creative director. During his tenure at Grey Amsterdam, the agency won 12 major

Impact BBDO wins Playnation, Magic Planet and Ski Dubai Dubai. Following a multi-agency pitch (involving Saatchi & Saatchi, TBWA/ Raad, Face to Face, BPG, Action impact and Spice), Majid Al Futtaim Leisure and Entertainment has appointed Impact BBDO as lead agency to promote three brands: Playnation, Magic Planet and Ski Dubai. This win is Impact BBDO’s second major piece of MAF business following its successful pitch in 2009 for Mirdif City Centre – the biggest opening for a mall in the Middle East. Douglas Palau, vice-president of Impact BBDO, says, “This is a great win. Playnation, Magic Planet and Ski Dubai are exciting brands and the insightful creative that won the pitch was built on strategies honed from BBDO’s worldwide experience on youth brands and our local expertise and understanding. Starcom Dubai wins CSR award Dubai. Media agency Starcom Media Vest Group’s Dubai office has won the CSR award at the Media & Marketing Global Awards 2011 for its work for Kraft’s Philadelphia. It was recognized for the “Philadelphia: spread some inspiration” campaign it did for the cream cheese brand. Also competing in the category were MediaCom International and OMD International, which were “highly commended” for their campaigns for Dulux and Sony, respectively. Bladonmore hires senior consultant Abu Dhabi. Bladonmore, a corporate communications business, has announced the appointment of Ahmad Hammoud as senior consultant in its Abu Dhabi office. Hammoud brings more than 15 years of multi-disciplinary corporate communications experience, is a fluent Continued on page 14

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OCTOBER 2011 | Regional news

BPG to restructure with focus on pods and procurement

Dubai. Ad agency network BPG is to restructure its Dubai and Abu Dhabi offices with three “pods” in Dubai (including one specializing in public advocacy) and one in Abu Dhabi. Clients will be assigned to a pod, and each pod will comprise approximately 14 or 15 staff from disciplines including account handling, creative and PR. The pods will each be headed by a “coach” and three “captains.” Coaches include the chief operating officers of BPG’s Dubai and Abu Dhabi offices, Nitin Puri and Clark Williams, respectively. The captains will be senior staff now able to take on more responsibility as the coaches are freed up to focus on strategy and training. BPG will also be launching a specialist unit to concentrate on procurement in fields such as print, television production and promotional goods. “One of the performance indicators I’ve put to myself is in the next 12 months we need to have gold standards in supply chain management,” says BPG CEO

Avi Bhojani. “That’s a weakness area of agencies. In today’s context it’s very critical because otherwise procurements of organizations will take over from us. We’re a creative business; we’re hopeless at money management, at negotiations, ad controls that need to be kept. More and more large organizations have started procuring services directly.” BPG’s procurement division will not handle media, but will be similar to the media buying units born of agencies in the early 2000s. “If all you’re doing is using your Rolodex to make your phone calls to your suppliers, then what your suppliers are doing is they are Googling and are procuring from China,” says Bhojani. “So why do you have a layer of middlemen on that? Why can’t you provide that service? If you cut one layer, the chances are you’ve suddenly got between a 5 percent and 7 percent margin. … It’s a low-hanging fruit.” BPG’s procurement department will be headed up by Poonam Waghmode.

Continued from page 12 Arabic speaker and has a strong track record of creating and implementing strategic communications, media relations and marketing programs, a press statement reads. “Ahmad has achieved success both in-house and on the agency side. His thorough knowledge of the Middle East market makes him a natural choice for us,” says Jonty Summers, director and general manager of Bladonmore Middle East. “I am thrilled to be able to draw upon his insights and experience and look forward to introducing him to our Gulf-based clients.” Cheil MENA appoints Milos Ilic as ECD Dubai. Cheil Worldwide MEA regional headquarters has recruited Milos Ilic as executive creative director for the MENA region. Illic, who has joined from TBWA in Dubai, reports to Azmi Yafi, chief operating officer for Cheil Worldwide MENA. Andrew Yi, president and CEO of Cheil Worldwide MEA, says, “We’re delighted to have Milos join us to lead Cheil creatively. He brings us best-in-class creativity across the expanding channel landscape – both offline and online.” Illic is an award-winning creative director with a large number (approximately 250) of international awards (from events including Cannes, One Show, New York Festival, and the Effies) and work published in The Gunn Report, Graphis annuals and other major industry publications, a press statement reads. Throughout his 18 years’ experience, he has worked on many recognizable brands, including Mars, Nissan and General Motors.  I Digital People’s Choice award on Yahoo Maktoob Dubai. Yahoo Maktoob and the Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) have announced that the 2011 People’s Choice Award will be hosted on Yahoo Maktoob, harnessing the site’s reach, which includes more than 55 million users in MENA. The People’s Choice is the category in the AIB’s international media excellence awards that is open to online viewers everywhere who vote for their favorite entry, a company statement says. This year’s topic for the People’s Choice award is “Best Coverage of Democracy Uprisings,” reflecting the momentous changes happening in the Middle East and North Africa

during the Arab Spring, highlighting the impact that traditional and social broadcasting had in enabling the movements for change. BeirutNightLife.com launches initiatives

Beirut. BeirutNightLife.com, a website promoting tourism in Lebanon, announced the launch of a TV and radio show to be broadcast on MTV and music station NRJ. The announcement came at an event at Beirut’s Cherry on the Rooftop on Sept. 9. Three other initiatives by the website were revealed at the event, including the official launch of a quarterly magazine and two new Web portals. “I am glad to announce that the Dubai version of BeirutNightLife.com is up and running,” says Jean Ghalo, founder and CEO of BeirutNightLife.com. “The new night experience of Dubai (Pingdubai.com) will cover the best tourist destinations in the cosmopolitan city, presenting a guide to nightlife in Dubai. The other website will be Dineoutlebanon.com, your first ultimate video guide to culinary experience.” MBC and Emirati filmmaker join for online mini series Dubai. MBC Group has announced a new partnership with Emirati film director and producer, Ali Mostafa, (of City of Life fame) involving the production of an online mini-series entitled Classified. The series is exclusive to mbc.net and was set to launch at the end of last month. The five-episode mini series sees four friends taking a journey across the region. Zoya Sakr joins new woman’s portal as editor in chief Abu Dhabi. Zoya Sakr, who worked as editor in chief for Abu Dhabi Media’s (ADM) women’s lifestyle website anazahra. com, has parted ways with ADM to manage a new women’s portal called nawa3em.com. Continued on page 16

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OCTOBER 2011 | Regional news

MEC wins General Mills and DIFF accounts

Dubai. MEC MENA has been awarded the General Mills MENA business after a two-way pitch. General Mills is one of the largest food groups in the world and includes brands such as Betty Crocker, Häagen-Dazs, Green Giant, Nature Valley, Old El Paso and Pillsbury to name a few. The assignment covers the GCC markets, Egypt and Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). The Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) has also appointed MEC MENA as its media buying agency for its eighth edition, which will be held from Dec. 7 to 14.

Continued from page 16 The website is being launched by 2Pure – an independent digital and branding agency that has extended its services to include e-publishing, says Sakr. It will focus on beauty, fashion, celebrities, romance and horoscopes, and will include features, videos and forums. It encourages women to “read, watch, share, blog and personalize the content to their tastes,” a press statement reads. Sakr adds that Nawa3em has introduced a “tailor made content” strategy. “Now you can enter your skin type, your hair color, your height, and even your favorite celebrities, and Nawa3em will deliver the content that only interests and match[es] your criteria. You can customize the feeds that you want to receive and get notifications when new videos and galleries that you like are uploaded.”  I RESEARCH

Following a four-way pitch, which included previous incumbent OMD, Mediavest and MediaCarat, MEC MENA secured a three-year contract. Mahsa Motamedi, DIFF’s director of marketing and sponsorship, says, “Media buying plays an important role in driving the festival’s industry and community engagement, and MEC’s approach provided an exciting blend of both cutting-edge technology as well as its active engagement in all the spaces we want to be present in.” Mohan Nambiar, CEO of MEC MENA, adds, “DIFF is an iconic

event in the region and we are delighted at being chosen to handle its media business….We strive to be a valued and valuable business partner to all our clients and hope our partnership with DIFF will pave the way for exceptional success in its next editions.” Leo Burnett continues as the festival’s marketing and advertising agency, executing all DIFF creative and digital, while Asda’a Burson-Marsteller remains the festival’s public relations agency for the UAE and Arab world, a press statement reads.

GfK to set up Middle East arm Kuwait. Market research company GfK has announced that it is partnering with ARA Research & Consultancy to set up GfK Media Research Middle East (GfK MRME) and launch a series of studies targeting Arab countries. The new company will enable GfK to broaden its activities in the Middle East and to focus in particular on the media sector. GfK MRME will offer information services on media consumer behavior and attitudes to all emerging and established media. The services will include quantitative research on the usage of print, TV and radio media.  I TELEVISION

 I AGENCIES Zenithmedia announces promotions Dubai. Publicis Groupe’s Zenithmedia media agency has announced two executive promotions for the MENA region. Suhail Kambriss (pictured, above left) has been promoted to chief operating officer for Zenith-

media MENA from his previous position as commercial director at Vivaki Egypt, while CV Suvi (above, right) – previously general manager at Zenithmedia UAE – has been promoted to strategy & integrations director, Zenithmedia MENA. Kambriss has 14 years’ expertise in media planning, buying and business

development across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He started his career in 1998 and has been with Vivaki since 2008. Suvi started his career in India, and has been with Zenithmedia since its inception in the Middle East, reads a company statement. He has held several key local and regional roles in his 14 years with the agency.

Arabian Studios in the UAE Dubai. Arabian Studios, an international production company with offices in Europe and studios in Los Angles, has set up a presence in the UAE. With the planned UAE base, Arabian Studios aims to change the concept of film-making and production companies in the UAE, which at the moment are considered as facilitators, a press statement reads. Arabian Studios operates with the aims of increasing the desirability of the industry for people to invest in films and encouraging new talent to emerge from the region, it adds.

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OCTOBER 2011 | International news

Yahoo board fires global CEO

 I AGENCIES Twitter tries to boost ad revenue Twitter has begun publishing promoted Tweets into the timelines of users who aren’t necessarily followers of the brands posting the Tweets – its latest push to build ad revenue. The move has been anticipated for some time. Twitter began showing the ads and named some advertisers involved, including AMC Theatres, American Express, Best Western, Disney, HP, Lexus, Lionsgate, Movietickets.com, Pepsi, Red Bull, Salesforce.com, Sephora, Xbox and Yahoo. As it has with other developments in the past, Twitter is rolling out the effort slowly, first to a “single-digit percentage” of Twitter users worldwide, and only on Twitter.com. A Twitter spokesman said they’ll eventually be integrated into the timelines of users on desktop clients such as TweetDeck and mobile apps. But Twitter is keeping vague on how, exactly, those ads will be targeted. Placement in timelines will be determined by “a variety of public signals that help determine which promoted Tweets are most relevant,” the company says in a statement. The spokesman declined to specify which signals will drive the placement, but noted that any public information from a user – who they follow, lists they’re on, what they

retweet, and how they interact with Tweets – could be a factor. Advertisers only pay when a user takes an action, such as a retweet, a reply or a click-through on a link. Reuters creates aggregation site

At a time when the Business Insiders and Huffington Posts of the media world are doing anything and everything to pump up page views for advertising dollars, Reuters has created an aggregation site with usability at the core. The financial news service has launched Counterparties.com, a content-aggregation website that highlights 20 to 30 of the day’s most compelling financial news and opinion stories and links directly out to each one from the homepage. In that way it is more Drudge Report than Huffington Post – no rewritten stories, just a new headline with a conversational tone for each article, and a direct link out to the original source of the content.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was fired in September, with the company’s chief financial officer Tim Morse being named interim CEO. The struggling portal will kick off a “comprehensive strategic review” of its business in an attempt to turn itself around. The news of Bartz’s firing was first reported by AllThingsD.com. Bartz had struggled with several issues since her 2009 hiring, including a few key ones recently. Earlier this year Google passed Yahoo as the largest display ad player, for example, and Facebook is expected to pass both of them this year. That’s a major blow to Yahoo, which had long been a leader in display advertising, touting its scale and relationships with major advertisers. “We are committed to exploring and evaluating possibilities and opportunities that will put Yahoo on a

trajectory for growth and innovation and deliver value to shareholders,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock says in a statement. Yahoo’s board also announced a newly formed “executive leadership council” to assist with the review. At a time when the online display market is growing faster than search, Yahoo’s share of the display pie is declining. Online display is expected to grow by 24.5 percent to $12.33 billion in 2011. Yahoo’s share, however, is expected to decline to 13.1 percent in 2011, from 14.4 percent in 2010, according to eMarketer. Yahoo has struggled with integrating its search system with Microsoft’s Bing in a deal that was struck two years ago. And Yahoo’s business outside the US has faced challenges, specifically in Asia where Bartz clashed with business partner Alibaba CEO Jack Ma.

“This is an idea that everyone has had at some point,” says Reuters’ finance blogger Felix Salmon, who led the push for such a site at Reuters. “But I happen to be lucky enough to be housed in a building where this kind of thing is possible and where the first question is not, ‘How do we monetize that?’” The mission of the site, says Salmon, is to “find the signal among the noise” and give readers a destination in which they can find the day’s most compelling news from all corners of the Internet. To help sift through that noise, Reuters is licensing a tool from the New Yorkbased startup Percolate. Percolate, founded by former Barbarian Group exec Noah Brier and Federated Media veteran James Gross, mines a user’s Twitter and RSS feeds (and Tumblr soon, too) and uses an algorithm to curate and surface the most talked-about content around the Web unique to that user. For Counterparties, Percolate is mining the Twitter and RSS feeds followed by Salmon, which, combined, number in the thousands.

“As the media landscape evolves, opening new and exciting ways to connect with our customers, we’re excited to begin working with Optimedia to launch a refreshed media strategy in 2012,” says Kurt Kane, Pizza Hut’s chief marketing officer. WPP-owned MEC had handled the business for more than 10 years. “MEC has been a valued partner that brought strategic insights and solid planning to our brand for more than a decade. We are parting ways amicably and wish them the best,” Kane adds. Shops that participated in the review along with Optimedia and MEC were Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Universal McCann and Interpublicowned Ingenuity Media, an arm of the Martin Agency. The loss of the Pizza Hut media account is a blow to MEC, which earlier this year parted ways with Activision. Also in review on the MEC roster are Novartis, worth about $600 million globally, and Toys R Us, worth about $115 million.

 I AGENCIES Optimedia wins Pizza Hut $217m media account Publicis Groupe’s Optimedia has been awarded Pizza Hut’s media account following a review.

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OCTOBER 2011 | OPINION

The Communiquestion

Open mind

We ask the industry to complete the phrase “Creativity is…” DAVID PORTER Media director, Unilever MENA … in all of us at birth. Sadly, too many people believe the fools who tell us we don’t have it or who beat it out of us, or we simply forget we once had it. Imagination is more important than information. If you have lost your imagination, make a family: the kids will find it for you again. JOELLE JAMMAL Managing director, Leo Burnett Jordan I like a quote by Leo Burnett which says it all: “Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.” Creativity is also passion and inspiration; it is the use of your imaginative skill in an innovative way to add flavor to your life and work. YOANN EL JAOUHARI Managing Director, JC Decaux, Dubai & Northern Emirates In the out-of-home industry I would say it involves getting your brand ready for a super urban “speed dating.” Only one flash occasion to make a first good impression, or no impression at all.

MOUNIR HARFOUCHE CEO, Lowe MENA … an advanced thinking capability that combines a high level of logical analysis, strategic sensitivity, emotional intelligence and a wild brain that is not limited to the obvious. FADI CHAMAT General manager, PHD Abu Dhabi … the manifestation of imagination in the physical form. HUBERT BOULOS Head of strategic planning, JWT … the best solution to a problem. NAVIN VIJAY Senior exchange executive, Mindshare UAE … when a planner sees beyond the numbers and when they see audience as more than just audience. Planners need to be creative in targeting their audience, both effectively and engagingly. Being involved at the ideation stage, planners have a greater influence on the direction of campaigns.

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RONALD HOWES Regional managing director, GCC, Memac Ogilvy … simply getting others to say or think, “Why didn’t I think of that?” TONY ORSTEN CEO, twofour54 … getting our brilliant home-grown rapper, Khalifa Al Rumaithi, to rap in a board meeting. ALAIN BRAHAMCHA General manager, UAE, Starcom MediaVest Group … seeing the same thing as everybody else, but thinking of something different. MICHEL BORT Client relationship director, Kassab Media … thinking outside the box. No boundaries / limitations / hesitation. Just do it.

MARWAN QUTUB CEO and co-founder, 3Points Advertising … creating an impression that helps achieve your objective. YVES-MICHEL GABAY General manager, MEC MENA … everywhere and can be expressed by anyone. NASSIB BOUERI CEO, Y&R & Wunderman … very subjective. Sawsan Ghanem Managing director, Active Public Relations … an advanced thinking capability that combines a high level of logical analysis, strategic sensitivity, emotional intelligence and a wild brain that is not limited to the obvious.

EDMOND GEBARA Senior exchange executive, Mindshare UAE … at its best, successfully implementing a train of thought usually opposed by some form of the masses.

Mohammed Tayem Managing director, Entourage The invisible force that delivers visible results. It is the only way David wins over Goliath. No creativity, no life. But what is creativity without direction? It is that brute that can go against you if not tamed.

AZHAR SIDDIQUI General manager, Magna Global … original and exciting ideas that lead to positive business results.

Hermann Behrens CEO, The Brand Union Midlle East … grey matter making stuff that matters.

ALI AWADA Manager exchange – digital, Mindshare UAE … pulling a hat out of a bunny’s… mouth, let’s say.

Rachid Mtaini Managing director, Euro RSCG UAE ... the ability to realize that there are tons of answers to a situation (or task, or challenge), and find the path least trodden and an amazing new perspective and not go off-compass. I am told that the most elegant solutions are usually the simplest.

YOUSEF TUQAN TUQAN CEO, Flip Media … making things obvious. ROY BARGHOUT Senior manager – digital exchange, Mindshare UAE … you, me and them. ZOYA SAKR Editor-in-chief, anaZahra.com … innovation.

NICK STREET Head of creative services, Rufus Leonard Middle East …the use of your imagination to create something new. LIANNE RIVETT Senior designer, Rufus Leonard Middle East …joining the dots up in a different way (and sometimes adding a few new ones).

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Etisalat wanted to engage with business professionals always on the move. Yahoo! Maktoob enabled them to specifically target interested and relevant customers using advanced Behavioral Targeting technology which delivered a click through rate (CTR)* 15x greater than industry standards. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the power of Yahoo! Maktoob.

See what Yahoo! Maktoob can do for your brand at advertising.maktoob.com or email us at: advertise.me@yahoo-inc.com *CTRs of this magnitude are generally reserved for bold rich media campaigns, home page takeovers or overlay ads.

SCIENCE + ART + SCALE

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Digital special

Is there anything thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not digital today? If there is, there soon won't be. Communicate looks at what that one word can mean to the industry, to agencies, and to marketing communications in general

Beyond the blur Page 28

Gaming in KSA Page 48

Spend yourself mad Page 38

PR turns to bloggers Page 52

Social stats Page 40

Omnicomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s strategy Page 58

Five trends to watch Page 44

The new scrapbooking Page 62

State of the region Page 46

The trouble with trolls Page 64 Communicate I 27

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OCTOBER 2011 | Cover Story

Beyond the blur

How media agencies are adapting to cope with the ubiquity of digital by Austyn Allison

n the AMC TV show Mad Men, set in a fictional agency on New York’s Madison Avenue in the heady days of liquid lunches, chain smoking and kickbacks of the 1960s, Draper Price opens a television department. It is headed by Harry Crane, and Harry has an initial staff of, well, himself. The television department is his own initiative, and it is seen by most of the agency as an add-on to the serious work of creating print ads and buying space for them in magazines. TV in Mad Men is an afterthought, a footnote to the real business of the agency. Back then, television was little more than print ads with a soundtrack. In the early episodes of the show, pitches to clients are based on dummy posters, and TV is sometimes thrown in at the end. But as time progresses, as the 50s turn into the 60s, Harry Crane’s TV department gets more and more attention, and he becomes more and more important to the pitching process. A few things have changed since the Mad Men days: Three-piece suits have become two-piece, fewer creatives smoke pipes, and there are fewer secretaries to go around. On top of that, ad agencies are no longer one-stop shops – around 10 years ago, specialist divisions emerged from creative agencies, and media-buying units were born. As television

became ubiquitous in consumers’ homes, so the television departments of media and advertising agencies became so important that they ceased to exist. Now everything involves television; every creative needs an eye for the small screen, and all suits live and breathe viewer figures. Harry’s department has become the agency. Now imagine Harry Crane is the one man in an agency who has been asked to look at an emerging channel called “digital,” and you can see the same thing is happening today with digital as happened in the 60s with TV. Four or five years ago, agencies started giving one person a room and a computer and telling him – more importantly, telling clients – that he is their specialized digital department. He was allowed into pitches, encouraged to be there to show clients that his agency is on top of technology, but subtly discouraged from making too many suggestions about real media buying. Digital was an afterthought, an addendum, a garnish to the media main course. But now digital is becoming more pervasive. Sure Digital Harry’s still there, but he’s got himself a bigger team. He’s not controlling the biggest budgets, and many agencies still have him sitting in a separate division. But he is becoming more and more central to the agency’s planning.

Digital is doing today what TV did in the 1960s. It is creeping out of its sectioned-off department and taking over the agency. Not so special any more. “There were a few years when people said, ‘You’re digital so you should know all this,’” says Dimitri Metaxas, Omnicom Media Group’s regional executive director of media. That was him at the start, but those teams are growing as digital deepens. “There are all sorts of areas of specialism, and people who focus on those areas have that depth of knowledge and experience that I don’t have,” continues Metaxas. “My job has become to have enough of an understanding of what they do and where they fit within the overall big picture. But when you dig really deep down, deep into it, you rely on these individuals to tell you what is the right way and the wrong way.” For this reason, says Vivaki’s regional head of digital, Rayan Karaky, it’s best to hire those who can do what you can’t. “The most important thing is that you hire people who are better than you at something,” he says. “I could never do my search campaigns like my search people; I could never do social media like the social guys do it, and I could never create content like the content guys.”

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©Corbis

Search is digital; social is digital; display is digital; mobile is digital. There is no shortage of indecision and disagreement about what digital actually is (see box, page 36). What’s clear is that there are no easy lines to be drawn about the phrase. “You have digital TV,” says Karaky. “You can have a digital-format newspaper. It’s still a newspaper because it’s breaking news. But it’s just not paper any more. It’s just news.” “I don’t think of digital as a separate medium,” he adds. “And I think that’s one of the key challenges that media agencies have to start embracing. Planners need to start thinking in terms of: Am I a traditional media person or am I a digital media person, because our role as an agency is to deliver advertising messages in the most optimized way, no matter how or what we do.” Planners need to deliver messages to consumers in the quickest and most accurate way. “And digital happens to be the quickest and most efficient way to deliver content.” Breaking down the walls. Dana Adhami, Mindshare’s digital champion (a director-level role), says the enigma of digital’s definition extends beyond the media agency. “As a channel, digital has really exploded to every other medium possible,” she says. “This has created a massive blur for every agency possible. So digital today can be handled by a PR agency; it can be handled by a creative agency. It’s very blurry.” This muddies distinctions between agencies. “Because of this blur, today a media agency can pitch for social, and can look into earned, owned and paid media. So it’s all becoming integrated.” “It comes down to business sense, and how agencies are able to translate clients’ requirements into a social presence,” she adds. At regional agency network BPG’s recent annual offsite, Nick Vale, the global head of planning at WPP media shop Maxus, spoke about Nike’s Chalkbot. During the Tour de France cycle race, people could send messages in support of friends and family with cancer to a road painting device that would paint those messages on the road for riders to read as they raced over them. “I don’t know what it is,” said Vale. “I don’t know if it’s media, or if it’s a message. What kind of an agency should create that?” His conclusion: “We should create that.” It doesn’t matter what sort of agency you are; if the idea is a good one, do it. Channels are also playing a sort of pass-theparcel with consumers – a print ad will link to a Facebook page, which will point the consumer toward a YouTube video that’s based on a TV slot, and so on. Traditional media won’t die. Adhami reckons the region’s favorite medium will be number one for a long time to come, saying “TV is going to be the catalyst at pushing digital forward and making sure that at a campaign level it is fully integrated and collaborated within the communication.”

BOX CLEVER. Who, in the 1960s. would have thought television could become so pervasive? Ain’t it great to integrate? Planners cannot live in silos any more than their media specialisms can, and as a result, agencies are becoming more integrated. “Everyone in the agency today needs to speak the language of digital,” says Adhami. “So a TV planner needs to understand digital, and a digital planner needs to understand TV. Agencies are finding it very important to have all their staff speak one united language.” She says “integration” is too much of a buzz word, though, and Rayan Karaky also agrees it is overrated. “I think that people shy away from ‘integration’ because they think it’s going to take away from their power. Because when you say ‘integration’ you think they are going to take us and integrate us within the overall agency.” That’s not what it should mean, though. “To me it’s who delivers,” he says. “That’s the goal of the agency. So to me it’s going to be about who is really capable of understanding the whole scope of what media is about and what content delivery is about?” Managing director of Havas Middle East Pierre Soued tells Communicate, “Digital is becoming more and more at the core [of the agency]. First of all we used to talk about digital, but now we can feel it, we can sense it.” More and more clients are asking about digital, says Soued, and “Everybody is talking about integration.” Clients will lose respect for agencies that remain stuck in traditional niches. “We have to position ourselves, in fact, as communication experts, communication consultants,” he adds. “How to solve your issue will be through different areas of expertise. No more, ‘Ah yes, you have

to make an advertising campaign, you have to undertake a digital campaign, or a PR campaign, or an event.’ It is a mixture of everything. For the client to respect you now, you have to come as a person who believes in a unified approach.” Havas has put this into practice with the structure of its digital division. Dany Naaman, who heads up Havas’s buying arm MPG, as well as Havas Digital in thr region, explains how this new wing of Havas has been created to break the silos. “Brands take a silo approach to the interaction with their customers, which puts the consumer in control of the relationship,” he says. “The challenge for agencies is to understand and help manage this interaction.” This requires a broader set of capabilities (he lists “performance search, performance display, social search, listening”) as well as flexibility, agility and collaboration. Havas Digital effectively breaks the walls between buying agency, PR agency and creative agency. “The Havas Digital structure is set to cater for these requirements. We are breaking conventions on how agencies service clients and clients are organized,” he says. Bills to play. The structure of agencies may be changing, but so are their billing models. “Even in the paid media space the traditional model of billing clients a percentage of media spend has decreased,” says OMG’s Metaxas. “We have a diversity of fee models in place. Some of those are related to commission on media buy, which has its pluses and minuses; there’s retainer-based model, which is time and resources; and then

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Dimitri MetaxaS. OMG’s executive director of digital .

Meredith Tuqan. OMG’s regional director of social media

Ryan karaky. Vivaki’s regional head of digital

there’s the whole performance elements that perhaps would act as a nice sort of boost to any of those other models.” Social media, in particular, tends to get billed by the hour. It’s not yet at the stage of billing by effectiveness. Meredith Tuqan, OMG’s recently hired regional director of social media, says the agency – and the industry as a whole – is still working out the best measurements of effectiveness. “We work on a consultancy model,” she says. “There’s no way we would be billing in terms of the number of fans, for example. It doesn’t make sense.” Metaxas agrees. “The reason for the performance fee model lagging is because we’re still determining the best performance models anyway, as in: What is truly success in social media? It’s not the number of fans, and that’s part of the education that we’re doing in the market as we speak.” Adhami says it is better to base relationships with clients on strategy than on short-term hits of Facebook friends. “I’ve seen so many clients start social pages and social campaigns, and then once the tactical campaign is over, the page stops. So again if clients want to see results then it has to be based on a strategy thing, whether that is long-term not tactical.” Karaky would prefer to take more from his clients when Vivaki serves them better, rather than when it buys more media. “I’d rather go to my client and say, ‘This inventory is way more filtered than anything you’re buying anywhere else, so I’ll need you to pay a little bit more for it,’” he says. “So I can make money, rather than trying to find ways to hide the money I am making.” He continues, “Basically your marketing

budget comes from how much you sell, so my fees should come from how much you sell. If the model changes to that, then you start seeing a lot more innovation.” A fair exchange. Media agencies need to escape the haggling mindset. And transparent digital media exchanges may help. “Exchanges in the display environment allow media planners to go in and bid on inventory,” says Karaky. “When that happens, it’s a bidding platform. There are no hidden costs; it’s there, everybody sees it, everybody would want to buy it.” This offers a great opportunity for the industry today. “If you, as an agency, manage to get into that environment first, clients are going to want to go through you because you are transparent and you are being honest about the inventory you are buying, and you are bidding on it based on data you have already collected,” he says. “When that happens the whole model will have to change, because clients will have to remunerate agencies that are getting them better results.” Out of the comfort zone. The relationship between agencies and clients is still rocky. Media professionals Communicate spoke to put much if this down to a lack of comfort with digital. Adhami says that while most Mindshare clients are interested in digital, their level of adoption varies between categories “An FMCG client will be very conservative on spend when it comes to digital, whereas a client in the airline business will rely heavily on this channel because it is the performance channel; it brings sales, it brings leads, you can measure it,” she says.

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bob gilbreath. Chief strategy officer, Possible Worldwide

dana adhami. Mindshare’s digital champion

dany naaman. Regional general manager, Havas Media

Clients may be prepared to run digital-only campaigns, while others prefer to keep television in the mix, using broadcast spots to push consumers online, she says, adding, “Some of our clients are extremely educated; they know how all the touch points come together and how important digital is both as a channel and as an overall touch point. But yes, there are other clients that want to adopt it, they are very excited about it, but they either don’t know how or they are still afraid.” In the case of these clients, the agency’s role is to convince them they don’t need to be scared. Another speaker at the BPG offsite, Bob Gilbreath, chief strategy officer at WPP’s integrated digital shop Possible Worldwide, offers one reason clients can be slow to adopt digital. “I think the biggest reason for that is that we’ve given them mainly banners, which has taken that interruptive model and [converted it to] digital,” he says. “We and others have done eye-tracking studies that show that people literally do not see banner spaces; they don’t pay attention at all. And the answer in our industry has been make the banner bigger. Interrupt people more.” That’s not the right answer. One step ahead. The agency needs to drive the client, says Gilbreath. It contains contain people who are more likely to embrace change and be excited about developments. “I feel that’s been my full-time job the seven years I’ve been on the agency side: Be one step ahead of where our clients are in understanding that digital trip.” This role comes with a proviso, though. When he says one step, Gilbreath means that much and no more. “Anything more than one step, and you’re a geek; you’re alien to them,” he says. On the other hand, “If you’re at where they

are, they recognize that pretty quickly and start wondering if they have someone who’s really challenging them enough.” Tech pundit and author of The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, speaking at the same event, argues agencies shouldn’t be slaves to clients. “The great success story in Silicon Valley is Apple’s Steve Jobs, and he’s deeply authoritarian and never asks, never does any kind of workshops with consumers, and he tells the consumer what they should want,” says Keen. “I think the same should be true of you guys in digital services, because the consumer will always fall back on orthodoxies or stereotypes of common form. And my guess would be that if you’re going to be effective you often have to give or sell or tell your clients stuff that they don’t want to hear or they don’t like. But if you’re going to have value you’re going to have to do that, otherwise there’s no point in them going to you; they can do it themselves. And the challenge in the 21st century is you guys being disintermediated by clients who do think they can run their own marketing and hire people to do Twitter feeds.” He adds, “Your challenge is to prove value, and that requires you to often be quite controversial. You have to be careful giving customers or consumers – or anyone else – what they want.” Site unseen. As a digital minimum, clients need a website, according to Dana Adhami. “Everything has to be searchable, social, transactionable and shareable,” she says. “In essence, this is all centralized around content. Whether it is digital or non-digital, content is king. Content is the core of all of this. And as long as it is shareable, searchable and transactionable, then it all creates, in a nutshell, this positive digital footprint.”

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All together now. Digital is part of virtually every media plan today

Pierre Soued. Managing director of Havas Middle East

nick vale. Global head of planning at WPP

TOBY HOARE. CEO of JWT Europe

Rayan Karaky’s not so sure about the need for a site, although he too hangs a lot on content. “Does a client really need a website?” he asks. “That’s what I’d start with. Does a client have enough content to keep a website fresh?You could totally survive in a digital environment today without having a website.” Content can be delivered through other channels, including social media. “So today the most important thing for clients to have is content, not a website,” he continues. “Don’t worry about the delivery. Delivery is there; you just have to provide that essence that is going to get people talking, or sharing, or whatever you want.” Pitch and push. It’s not just clients that benefit from a digital strategy. Agencies are using their digital offerings to give themselves a push at pitches. “Agencies find that a way to innovate and a way for them to seem edgy and creative is by using this channel,” says Adhami. “So as a result they feel that by using digital it will strengthen their creativity levels. It will just give them an edgier push.” This might explain why they are spending a disproportionate amount of money on developing their digital capabilities. Digital spend can be measured as a single-figure percentage of the budgets agencies handle, but all the media agencies Communicate spoke to said they would have to think long and hard about hiring anyone – for any position – without digital expertise. “Today when a pitch takes place or a client sends out an request for proposal it’s interesting because yes, a big part of the proposition within that is digital,” says Adhami. ”Agencies feel that

this is their edge, this is how they can prove themselves. Competition from a business point of view is extremely high and we just need to always be ahead, always prove ourselves better.” Toby Hoare, CEO of JWT Europe, says, “When you do something well, when you have a really smart idea that you’ve sold to the client and deliver, the other piece of advice I would give you is make a big deal about it, talk about it, PR it, boast about it, because it’s only when you do that several times that people actually start to believe that you are any good at it.” Selfish consumers. Gilbreath says, “This is no longer the present or future of marketing: Looking at buying pairs of eyeballs on ad spaces: That world is going away for many reasons. One of the reasons is that we have what we call the selfish consumer. When you have digital media you can get what you what you want, when you want it, in the form that you want it. You can delay the time, you can share with your friends or be anonymous. This is a consumer that is now used to having power. And once you’re given that power, given that freedom, you never want to let it go. And that goes for the things we start seeing and how people consume media.” The consumer is becoming all powerful, and it’s digital media that’s giving them that power. Agencies are adapting at different paces and in different ways to serve that consumer, and to best help their clients in reaching that consumer. And digital is everywhere in that movement. And like television half a century before, it can only get more powerful.

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By invitation only

MEDIANOMICS Business and media science combined Sunday, October 2, 2011 Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai

At a time when businesses aim for the essential and the effective, OMD Predicts unveils the latest data, thinking and practice to make marketing communications more precise and accountable. The speakers we have lined up will share their expertise in removing uncertainty and approximation in the planning process.

The Speakers Economic trends

Philip McCrum Economist Intelligence Unit

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Engagement metrics

Dan Hill Sensory Logic, Inc

The business value of data

Damian Blacken & Ian Woods Annalect Group

For more information: loret.wessels@omnicommediagroup.com

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OCTOBER 2011 | Cover Story

We ask: What is digital? Dimitri Metaxas, regional director of digital, OMG I’ve been in the business for 10 years and I don’t know yet. I think that it’s a family of technologies and channels that are loosely interlinked because they have an Internet connection. For the most part. You can get an outdoor signage which is digital signage but it’s not necessarily digital media until that signage gets networked in some form or another so we can manage it as part of a network. And then, of course, there are certain less pervasive technologies like bluetooth. But for the most part, if you get a platform or a channel that gets connected to the Internet, whether it’s a TV set or a PC or a mobile device, it suddenly becomes digital media. Dana Adhami, digital champion, Mindshare One thing that we’ve achieved over 10 years, in the region is to establish the concept that it is no longer a channel. So clients no longer say “I want to do digital.” Now it’s more, “I want to do a campaign where digital is part of everything.” TV has a digital link, and we find that a lot of print ads have a digital link as well. In our new office [Mindshare recently shifted to new premises in Dubai Media City], it has so many interesting things that have helped us and facilitated our working, compared to the old office, like screens and conference calls and connections, like having wireless everywhere. To me technology is the core of digital. Therefore it is everywhere. Rayan Karaky, regional head of digital, Vivaki It’s a collection of distribution channels that allow information to flow much faster and much

easier, in a quicker way. Everything can be turned digital. You hear today about digital TV, you hear about reading the newspaper on your iPad, so I don’t see it as a medium; it’s more of a facilitator of delivery of information and content. And it allows for a lot of interconnectivity. It brings people closer together. It turns the world into one village. So to me I don’t think of digital as a medium, I think if it more as a platform that connects everything and allows information to flow in whatever direction people want it to go. Avi Bhojani, CEO, BPG To me digital is not just a media. Digital is a state of mind, a way of life. I give you one example: When Cordiant (the holding company of Bates, which earlier owned both Bates and Saatchi) was acquired by WPP in 2003, [WPP boss] Sir Martin Sorrel said, “The good news is that now you report to me directly.” I said, “With all due respect, I’ve heard this before, but you’ve got close to 100 companies. Even if there’s only one person from each company who reports to you, you’ve got 100 people reporting to you; it doesn’t quite work.” He said that was the old thinking. “In today’s context, with a BlackBerry, my commitment is: Within 40 minutes, if I’m awake, and if I’m not in an aircraft, I’ll respond to your mail.” This is digital: You can be anywhere and you could continue your work or your social activity. Dany Naaman, regional general manager, Havas Media Digital is part of every body’s life, as well another communication stream and a multitude of increasingly relevant touch points. It can be meaningful in an era when two thirds of brands are irrelevant in consumers’ eyes.

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OCTOBER 2011 | COVER STORY

Lost in market values Why no one can decide what percentage of ad spend is taken up by digital by Austyn Allison

verything digital can be monitored, can’t it? After all, the entire digital discipline is made up of ones and zeros. It would be tempting to think that after years of arguing over discounts and rate cards and rebates, digital – specifically online – might be one media channel that could easily be monitored and evaluated. But no. Just ask a planner. “I’d be throwing a number up in the air if I were to tell you,” says Vivaki’s head of digital, Rayan Karaky. “I don’t think our region has crossed $150 million; I don’t think it’s even reached there, although in the next year I think we could get there.” Mindshare’s digital champion Dana Adhami guesses that spend is between 1 percent and 10 percent of regional advertising spend. “I’d say it’s 3 percent, if I want to be generous,” she says. Meanwhile, Omnicom Media Group’s regional executive director of media is sticking his neck out with a 9 percent call. Yes, 9 percent. He refutes the estimates of those who put digital spend in the low single digits, saying, “I don’t know what they are talking about. Honestly, we moved beyond that ages ago.” The problem with working out spend is that there is no monitored spend to speak of. Companies such as OOX Monitor track ads, but when

you see a banner, for example, on a site, it can be impossible to say whether the brand behind the banner bought 100,000 impressions, 1 million impressions, a certain number of clicks, or any other measure of digital presence. Metaxas says he reaches his figure thus: OMG tracks its clients’ spend among major publishers, of which there are only a handful of serious players in the region. And OMG estimates the total advertising market as being $2 billion, maximum. Rate card spend is around 11 billion dirhams, and “factoring for freebies, factoring for barter deals, factoring for all those elements” OMG knocks that down to 7 billion dirhams, says Metaxas – around $2 billion. “We are estimating that the total market in digital will hit $170 million by year-end,” says Metaxas. “That would be a growth of 30 percent on the previous year, which would push us up to around 8.5 percent.” OMG rounds it up, but reckon that’s close to the true figure. With growth on that scale, there is little surprise that figures vary. If digital is growing by 30 percent year-on-year, then even OMG’s figures will change by $40 million between January and December. In May of this year, Yahoo’s regional vicepresident and managing director told Communicate

he estimated regional spend on digital to be approximately $100 million. “This is our estimate for the whole region,” he says. “But most of it is coming from the GCC; the vast majority – probably 90 percent – is coming from the UAE and Saudi Arabia.” He says Yahoo is working with other publishers on initiatives to introduce more transparency to digital accounting, and possibly to form an interactive advertising bureau for the Middle East. “What’s interesting is that the overall market is flat, stagnant,” says Metaxas. “We’re in a stagnant industry. However, digital continues to grow at double-digit rates year-on-year. That’s a compounding effect, so we are shooting up to 8 or 9 percent. People don’t recognize that because in their minds they keep thinking it’s always been 2 percent or 3 percent.” Also, due to the nature of digital, advertisers from abroad can easily spend in the market. For example, international airlines can buy space on regional sites. This also raises the value. There can be no doubt that digital spend is growing – both in terms of hard numbers, and also as a percentage of overall media buys. But there’s nobody in the market who doesn’t wish n they knew more.

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OCTOBER 2011 | DIGITAL

Game for anything

When even pirated video games are being modified to better serve a Saudi audience, you know it’s time to take the media seriously by Sidra Tariq

Chadi Saab. Media supervisor at Starcom MediaVest Group

ong ago games used to be only a form of entertainment. Children would huddle around board games like Monopoly and Ludo and spend hours competing with each other. There was no concept of a banner ad popping out of the game or an interactive video trying to attract your attention. But games these days have managed to become a major platform for advertising. Like the rest of the world, the Middle East is making great efforts to put the gaming industry in the fast lane as the number of active users escalates. Advertisers are also at the forefront ,ready to bank on the marketing opportunities gaming platforms have to offer – from banners and pre-rolls to dynamic in-game advertising (ads embedded in a game). Saudi Arabia has some of the most active gamers in the Middle East, making it a major market. Fadi Al Ramahi, chief operating officer of Dubai-based regional gaming company Tahadi Games, which features massively multiplayer online and browser-based games for Arab customers, says, “In Saudi, the gaming market in general has been growing nonstop over the past two years.”

He adds that the kingdom is a very promising market for Tahadi, which currently offers four free-to-play localized online games: Runes of Might, Heroes of Gaia (Abtal Gaia), Ragnarok, and Crazy Kart. “We see around 1 million gamers in Saudi Arabia. It started off, of course, with console gaming, because the market started off as a console gaming market, and then people started going more towards the online gaming market. So if we look at Tahadi, for example, we have around 180,000 to 200,000 registered users from Saudi Arabia.” Around 30 percent of Tahadi’s user base is from Saudi Arabia and the level of feedback and engagement from Saudi gamers is very high, says Al Ramahi. “They provide feedback, they communicate, they help our other players… and it has been just fabulous working for the Saudi market.” MEASURING THE MARKET. While the gaming sector in Saudi Arabia is very active, it is difficult to track how much the market is worth, especially when it comes to console gaming, says Chadi Saab, media supervisor at Starcom

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MediaVest Group in Saudi Arabia. “The Saudi gaming industry is a little bit vague because there are not a lot of numbers,” he says. Officially imported consoles are tracked with serial numbers, but since there can be several months between their release in the US or Japan and their official roll-out here, some distributors buy them abroad on their own by paying a premium. This makes it difficult for the manufacturers to track the number of devices that have been exported to the region. Piracy is another problem haunting the country, and also blurs gaming statistics. Yet marketers realize that the market is a growing one and it provides them with a lot of opportunities to connect with customers. Marketers usually divide gaming into four categories, says Saab: casual games, console games, MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games, sometimes called MMORPGs or massively multiplayer online role-playing games), and advergames. “Casual games are games like solitaire, chess, and card games. Console games are mostly expensive and are usually played by males, especially if they are action and soccer games; they go to PS3, Xbox and computer games. MMOG and MMORPG are [role-playing games] like Mafia Wars on Facebook, Farmville on Facebook, World of Warcraft, and Second Life. These are huge world games; you have millions and millions of players working and interacting online and playing online. Advergames are games launched online or on CDs by a brand. Pringles has done that and M&M’s has done that.” Tahadi’s Al Ramahi says, “Generally speaking, there is no specific dipstick for the gaming market in Mena, and this is really one of the challenges for any company that needs to go into the gaming market. We expect around 60 to 70 percent to be console gamers. But as people see more and learn more about MMORPGS, we see the percentage versus the console gamers is increasing.” Console gaming is huge in Saudi Arabia, says Saab. This includes regular console gaming and online console gaming, which allows gamers to compete with players from around the world. Saab says he knows youngsters who will rent a house for a weekend and play console games there. “They can spend the whole weekend there, just having small naps, waking up and interacting, playing the games, sleeping and waking up again.” “Console games are a huge success, especially as Saudi doesn’t really have a lot of entertainment outlets for youngsters and teenagers,” he says. “You don’t have a party scene, you don’t have so many artists’ places and cinemas, not even proper parks and even the weather doesn’t really help. So what you will find them usually doing is going indoors and playing online console games.” He adds that the average age of console gamers in Saudi is 30 years, but kids start playing at 12 years old.

fast and furious. Girls and boys alike enjoy racing games While the male population is more inclined toward console gaming, women in Saudi Arabia tend to be casual gamers, says Saab. “Females are known to be the number one players of casual games, as those demand a lot of time commitment while you play them,” he says. “They usually play [games like] sudoku, and you can play it on websites.” Many women also play soccer on consoles, as well as games like Guitar Hero and first-person-shooters, he adds. Online gaming is one of the fastest-growing sectors in global interactive entertainment, representing 15 percent of the worldwide video game industry, according to US research firm NPD. With broadband speeds improving around the Middle East, online gaming is also becoming popular in this region. According to research company TNS, 86 percent of the Saudi online population plays online games, while 37 percent plays daily (the global benchmark for daily use is 27 percent).

Pressing the right buttons

LOCALIZATION. Localization of game content is a movement that has been taking place in the Middle East for a while now. Game developers are trying to make the games more regionally relevant by publishing popular games in Arabic and by tailoring content to fit the cultural sensitivities of the region. As far as console gaming is concerned, international games such as Travian – a multiplayer online strategy game developed by German

The most popular games in Saudi Arabia, as shared by SMG’s Chadi Saab. FIFA 2012 Call of Duty Black Ops Need for speed Hot Pursuit Grand Theft Auto Gears of War 3 Halo 2 Pro Evolution Soccer Infamous 2 Assassins Creed Brotherhood

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Entering another world. Multiplayer online strategy games such as Travian are popular in Saudi software company Travian Games – are more popular and played more often than localized games in Saudi Arabia, says Saab. But the story is a little different for casual games. “Casual games have a presence on Yahoo Sports and many of these websites, and usually these are regionally developed.” A different type of localization has also hit the market. And it comes in the form of piracy. People hack games for PlayStation, Xbox and other consoles and computers, and sell them at lower prices. But what’s new about that, you ask? Piracy takes place in every market. However, this is a bit more tailored to local demand. “These guys [pirates] take the number one games, which are usually soccer games and maybe shooting games and they are able to hack into the games or adjust [them] according to the needs of Saudi. For instance [in soccer games], depending on the local teams here, they will actually classify the local teams here and change their professional level – they will make them faster or stronger than other teams.” Games worth 250 riyals or 300 riyals could be sold for as little as 10 riyals or 15 riyals, he says. Some pirates even go to the extent of looking for advertising for the hacked games, and Saab says that he has been approached with an offer. “They will actually tell you, ‘How about you get your local client to advertise in this game which we hacked [and will] sell for 10 riyals, and you [are] going to have [your client’s] banners all over the game, and we are actually going to duplicate around 10,000 of these CDs and sell them.’”

“I was really shocked,” he says, adding that he declined the offer. ADVERTISING. Games provide a great avenue for advertising. The sheer number of gamers in the world and an opportunity to interact with an engaged audience is always appealing to marketers. Al Ramahi says that at the moment brands mostly advertise on gaming websites. MMORPGs are also emerging as an attractive platform, especially with the option of in-game advertising, he says. In-game advertising is now turning out to be a popular marketing tool, particularly in online console games. “We find it very important and it is a very good opportunity for us to be present with game banners on the console service itself as [gamers] connect to the Internet,” says Saab from SMG. “We usually always advertise dynamic in-game advertising in console games and they have a huge success here, especially for our client Saudi Telecom Company (STC). Basically you will be playing the Need for Speed racing game and throughout the race you will find banners [from] STC that offer a new broadband connection.” Al Ramahi adds that Tahadi is also seeing an increased interest in in-game advertising. “We have advertised for a couple of clients before, and the feedback was really good. Generally, gamers don’t like to see many advertisements in the game. So we’d rather sacrifice a little bit on the revenues generated from in-game advertising, though if we do it smartly we can still satisfy everyone: the audience and the advertisers.

Generally speaking, you wouldn’t go into an online game and find it flooded with advertising. That just makes the gaming experience a little bit weaker.” CLIENTS. In-game advertising has been attractive to marketers from different industries, but Al Ramahi largely sees telcos and FMCGs opting for online in-game advertising. Meanwhile, Saab says that at the moment, there aren’t many advertisers in Saudi competing for banners in games. “For the time being, mostly telecommunication companies are really big on that as they have the bigger budget. Basically their budget is not experimental per se, but they have room for awareness campaigns.” “For instance, my STC client is utilizing this media properly and we use it [to communicate things like Internet] speed upgrades from high-speed to super-high – messages that are relevant to people who are savvy when it comes to Internet and require more from their Internet speed and so on,” he adds. Saudi Arabia continues to be a growing gaming market and a useful platform for marketers. “From an advertising point of view, with more game developers in the market, high penetration of smart phones and the new tablet market, I expect to see more brands creating advergames, and having brand presence in games,” says Saab. “As the market is opening more and more on digital advertising and due to increase in highspeed Internet penetration, I expect to see more local and regional brands present in dynamic video in-game advertising.”

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Getting the word out

Marketers can’t afford to ignore bloggers. But how should they interact? Communicate finds out by Sidra Tariq and Austyn Allison

Shamin Kassibawi. Owner of Dubai video blog Shamimscene

TINA Chikhani. Marketing director of HPC and foods at Unilever

hat’s the best way to spread a message on the Web? Many would say post it on Twitter or Facebook. But many others would speak of a social media tool that preceded these social networks: blogs. Marketers around the world are taking that into account and watching out for blogs – particularly those with a large, loyal following – that could be useful communication tools. “Bloggers play an extremely significant role within the overall marketing mix that we as marketers should not underestimate,” says Tina Chikhani, marketing director of the HPC (home and personal category) and foods at Unilever Middle East and North Africa. “Over the last few years specifically, we have seen a major change with global marketing campaigns, shifting from traditional communication channels such as PR, TV and outdoor – to include new communication methods including powerful bloggers and brand ambassadors.” Unilever skincare and beauty brand Pond’s recently held a private event for bloggers in the UAE. “We hosted the region’s most influential bloggers to an exclusive 24-hour brand-discovery journey weekend of pampering at a ‘secret’ destination,” says Chikhani. (That venue isn’t a secret now; it was The Cove Rotana Resort, Ras Al Khaimah.) “Bloggers in the region – and globally – have the power to strongly influence a large segment of your consumers,” she adds. “From negative prod-

uct and event reviews to bad customer service in a restaurant – bloggers certainly play a strong role in word-of-mouth within the local and digital community.” We’ve seen that in the much-talked-about case of Benihana, where the Kuwait franchisee of the Japanese cuisine restaurant sued a popular blogger for writing an unfavorable review. The incident brought a lot of support for blogger Mark Makhoul, bad publicity for the restaurant (see “Managing great expectations,” page 46, Communicate, Sep. 2011). Brands around the world do encourage bloggers to cover events and review their products, but there is a level of risk involved. “Obviously, the blogger’s opinion is a personal one and therefore, as a brand, you can experience potential negative reviews based on the blogger’s personal views of your product, brand or event,” says Chikhani. Muna Al Gurg, director of retail at Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group, which represents United Colors of Benetton, along with other brands in the region, says this is why “there has to be a very strong communication between the retailer and the blogger, because you don’t want your brand misrepresented in any way.” McCollins Media is a marketing company that has worked with bloggers for clients including LG, Samsung and Imation. “We make the client aware before we get started that you’re going on social

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media, going on the digital platform,” says Meghna Kothari, the company’s director. “It’s real-time feedback; you cannot control anyone to answer to you in a particular manner, and you should be open to this.” Besides, too much of a good thing can be bad, she says. “If you’re on Twitter and you keep on hearing praises and praises about a particular product, you’ll think this person has just been stuffed with money to say good stuff about the product. These bloggers don’t want to ruin their reputations; they want to give the good and bad sides of a product rather than just praising it.” Chikhani agrees. “Just like a journalistic opinion, bloggers share third-party, unbiased opinion, which is very powerful and credible within the consumer’s mind and, potentially, their overall purchasing decision.” LINKING UP. Keeping this in mind, a number of brands in the region are taking steps to engage bloggers. At the Pond’s event, bloggers got to engage with the brand, experience products, discuss their skincare regimes and beauty trends, get facials and massages, and so on. “The event – along with various activities taking place – is the first outreach aimed at closely engaging and building long-term personal relationships with our region’s top bloggers,” adds Chikhani. “We have seen extremely positive results in terms of a series of reviews from the event and our latest product line, Pond’s Gold Radiance,” she says. Chikhani adds that Pond’s Arabia has “incorporated dedicated ‘blogger’ campaigns within our overall marketing plan – not just in the UAE but across other key markets for Pond’s including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain where bloggers are also making a strong footprint.” Benetton also launched an on-going initiative called “United Bloggers of Benetton” at the start of the summer, within which bloggers have been assigned to style Benetton’s store windows, says Al Gurg. This way the bloggers receive publicity from the window, and the brand experiences a new look every week, plus the coverage bloggers give. “Different bloggers are working on different things,” adds Al Gurg. “Some of them are blogging, some of them are taking videos… and some of them continue to go into our stores and take products and put it into their ‘Look of the day.’” McCollins recently ran an event for UAE-based tech bloggers to promote its client Samsung’s new 3D television. Around 25 of the country’s 40 or so tech bloggers were invited to a laid-back and distinctly un-press-conference-ish demo. Samsung reps demoed the television as their audience lounged on beanbags, then took questions (more technical than they get from journalists, says Kothari). The bloggers were given a hash tag and encouraged to Tweet about the event, and were promised the chance to review the television over the next months. As well as goodies handed out at the meet-up, the blogger who demonstrated the most coverage and influence would be given a television. Following the event, Samsung arranged to film the bloggers using its product; the footage racked up more than 40,000 YouTube views.

Talk of the town. Good marketing can generate great word-of-mouth among bloggers RESULTS. Results of such activities are not that easy to measure, but social media can help paint a picture. “On our Twitter [and Facebook] pages, we’ve increased the number of people who are following us, because of the fact that [the bloggers] are talking about us,” says Al Gurg. What’s more interesting, she says, is that the new followers are actually part of Benetton’s target market. Yet social media alone cannot determine the success of a project. “There is definitely more footfall [in our stores], but it still needs time,” says Al Gurg. “[In] a project like this you need to reflect and analyze the results… because the hype is slowly happening. I would guess that I would see results in a couple of months. In terms of sales, I can’t tell.” Al Gurg says Benetton has a line of events planned for bloggers for the rest of the year, such as competitions, giveaways and “Look of the day” projects. The brand is interested in building a longterm relationship with bloggers, she adds. Benetton is considering taking bloggers to Milan Fashion Week next year. Kothari says marketers need to know which bloggers to talk to, just as they should know which media outlets they want to get their messages to. “As an agency we know who the bloggers are, because through our Twitter account and our digital presence we have done this homework to help us understand who the consumer electronic bloggers are, what their likes are, and what their dislikes are. And we got in touch with them and maintain a database with them. Then we sent a bloggers’ meet invite to them telling them to come over.” It’s also important to watch for new bloggers, she says. “[The blogging community] is extremely close-knit, virtually, and many of them hang out to-

meghna kothari. Director, McCollins Media

Muna Al Gurg. Director of retail at Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group

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gether, but it’s not like a herd of 25 people together; it would be about three, four of them. These are the people who like technology; they like to talk about this within themselves as well.” “There are certain ones who are very established and you really need them,” she adds. “And there are certain oneswho are coming up, who are doing good for themselves, and they are open enough to get in touch with you and say, ‘So what do you have now? Is there anything different?’ There are some who want to create a community on a website or a blog, and they want to position the blog and are building the blog as of now, so they want to ensure that they have really good products to review.” How would she choose whether to invite a budding blogger? “I would check your online reputation. I would check your Twitter account: How many people do you have? What do you normally talk about? Are they responding to you? What are your stats on Facebook? What’s your cloud ranking? How influential are you? Are you on LinkedIn? Have you been spoken about among other bloggers? Those kind of things.” WORKING TOGETHER. Bloggers have been noticing and appreciating the engagement. “A lot of brands are getting in touch, working with us and sending us news and collaborating with us in different ways,” says Shamim Kassibawi, the Dubai-based owner of regional video blog (vlog) Shamimscene.com, which she recently created to show the local and international community a glimpse of local social events, new brands and products, key personalities in the community, and other stuff that interests her. “[Brands] are seeing the importance of bloggers, actually giving them more attention and are planning around it,” she adds. “They are including [bloggers] in their overall budgets and marketing strategies and what not.” “From a blogger’s perspective, it’s really encouraging to do a better job, and to put in the effort

and come up with ideas,” says the blogger, who quit a PR job to pursue concentrate on Shamimscene. But while some brands in the region are making the effort to connect, the path is not exactly rosy for bloggers, says Kassibawi. “At the end of the day, we don’t get paid and therefore we need to be looked after; in the sense that the right material is given to us. We can’t make it to the other side of town because we have to pay a certain amount of money at times, and so on.” Moreover, bloggers are experiencing something journalists have been complaining about for years: brands contacting them with irrelevant information. Just as Communicate is unlikely to care about the launch of a new lipstick, a fashion blogger wouldn’t want to write about the launch of a new ad campaign for a car company. And sometimes it’s not about a press release. “It’s a matter of someone coming up with a creative idea,” says Kassibawi. “A lot of PR agencies do, but some of these don’t. They treat you like an editor and they send you a press release, which [is] a boring way of doing things.” Even if bloggers get frustrated, Kothari says, they tend to be good natured, though. “There are none that I would not be inviting back,” she says. “They have been a very open bunch; there’s no drastic problem that I have faced with them that I would not want to invite them back, and it’s a growing community so definitely we have to have them on board.” Not that marketers have much of a choice, though, she adds. “You cannot pick and choose. They are indispensible in a way that, you know, they talk among each other, saying, ‘I just went to this bloggers’ meet,’ and you’re kind of in an awkward situation if you don’t invite the other person.” Brands and bloggers in the region need time to get used to working together as this relationship isn’t yet prevalent here. But it is growing, and once both sides get an understanding of each other’s requirements and limitations, we are likely to see blogs gaining prominence in marketing plans.

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OCTOBER 2011 | Cover Story

Pièce de résistance

Marketers’ agency shifts are a sure sign media has become a crucial piece of the puzzle by Alexandra Bruell

here’s been a flurry of media reviews this summer, but unlike the spate during recession-plagued 2009, this action has been less about driving down ad rates and agency fees, and more about rethinking agency models and boosting efficiency through digital media. “It’s not about saving money,” says Joanne Davis, president of Joanne Davis Consulting. It’s about a dramatically different media landscape and marketers trying to figure out who should be handling their budgets. The dilemma of the moment: “Should digital sit with the media [agency] and [should] all money sit together or should digital media sit with a digital agency?” Susan Thronson, senior vice-president of global marketing at Marriott International, which is currently reviewing and looking to consolidate its media agencies globally, says 50 percent of the company’s marketing budget is being spent on digital. Of that, 80 percent is focused on the US, but she says that international digital spending will grow more quickly than US spending. As a result, the company is in talks with large global network shops, as well as digital shops such as AKQA, iCrossing, and Digitas.

“Not unlike many others, we see an opportunity to have a very strong strategic media relationship on a global basis,” she says. ExxonMobil is another marketer that’s changing its agency-review approach. For the first time, it’s holding parallel creative and media reviews in which the creative and media winners don’t need to be within the same holding company. It’s an approach that’s likely to be less about creating cost efficiencies and more about finding the right mix and thinking. It also speaks of the rising influence of the media agency, independent of creative, in the digital era. “That shift, in terms of how we’re thinking about and moving from transactional toward relationship and engagement marketing, is at the essence of everything we’re doing,” says Lisa Colantuono, managing partner at search consultancy AAR Partners. Clients aren’t coming to the agency with a mandate to spend a certain amount on digital, says Horizon CEO Bill Koenigsberg. They’re looking for strategic guidance. He adds, “It’s a combination of: How do we navigate the new landscape, optimize spend and leverage assets in a fragmented marketplace?”

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Why Omnicom opts out

Number two holding company has been quiet on the interactive front. Is it failing to evolve or does it know something the others don’t? by Kunur Patel

ll roads lead to digital, but when it comes to the Big Four agency holding companies, one of them – Omnicom Group – is taking the road less traveled. French holding company Publicis Groupe has spent billions swallowing up massive digital agencies Digitas, Razorfish and most recently Rosetta; WPP has been rolling up a series of smaller acquisitions to create Possible Worldwide, its first global digital-only network; and Interpublic Group of Cos. has been working to export older acquisitions R/GA and Huge around the world. But US-based Omnicom, the No. 2 holding company, with $12.5 billion in global revenue, has been quiet when it comes to its digital strategy. Its philosophy has been to inject digital competence into its core agency brands, DDB, BBDO and TBWA, and grow capabilities within its highly profitable Diversified Agency Services (DAS) division, which handles below-the-line work. But by integrating – or, as detractors might say, burying – digital capabilities within its larger, more well-known brands, is it building the agency of the future, one in which digital isn’t a silo, but inherent in everything? Or is it devaluing the

complexity of the technology needed to market in 2015 and beyond? “I love the promise of [the integrated agency]. I love the idea in theory,” says Shiv Singh, global director of digital for PepsiCo beverages and former Razorfish exec. But, he adds, “I don’t think anyone is truly there in reality.” During the firm’s second-quarter-earnings call, one analyst pressed Omnicom CEO John Wren about his revenue from digital and what to make of competitors’ acquisitions. His response spoke volumes: “Our belief is all of our services are digital and will become digital … and it’s my belief that two years from now you won’t even use that word to make a distinction.” INSIDE OUT. Wren doesn’t trumpet how the firm is adding digital services to its mix like his competitors, because he says Omnicom shops are doing digital from the inside out. (Incidentally, the word “digital” was used 11 times in Omnicom’s earnings transcript vs. 44 for WPP and 36 for Publicis.) Whether Omnicom’s approach will beat taking on or combining digital agencies is to be deter-

mined. But one thing’s clear: As an ad holding company, there’s good reason for wanting to make sure clients are well aware of your digital capabilities, since they’re pouring more and more of their marketing budgets into digital spending. The pool of digital ad dollars is soon expected to rival current levels of TV spending, according to Forrester Research. US interactive marketing spending will reach $76.6 billion by 2016, equal to TV spending this year, and will grab 35 percent of total ad budgets. That’s up from digital accounting for 19 percent of all spending in 2011. “WPP and Publicis, in making big digital acquisitions, have been very splashy,” says Daniel Salmon, equity research analyst at BMO Capital Markets. “There are questions from investors about Omnicom’s digital strategy and whether or not they’ve been aggressive enough.” WPP and Publicis say digital accounted for 29 percent and 28 percent, respectively, of 2010 worldwide revenue. Omnicom doesn’t report this number. Omnicom says it plans to make the entire company more digital through training programs, centralized digital-media capabilities and technology partnerships. It’s not about creating digital

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DIFFERENT TACK. That’s a very different tack from, say, Publicis which has spent at least $2.4 billion in the past five years to buy Digitas, Razorfish and Rosetta. Meanwhile, Omnicom is investing to digitize its legacy agency networks DDB, BBDO and TBWA, plus its media agencies. “They’re all asking the same questions, and Omnicom is making its bet: It doesn’t want to be a technology company,” says Chris Stutzman, a principal analyst for Forrester. “Publicis has made bets and is becoming a communicationstechnology company.” A low-key approach to digital hasn’t hurt Omnicom on the new-business front – something its executives point to as early validation of the strategy. Omnicom is the leader among the Big Four holding companies by year-to-date net gross reported billings, with nearly $2 billion in new business, according to a JP Morgan analysis. In media, Omnicom’s strategy looks a lot like Publicis Groupe, which funnels digitalmedia buying and tools through a unit called Vivaki. Omnicom last October formed Annalect Group to centralize digital-media targeting, tools and buying power, and moved PHD’s US CEO Scott Hagedorn to lead it. Today, Annalect handles about 95 percent of all Omnicom digital-media business. Thanks to the even-keeled management of Wren – whom insiders say is more hands-on in the business than ever – and chief financial officer Randall Weisenburger, Wall Street remains happy with Omnicom’s stability compared to some of its peers. “With WPP, Sir Martin [Sorrell is] a visionary, no doubt, but you might wake up one day and he’s made a $1 billion acquisition,” BMO’s Salmon says. Early this year WPP, the biggest ad holding company by revenue, built Possible Worldwide, its first global digital-only ad network to compete with the likes of Digitas and Razorfish, which brought in $486 million and $406 million in global revenue last year, respectively. Possible is still comparatively small, with $100 million in global revenue, but it’s been acquisitive. DISPOSITION FOR ACQUISITIONS. Omnicom, too, has in recent times made a few acquisitions, among them, online consumer research firm Communispace and social-media-marketing agency Fanscape. In the quarter those deals were announced, Omnicom paid out $211 million for acquisitions, according to SEC filings. However, it’s weaker in behemoth, digitalonly agency brands. While Omnicom has some,

behemoths on an island, but moving the entire $12 billion company into the future, its senior management says. That task is shouldered by Jonathan Nelson, Omnicom Digital CEO. “We are a services company,” says Nelson. “Our job is to add value on top of the data and the platforms.”

Sorrell to bother you. Sir Martin’s WPP recently built digital network Possible Worldwide they’re smaller. Of the top-10 digital agencies by US revenue, Omnicom has one, grown out of direct-response roots: Rapp stands No. 9 with $196 million in 2010, according to Ad Age DataCenter. Revenue for Omnicom’s next largest digital agency, No. 17 Organic, was down by 4.8 percent in 2010, a year when most of its peers saw doubledigit growth. (2011 has proved to be Organic’s best new-business year yet, Nelson says.) Other standalone digital shops under the Omnicom banner include Chicago-based Critical Mass, Tribal DDB and Proximity Worldwide. Again illustrating Omnicom’s tendency toward integrating digital, the latter two shops are aligned with two of its legacy agency networks, DDB and BBDO. Tribal CEO Paul Gunning, for one, is also chief digital officer for DDB. “At Tribal, everyone carries two business cards,” says one former employee. TBWA was earlier aligned with Agency.com, which Omnicom acquired in 2003. A few years ago the agency was a premiere interactive brand and the fourth-largest of its kind in the United States. Fast forward and Agency.com integration has been messy. It rebooted as Signal to Noise last July and was open just over a year before folding completely, shuttling its two remaining accounts to Tribal and Organic. Sean Corcoran, senior analyst for Forrester Research, says, “It’s still very important to have strong digital agency brands and it’s because of two reasons: the ever-changing digital landscape that requires a constant churn of new specialty

skills, and the slow adaptation of marketing departments and how they’re organized for the past rather than the future.” FLYPAPER FOR TALENT. Hot digital brands are very often the flypaper that traps the best talent. It remains to be seen if the brightest minds in digital want to work for a company that’s historically been known for more traditional work. “In digital, it’s all about the talent, and the talent moves around,” says PepsiCo Beverages’ Singh. When it comes to PepsiCo, for example, Omnicom shops handle most above-the-line work for beverage brands, but digital agencies include lots of shops outside of the family, such as Interpublic’s Huge, Engine USA’s Deep Focus and indie AMG. Tribal DDB does handle digital work for two brands, Mtn Dew and Amp, and Singh also says he has an eye on Organic. “We have a very strong, healthy relationship with Omnicom and Pepsi with [TBWA] Chiat,” Singh says. “They help us with some things digitally, but with big initiatives and deep digital we find agencies that are digital natives typically deliver the most value.” In the end, it’s the marketers who get to decide which approach is right, be it buying all of the digital shops your bank account allows, or slow-and-steady digital integration. BMO’s Salmon says, “They’ll all digitize one way or the other, if not, their clients will flee. That’s how agencies die.”

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Tags very much

Facebook’s new location features look less like foursquare, more like, well, Facebook by Irina Slutsky

verybody, calm down: Facebook is not getting rid of its location-based product, as has been reported elsewhere recently. Rather, one year in, it is making some major changes to it. The new location-based features look less like a Foursquare wannabe and more like an allinclusive product that better reflects the way people actually use Facebook. The changes were laid out in a Facebook blog post explaining a bevy of new features on privacy and sharing. Previously, the only time a Facebook user could mark a location was via the Facebook mobile app, the idea being they would mark their current whereabouts. Now, rather than tethering location to mobile devices and limiting check-ins to an app, the new product – which is no longer called “Places” but has no new name – allows users to tag locations in any post from whether on a phone or a tablet or a computer. Interestingly, as Facebook aims to be more like itself and less like Foursquare – a service that has been strictly about where you are right now – Foursquare could be seen as trying to be more like Facebook, where anything mentioned on the site is up for tagging. Facebook executives tell Ad Age that after evaluating Places for the past year (the product launched last August), they learned that users

viewed locations as just another part of their everyday lives, one that they are more than happy to share on their walls. “People tell their friends what they are doing, who they are with, and where they are,” a Facebook exec says in an e-mail, explaining that location can be tagged in the same way users are tagging friends in posts. “Now a place becomes another descriptor to add to any post. It can be a place where you are, have been, want to go or just want to talk about.” The Places logo will now be called Nearby on the mobile app. It’s no wonder Facebook wanted to tweak its location offerings – that Places lagged behind more popular location-based companies such as Foursquare was no secret. In June, Ad Age learned that Places’ most popular check-ins were airports and, ironically, Facebook HQ. The new location product hopes to change that. Check-ins are essential to Facebook because they create an opportunity for advertisers and marketers to know where users are going and to offer savings, deals and coupons based on those check-ins. When Facebook Deals launched in November as an extension of the Places product, 22 retailers – including Starbucks, McDonald’s and Gap – partnered with the social network to offer deals based on check-ins. Foursquare, despite having a much smaller user base than Facebook,

continues to partner with major restaurant chains, retailers and even American Express. Foursquare has fared well since Places launched, reporting more than 10 million global users with more than 3 million check-ins per day this spring. Executives say check-in deals will continue to be offered to users, but can now be based on a more expansive variety of Facebook activity. If McDonald’s sees that a user has tagged it in a post (“I’m heading to McDonald’s for lunch”), it can offer coupons before the user gets there. This is where Facebook’s potential dominance becomes obvious – the ability to mine real-time conversations of more than 750 million users is not really available on any other platform. (For a while, Facebook has been testing ads based on real-time posts.) While they declined to say how many users are checking into these locations – allowing for an assumption that the numbers are low – Facebook execs said the top five dining locations measured by check-ins on Facebook are Starbucks, Buffalo Wild Wings, Chili’s, Applebee’s and McDonald’s – all brands that have millions of dollars at their disposal to spend on advertising on Facebook. Business owners can still claim their business on Facebook and become part of the location ecosystem, one that Facebook hopes will continue to evolve.

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From the same people who brought you

©Getty/Gallo Images

OCTOBER 2011 | DIGITAL

New chapter for scrapbooking

Booming last decade, industry nears a bust, but two tech-based approaches may bring it back from brink by Jack Neff

an scrapbooking, a paper-bound Middle American pastime with deep roots that enjoyed a boom last decade, survive the onslaught of digital and social media? Two very different bets are being played that it can – one by an intriguing startup with heavyweight help, and the other by the scrapbooking industry’s biggest brand. Darcy Crociata, a Cincinnati woman who describes herself as a once-avid scrapbooker turned avid Facebooker, has the postmodern solution. She’s preparing to launch LifeBlinx, a patent-pending Facebook app that streamlines uploaded photos and wall posts into ready-made scrapbooks at $19.99 for a soft-cover book, and $29.99 for hardcover. The world has a lot of bootstrap entrepreneurs with big dreams of Facebook apps, but Crociata has better backing than many. Her advisory board includes her husband – a Procter & Gamble Co. marketing director – as well as Lucas Watson, P&G’s former global digital leader and now vice-president of YouTube sales and marketing

at Google, along with J.B. Kropp, who works in strategic partnerships at Twitter. Then there’s Provo Craft, marketer of Cricut machines for printing and cutting pages and embellishments for scrapbooks, and what appears to be the dominant brand in a $1.5 billion scrapbooking-supplies industry. Provo Craft launched only five years ago, near what some see as the peak of the scrapbooking boom, but Cricut is betting it can sustain steady growth in part by giving away cloud scrapbooking software and stepping up digital and social-media advertising via Mullen’s Frank About Women unit in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, named earlier this year following a review. One anecdotal sign Cricut can still thrive: When it took a new logo last year, one of its 20-something fans had the trademark tattooed on her wrist and posted a photo to prove it on the brand’s fan page, along with her intention to get a similar treatment on her other wrist.

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WORST NIGHTMARE. Crociata was never quite that avid, and in some ways she’s the scrapbooking industry’s worst nightmare. After the former school teacher, pharmaceutical-sales rep and focus-group moderator gave birth to twins nearly six years ago, she ran out of time and saw the photos and other stuff she used to put in scrapbooks pile up in tubs around the house. Now with three kids, she still takes a lot of digital photos, but uploads them to Facebook. However, Crociata found the urge to organize digital photos into keepsakes didn’t go away, even if she found no easy way to do it, including digital scrapbooking software she found tedious. Ultimately, she landed on the idea of developing a Facebook app that pulls photos and related wall comments into custom-printed scrapbooks. Next month she’s planning a public launch for the LifeBlinx app that in recent months has been in beta test with friends and family as she irons out kinks. “I never really thought about Facebook as my scrapbook until one day it just hit me that all this information is already here; why can’t we just pull it and put it into a scrapbook?” Crociata says. During a trip to Disney World two years ago, she came up with the idea of an app to do just that, and by last year got seed funding and advice for the idea through CincyTech, a public-private partnership that supports local entrepreneurs, and the marketing incubator it supports, The Brandery. Once she started down the path of developing an app that would pull photos and comments together into a coherent story, she says, “I started Facebooking differently.” MORE FACEBOOK TIME. That meant uploading more photos and annotating them with comments more often. The potential payoff here for Facebook, of course, is that if LifeBlinx catches on with millions of scrapbookers, they too will spend even more time on the network with a mind toward creating books. “With everybody taking so many photos on their digital cameras and automatically uploading them to Facebook and other social-media sites, it presents a huge opportunity to create this digital book on the fly,” says Kropp, who’s also co-founder of the Brandery, and has been on LifeBlinx’s advisory board for a year. Although sales data isn’t easily found on scrapbooking, a few signs point to a boom early last decade turning to bust. Michaels, which opened 11 Recollections Scrapbooking stores in 2003, closed them all in 2007. A study by Scrapbooking.com, an online magazine serving the industry, found industry sales peaked at under $2.6 billion in 2004 and 2005 and then began declining slowly to $1.7 billion by 2009. Google Insights for Search shows a similar decline in interest. Search intensity for “scrapbooking” in the US peaked in 2005, waning some in 2006 and then falling at an accelerated rate. In June scrapbooking indexed at less than

Cut and paste. Apps such as Life-Blinx can turn your Facebook photos into a physical book a third of its level relative to overall search six years ago. The graph is practically a reverse image, if not quite so hyperbolic, as the growth in search intensity for “Facebook” over that period. PLAYING CRICUT. Fortunately for Provo Craft, the two fastest-rising terms in scrapbooking search are Cricut and its phonetic alternative “cricket,” suggesting some pretty strong word-of-mouth. Regardless of what’s going on with overall industry sales, Cricut retail sales last year grew “double to strong single digits” to more than $400 million, says Provo Craft chief marketing officer Matt Wilburn, a former Yahoo executive. And he says the 2010 Craft and Hobby Association survey found 30 million households have someone who participates in some form of paper craft, although Scrapbooking.com estimates only 4.4 million people in the US like to scrapbook (though they’re spending about $300 per capita on it annually). The rise of digital photography has resulted in more images, increasing the need for some way of organizing and preserving them, Wilburn says. The cluttered hard drive or cloud photo app is today’s version of boxes of Kodak prints sitting in the closet, and in one effort to get all of those images off the hard drive and into books, Provo Craft is in beta test of Cricut Craftroom, a free cloud design software program.

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For whom the bell trolls Negativity and nastiness haunt industry Web comments, but best remedy may be to ignore them by Rupal Parekh

cGarryBowen was named Burger King’s new lead creative agency in June, on the heels of winning a closely-watched pitch for Sears and following two years of explosive growth fueled by expanding relationships with clients from Kraft to Pfizer. The agency’s track record has racked up plaudits from clients – “They’re on a roll,” Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg told Ad Age earlier this year – but when it comes to peers, there’s more vitriolic commentary than high-fiving. On the Mediabistro-owned ad blog AgencySpy, the news last month that McGarryBowen replaced CP&B on Burger King was met with scorn. The shop, and in some cases its execs, were assailed with juvenile name calling – a “consortium of hacks” who get “dumb clients to buy their bullshit.” Those who came to the agency’s defense were chastised. Toward the end of a string of 77 comments – all anonymous except one – was this, the one truly astute observation: “We have officially entered the Dark Ages of Advertising.” There is a collective feeling in adland that the business is simply not as fun as it used to be, and not just because of deflated expense accounts and increased pressure, but because a post-recession black cloud of negativity has descended over Madison Avenue.

While the agency community has never been a Kumbaya sort of place (Mad Men does a fine job of illustrating this), executives around the industry think the atmosphere is growing noticeably uglier. In many cases, they blame technology. Online media is enabling hate to surface faster and travel farther. Widespread Internet-bullying is a growing concern for the heads of agencies, who fear their talent will either join in the bashing or, worse, that their creative juices will evaporate as their work is tried in the courtroom of nameless Web critics. After all, advertising is an art, and artists tend to take their work personally. “The Internet has allowed sensationalism to permeate advertising,” says Tom Carroll, the CEO of TBWA/Chiat/Day. “The world has become far more competitive and headline-driven, and our business is no different.” MOANING THROUGH A MEGAPHONE. “Going to the bar and bitching and moaning has always gone on in the industry,” says Firstborn CEO Michael Ferdman. But the megaphone of the Web makes it feel harsher, he says. “You win a piece of business, you get attacked. You hire someone, you get attacked. And it’s human nature to feel hurt.

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Nobody wants to read bad things about themselves, their company or the work they’ve done.” Of course, the phenomenon is hardly confined to advertising. Peruse the comments on financial blog Dealbreaker, and the types of insults and name-calling make ad blogs look like child’s play. Even the Pope has addressed negativity breeding on the Web. Six months ago he urged followers to be responsible and positive users of social media, and use the Internet not for spreading hate, but for building relationships. Adland doesn’t quite have the same problems as the Vatican, though. With a recession that slashed thousands of ad jobs, and a revolving door spinning faster as new hires have less time to prove their mettle, it’s not easy being an adperson. McGarryBowen’s chief John McGarry didn’t read the post on AgencySpy last month. “I don’t read the blogs; I don’t care about the comments,” he says. “People who are spewing out negativity are mad, unhappy or jealous and I’m none of the above.” He doesn’t appreciate the dig at his clients, though. “You cannot look at our lineup and say that our clients are dumb. You’re going to tell me that [JP MorganChase CEO] Jamie Dimon is dumb? You’re going to tell me that [Verizon CEO] Ivan Seidenberg and [Verizon chief operating officer] John Stratton are dumb? [Disney CEO] Bob Iger is dumb? I find them demanding, realistic and obsessive about their companies and brands, and all they simply want to do is win.” CLIENT-SIDE CRITICISM. In addition to longstanding industry publications, there’s a growing list of blogs and other outlets devoted to the ad business today, and it’s not only agency folk reading them. Clients are reading posts, and the comments too. Trudy Hardy, manager of BMW marketing communications and consumer events at BMW of North America – which happens to be in the throes of a closely-watched agency review – tells Ad Age she makes a point of scrolling through comments sections on stories about the ad business. How long she stays there varies. “If there is worthwhile commentary about the piece or topic [I stay engaged] but if there is idle chatter on the page, then it is less appealing,” she says. Most agencies simply cross their fingers and hope that clients aren’t reading negative comments; perhaps what they should do instead is open a dialogue with marketers about what’s being said on the Web. Rob Reilly, worldwide chief creative officer at CP&B, says, “[Agencies] train clients to say if the work is being talked about in social media then it’s important. We use it to say, ‘Look at all the positive comments.’ But then we don’t want the negative. I think it would help, if clients are reading it, to say, ‘Look at the context of where it’s coming from.’” He continues, “I would love to think it could be [a more positive industry] but it doesn’t help that it’s a competitive business. I would hope we would celebrate when Wieden does work for P&G

Bad type. Some shops have banned their employees from joining the conversation online that is so amazing; it is awesome for everybody because it shows what a brave and visionary client P&G is, but it also shows what a tenacious and smart agency Wieden is.” CP&B has banned agency staff from engaging in dialogue on sites – whether it’s positive or negative. “We tell everyone not to comment on another agency’s work,” Reilly says. “I don’t want anyone from our agency to contribute to hurting other agencies. We have enough to worry about on our end that we don’t need to worry about other people’s work.” OUT-OF-CONTROL. Goodby Silverstein & Partners’ co-chairman Jeff Goodby thinks that sort of policy wouldn’t take hold at his shop. “I can’t control them,” he says of his staffers. “They have to have some judgment on their own. It’s not a police state and I wouldn’t want it that way.” Goodby – who is friends with foul-mouthed ad blogger George Parker – admits that whenever he reads a story on an industry website or blog, he reads the comments too. But he also admits it’s usually a waste of time. “It’s rude and rarely constructive,” he says. Nancy Hill, head of the trade group 4As – who has publically expressed frustration with “the incessantly negative adverbloggers” but also invited Parker to speak at a conference last year – says agencies are constantly complaining to her about mean comments. “You can’t make it go away,” says Hill. “Everybody complains about it, but everybody realizes that there’s nothing you can do about it in this day and age.”

Or do they? True story: I had a conversation (OK, argument) in Cannes, during which a chief creative officer of a prominent agency requested that Ad Age shut off its comments system. Yes, ditch the comments. I explained that in 2011 it seemed unthinkable to not engage our readers, that our site requires names and affiliation, and we reserve the right to remove personal attacks, as we did when a whip-smart female agency executive was attacked not long ago for an alleged penchant for “mom jeans.” Perhaps instead it’s time agencies talked to their staff about growing thicker skin. “I think a lot of people in advertising read this stuff and take it very personally, and you just can’t,” says Goodby. His biggest fear is that if people do let it get under their skin “the overall effect of it will be to make people not take chances in their work, make people not be brave to do things, and if it does have that effect, it would be sad.” Some agency leaders have other suggestions. TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Carroll says, “The only way to deal with it is to ignore it.” Ferdman would like to see a hazing of sorts. “Anonymity is the problem, and I think that anonymous comments should be pushed into a separate feed that says ‘these are the cowards.’ We should put them in their own detention of sorts, like in school, and they can all fight with each other and we can ignore it.” He continues, “The people who are willing to really contribute and put down their names – and if they are going to say their opinion and stand behind it – we should read it and it could be valuable.”

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What’s in an agency name?

From Zaaz to Odopod to Elephant, we get the back story on unusual monikers

ou’ve seen how some international agencies came up with their names. Communicate and Advertising Age talk to a few agencies in the region and around the world to find out the logic behind their unusual names. Some were THE LOCAL SHOPS ExtraCake PRA “We got lucky with our name,” says Ben Caddy, managing director of advertising and events agency ExtraCake PRA. “It represents us almost perfectly, as we approach the work with a smile and a bit of cheekiness. The name has meaning within marketing and communications because who doesn’t want more cake? But the reality is that the name has far greater sentimental value. It was the name of one of the founders’ family bakery in Beirut that was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times during the war. We still get the odd CV from chefs but no one ever forgets us and most people crack a smile when they first hear ‘ExtraCake.’” PAZ Marketing Management Zeina Akkawi, managing director of PAZ Marketing Management, says it was she and her brother Joe, interactive director, who came up with the agency name. “When we started the agency, we had two clear goals in mind: providing consistent and directed work to our clients while maintaining sanity and peace of mind for both of us,” she says. “We came to the conclusion that the Spanish word ‘paz’ reflects both those values as the word means ‘peace’ and while pronounced sounds like ‘path’ which also communicates a direction to goals. This also inspired our logo of a man walking and holding the peace sign up. We love it and believe it reflects our style of work.”

looking for something catchy, others wanted to reflect agency values, and a few even had memories attached. And then there were those who preferred to maintain the ambiguity around their name. Custard Communications “The three partners of Custard Communications sat together and brainstormed agency names over a number of days before whittling the names down to a shortlist of around 20,” says Ian Hainey, director of events PR and marketing agency Custard Communications. “Many of these titles included acronyms and other clever ways of trying to get across what we collectively stood for. However, in the end, we unanimously moved towards having a name that was fun and memorable for a PR and events agency, which could incorporate a colorful logo. We eventually settled on Custard and it’s incredible the number of clients that contact us just because they like the name or the logo. It seems there’s a lot of people out there who like Custard.” Rufus Leonard “When Neil Svensen and Darrel Worthington started Rufus Leonard in 1989 they didn’t want the agency to be just about them but more about the environment,” says Liza Medd, regional manager of Rufus Leonard Middle East. “So instead of naming the agency something along the lines of Svensen Worthington, they went for Rufus Leonard, the Old English term for ‘Red Lion,’ their local pub. The irony is that we quite often receive calls asking for ‘Mr Rufus’ and ‘Mr Leonard.’” The Tribe “Strip away the computers and the offices and any agency

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is simply a mutually supportive group of people; a tribe,” says Robert Mitchell, founder of the creative shop. “There has been lots of stuff about tribes of consumers and tribal marketing, etcetera. But it was actually our lawyer who came up with the idea of The Tribe as our name. We loved its suggestion of our Middle Eastern provenance, multidisciplinary expertise, and [that] when we started there were more than four of us.” Republique “In a creative context, the name Republique may come off as a little strange, but when it came to naming the agency it was actually a pretty straight line of thought that led us to the name,” says Fadi Mroue, managing director of Beirut-based Republique. “We wanted the agency to be a democratic collection of ideas – everyone gets a say in the final product, no matter what your position in the company. So we were looking for something that represented that philosophy of independent thinking, as well as something that reflected our declared independence from the rest of the advertising world. Why did we use it in French? It just sounds cooler.” Flip media “Our cofounder Dinesh Lalvani came up with the name 10 years ago,” says Yousef Tuqan Tuqan, CEO of Flip Media. “The name ‘Flip’ fitted well with the concept of creating a new agency that delivered innovative online products and services, but that initiative was parked during the ‘dot bomb’ era of 2001. When Martin [Diessner] and Dinesh started our agency in 2004, they didn’t have a huge start-up budget, so it was crucial that our brand would be instantly recognizable with a strong symbol. The name ‘Flip’ seemed a perfect fit, and once the Flip character was flipped onto the typeface, it was the start of something very special.” Sticky Ginger “As an agency, we’re creative, strategic and fabulous – so we needed a name that reflected that,” says Kiera Purdue, director of PR agency Sticky Ginger. “We wanted to choose something that hinted at what Sticky Ginger meant and stood for, and also one that would resonate with people, that they wouldn’t forget easily. We’ve definitely achieved that; we’re not an agency to be pigeonholed. Looking back, we think that it might have been something to do with a short-lived obsession with More Café’s ginger tea and late-night delirium working our day jobs whilst setting up Sticky Ginger that led us to the name. As soon as we found it, we knew it was ours, and it’s served us well.” Elephant Cairo Ali Ali, co-founder and creative director, says that the agency would like to keep its name ambiguous. However, in an earlier interview with Communicate, (see “Pandamonium,” page 60, Communicate, April 2011) co-founder and creative director Maged Nassar had said, “I don’t know. We just love the name.” Ali added, “It’s a strange name. A lot of people ask us about it, and that’s the reason I think it is a nice name. People have no idea why it’s called Elephant; we don’t know why it’s called Elephant.” “We wanted a name that obviously has nothing to do with advertising or creative, like ‘The Think Tank,’ or ‘The Creative Factory,’” Ali said. “We wanted something that would still work if we did anything other than advertising.”

3Points Advertising “Our idea was simple: revolutionize the ads [that] are made so we communicate with Saudi consumers in ways they have never experienced before,” says Marwan M Qutub, CEO and co-founder of the advertising agency. “Just ask about Aqim Salatak and the many award-winning and memorable ads we’ve created since 1998. Our name had to carry that spirit too and stand out versus the prevailing cliché names which were either a noun related to the marketing and communication field or acronyms of founders. Having a number in [the name] 3Points was part of that disruptive and differentiation approach. Yet the name has depth and it links itself to three words which summarize our philosophy to come up with creative solutions. These three words are: understanding, common sense and simplicity.” Watermelon Communications “We wanted a name that would stand out and people would remember. Watermelon, as a name, fitted into that bill,” says Madhu Kuttat, managing director. “The fruit also represents freshness, which is reflected in whatever we have been doing. Since our inception in 2001, people have come up with many interpretations of our name, with one of them giving meanings to all colors associated with a watermelon. For now, we will continue with our initial reasoning.” Clique Media “Coming up with a name for our company was a very easy process,” says Ashwin Salian, one of the three directors of the digital shop. “At the time of launch in December 2008, we were a bunch of friends (brought together by Sagar Shetty [also director]) with an entrepreneurial mindset who wanted to take advantage of opportunities in the (still) nascent digital industry in the Middle East. What we had was loads of selfbelief, great relationships in the industry, and a lot of trust in each other’s capabilities. We were a tightly-knit unit that resembled a Clique. Hence, the name. Although, the Clique has now grown into a bigger family, we still stay true to our core principle of a collective pursuit of shared goals. And yes, people no longer call us Click Media.” Fortune Promoseven (FP7) “In 1968, when FP7 was born, it was called Promoseven,” says Tarek Miknas, CEO of FP7. “The seven was in reference to the seven college students who started the agency as well as the seven forms of art – print, music, film, photography, drawing/painting, and sculpture – that the agency intended to provide. Fortune was attached to Promoseven when FP7 landed its first multinational client, Cathay Pacific, in Bahrain in 1977. Cathay’s agency in Hong Kong was called Fortune. So, the names merged to become Fortune Promoseven.” THE INTERNATIONALS Odopod “When we started Odopod we wanted to create a company with the ideas and resources to execute big and the metabolism and culture to behave small,” says Founder and creative director Tim Barber. “So when it came to naming the company we combined two pieces that got at this big/ small idea. Odo – this was Godzilla’s island, the island where he had been a legend for generations and where he first came ashore. We loved the bigness and total domination of Godzilla. And Pod [because] at the same time we

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liked that we were a compact team that grew ideas, like a pod – the compact, protective enclosure of a seed. For the record, Steve Jobs stole our thunder a year later when the iPod launched.” Zaaz “We wanted a name that wasn’t an acronym or the founders’ names,” says Shane Atchison, founder and CEO of Zaaz. “So we came up with Zaaz, mainly because it was short, succinct, available. Also it’s a palindrome. We define it as something new, because that’s something we aspire to do every day. There’s no secret meaning behind it, just a made up word.” +Castro “We wanted a short, Latin, memorable and, most of all, uncomfortable name,” says Nicolas Pimentel of +Castro, the Buenos Aires shop he founded last year, which is already working for Nike and Lay’s potato chips. “The most important thing you have to do if you want to innovate is to be willing to leave the comfort zone constantly. What one thing can constantly remind you of this? The name of your own agency. In a capitalist world, everyone tends to relate the word “Castro” to Fidel. Such a controversial person is a bit uncomfortable.”

Critical Mass “In science, a critical mass is defined as an amount necessary to achieve a significant effect,” says Critical Mass CEO Dianne Wilkins. “It’s that perfect mix of ingredients needed to start a chain reaction. In terms of the brand, our Critical Mass is a unique mix of people, ideas and results – it’s the combination of these things coming together as a catalyst for extraordinary experiences. The name really expresses something that is at the core of what we do – we have an unrelenting desire to create experiences that make an impact on our clients’ brands, their businesses and their customers.” Rokkan Says Rokkan CEO John Noe: “It’s Japanese for the ‘sixth sense.’ Two of us are Korean and one is Chinese. We just liked the way it looked and sounded. … And thought the meaning was relevant. … As much as we try to be thoughtful about strategy and process, we ultimately just go with our gut on things.”

EVB CEO Daniel Stein on EVB: “At the time we named the company, we were three guys working out of our houses. We knew we wanted a name that would connote the idea of a creative collective dedicated to innovation and forwardthinking ideas. We landed on Evolution Bureau. Within the first year we found that clients were having a hard time spelling the full name, so we shortened the URL to EVB. Luckily, it was available.”

Gigunda Group Ryan FitzSimons started a company from his Dartmouth dorm room in 1994 called the College Kit because it compiled welcome gifts containing products from brands that wanted to reach the college market. By 2003 the company’s offerings had evolved to include nontraditional marketing such as event production, experiential marketing and sampling programs that extended beyond the college demographic, so a new name was needed. He wanted a name that communicated big ideas and considered numerous options, including Hippo House. “I was going back and forth debating what name to pick when my sister reminded me that when we were kids, instead of referring to something as ‘huge’ or ‘enormous,’ we would describe it as gigunda,” says FitzSimons. “I knew right away that should be the name of my agency. “

Shackleton Madrid-based Shackleton was inspired by the exploits of intrepid polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. The name reflects the agency’s “nonconformity and ability to face the problems and solutions in a different way,” says Shackleton’s president, Pablo Alzugaray.

Sra. Rushmore “We believed 11 years ago that a feminine name with the image of a little old lady would represent the care and fondness with which we’d want to do things for our clients,” says agency President Roberto Lara. “We chose Sra. [pronounced senora] Rushmore because she was the character in the first

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OCTOBER 2011 | AGENCIES

interactive campaign done in Spain 15 years ago, for our Pepsi client. She was an actress named Dolores Goodman, who was in movies like Grease, and we got in touch with her and bought the rights to her image (which is displayed on the agency’s home page at srarushmore.com).” MIR “Adam [Wohl] and I were freelancing, and we needed to be a vendor in order to get (at the time) a big job; the budget would only accommodate for a vendor, no freelance,” says Darrell Whitelaw, co-founder of MIR. “I had an S Corp [registered corporation] that I used in the past to sell t-shirts and other mildly creative endeavors, so we filled out some paperwork and the next day had a real company. The difficult part was choosing the name. We had batted around a few options, and since at the time we did a lot of social stuff we liked the ring of MIR. It has a lot of meanings in Russian, but we loved the idea of the obshchina, a community where people were reliant on one another to survive. It really summed up our goal as an agency partner and the way we wanted to do business. Looking back, we definitely ‘settled’ on MIR, we needed a company name in less than 12 hours and it’s just stuck. The logo has changed, but the name is here to stay.” Squeaky Wheel Media “The word ‘no’ is the impetus for the name Squeaky,” says CEO and founder Anthony Del Monte. “I always felt that I needed to be the one who made a little noise. Being the youngest of a family of five kids all born back-to-back, making noise was the only mechanism I had in order to not be left out. Also, growing up in Jersey City, NJ, during the early 1970s, ‘no’ was a constant chorus. ‘Mom can I have a skateboard?’ ‘No.’ ‘Can I have a second helping?’ ‘No.’ ‘Can I get sneakers?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Yes.’ (Lots of yeses in my life also.) But, by summoning the courage to hear a no, you also become heard. When it was time to name my agency I focused on three drivers. It had to make sense: ‘Squeaky wheel gets the grease’ – making the right noise for our clients’ communication needs. It had to be personal: my background and the need to make noise to be recognized. And it had to be fun and memorable. As a side note, other names considered: Spork Media – an homage to utility and the device I used while eating so many free lunches in the ’70s (too weird) – and Old Dog Productions – a tribute to my experience (too novice).”

Herezie Andrea Stillacci, who launched Paris agency Herezie at last year’s Cannes Lions festival, says: “We always liked the heretics. Their courage. Their faith. Their fearless challenge to dogmas and orthodoxy.” Stillacci says “heresy” is derived from a Greek word meaning “power to change,” and that also appealed to him and his business partner, Luc Wise. “If you think about it, what other name could better fit the idea of launching an independent agency, in France, right in the middle of the financial crisis?” says Stillacci. (Cheil Worldwide holds a minority stake.) Ignited “In 1999 we wanted a unique name that communicated a bit about our business. And we wanted to own the URL (ignitedusa.com). The idea was to create an agency that sparked interest in consumers who were increasingly avoiding one-way, traditional advertising. If we ‘sparked’ or ‘ignited’ their minds, this would lead to the kind of interest and reaction we were seeking to deliver for our clients. The original name was Ignited Minds. About four years ago, we decided to shorten it, make it easier to pronounce for our receptionist. More memorable. But the meaning essentially remains the same.” SapientNitro CEO Alan J. Herrick on the Sapient part of merged agency SapientNitro: “After combing through the dictionary, our co-founders stumbled upon the word ‘sapient,’ which refers to human wisdom but which also has a technical connotation from sci-fi novels. It suited our philosophy that all business solutions ultimately are about people, and technology is simply an enabler. As our company has evolved, ‘sapient’ still captures the human and insightful approach we take to solving clients’ business problems.” Digitaria “Digitaria was named after a star (Sirius B),” Daniel Khabie says of the name Digitaria. “The story is that the Dogon tribe believed that it was the Digitaria star (Sirius B) that made another star (Sirius A) shine brighter when it revolved around it. After stumbling across this story (in the search for our agency’s name), we felt that this story’s message mirrored exactly what we wanted our company to portray – keep our clients’ business at the center of what we do and be the thing that helps them to ‘shine brighter.’”

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OCTOBER 2011 | MARKETING

Coupon keeping on Recession, social media and Groupon fuel discount trend in US and internationally, but some say equity suffers in the long run by Jack Neff

“When there’s a recession, focusing on building brand equity is a luxury that becomes unaffordable, because you’ve got to protect your base, and there’s no better way to protect your base than couponing,” says David Diamond, a marketing consultant and veteran of Catalina Marketing, operator of the Checkout Coupon system. Not everyone is convinced. “I continue to believe that the conceptual basis of couponing is bad for equity,” says former P&G chairman and CEO Durk Jager. Jager, who in his days as a senior executive there led the charge to reduce reliance on couponing and trade deals, refers to coupons as “wasteful” because they didn’t pay for their expense and led to reduced consumer loyalty. Various forms of “get one free” coupons at least get consumers to try products, something he says cents-off coupons rarely did, but all forms “show a short-term boost. However, coupons are easy to do, and too many use them under whatever excuse.” He acknowledges, though, that his own efforts to eliminate coupons never prevailed. Most marketers, he says, “never understood the conceptual basis of why coupons undermine loyalty and brand equity” – basically they don’t produce enough long-term sales to pay for the short-term investment.

hat a difference a couple of decades have made for coupons. Once marketing’s redheaded stepchild, they’re now more than ever in the public limelight and are arguably the hottest property in digital media – even fueling a pre-IPO valuation for Groupon that’s roughly half the size of media giant News Corp. But at the end of the day, are they helping brands? Coupons got a decidedly bad name in the 1990s. After packaged-goods marketers got hooked on them to keep volume moving during the recession early in the decade, they had trouble kicking the habit as the economy recovered. Consumers came to expect the deals, eroding profit margins and heightening price and deal sensitivity. So marketers, led by Procter & Gamble Co., looked to drain the swamp of coupons and trade deals they’d created by pushing everyday low pricing – a concept that was also driving Walmart toward rapid national expansion. Some leading packagedgoods marketers, including P&G, Kraft and General Mills, went as far as testing life without coupons altogether in upstate New York, until a state antitrust

lawsuit forced them to end the test and reimburse area consumers with lots of coupons. That was then. This is now: A massive recession, weak recovery and transcendence of digital and social media have turned coupons into a hot commodity among enthusiasts. Although Nielsen’s Inmar Coupon Report for 2011 shows redemption declining over the past decade, Valassis Communications’ NCH unit says that distribution and redemption both reached record levels in 2010. It found more than 78.3 percent of consumers say they used coupons regularly last year, up 14.7 points from pre-recession levels. Much of that seems to be driven by the more evangelistic coupon “enthusiasts.” SEARCH AND SAVE. Google Insights for Search shows looking for “coupon” or “coupons” recently indexed at more than double pre-recession levels from 2006. After steady growth between late 2007 and 2009, search growth for coupons leveled in 2010, only to reach a new peak in the first half of 2011 as rising gas prices and a slowing economy appeared to rekindle interest in deals.

TWICE THE BUMP. Coupons, however, do produce at least some repeat sales, more so than temporary price reductions at the retail shelf. A study in 2000 by Promotion Decisions, based on an analysis of shopper-card data, found that in the long run, ads tended to produce twice the initial bump in sales they created, while trade promotion had little long-term multiplier effect. Couponing fell somewhere in between, indicating it generates more repeat purchases than trade promotion but less than advertising. Far from abandoning coupons, P&G made them the centerpiece, pooling most of the company’s coupons into its monthly P&G BrandSaver circular distributed by Valassis’ Redplum unit and buttressed by online deals via sites such as PGbrandsaver.com and PGeverydaysolutions.com. The old notion that coupons only appeal to highly deal-driven consumers and not to “best customers” is falling fast. Todd Morris, executive vice-president of marketing for Catalina, says its research shows that more than 70 percent of shoppers will redeem at least one checkout coupon annually and “the greatest concentration is with most valuable customers with the biggest baskets.” Another factor auguring growth for couponing is a rapid shift of industry and consumer attention toward digital offers, often more targeted ones. Catalina’s digital offers may have less than 10 percent the distribution of newspaper coupons, but the company has 10 times the redemption rate, at 6 percent, Catalina’s Morris says.

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OCTOBER 2011 | MARKETING

Campbell soups up design package

Neuromarketing studies, a new tool for marketers, led to changes in display and labels by Lisa Terry

hopper-marketing experts have discovered that the shopper they’ve been observing, questioning and surveying all these years has taken a second, silent partner along for the store visit: her subconscious. Shopper marketing is in the throes of a paradigm shift, as the field learns how to best leverage new technologies that aim to expose what consumers feel, but cannot necessarily articulate. Campbell Soup Co., for one, worked with Innerscope Research to rethink its package design and in-store displays. The first study, in 2008, combined biometric vests and “hat-cam” cameras (complemented by eye-tracking/pupil measurement, as participants subsequently re-experienced their shopping trips on video) with in-depth, ethnographic interviews. The study revealed that even with major merchandising improvements executed several years earlier, consumers still found the soup category confusing and frustrating. People thought of Campbell Soup as soothing, nurturing and healing – but that wasn’t translating into purchases. In store, subjects experienced “navigational disorientation,” finding the wall of red and white soup cans overwhelming. So, with little biometric response, they chose a soup and

moved on. Those who really explored the shelves had a greater, biometrically evident emotional response and bought more soup. “By integrating biometric response with eye tracking and the measurement of pupil dilation, Innerscope was able to differentiate not only between positive and negative responses but also, within negative responses, between a bored, disconnected reaction and a more anxious, aversive response,” says Bob Woodard, vice-president of global consumer and customer insights at Campbell. “Neither negative response is good, but the latter clearly provides a bigger opportunity to improve in-store merchandising.” A second study by research company Merchant Mechanics in 2009 focused on soup labels and shelf cards, and tracked eye movement, pupil dilation and facial expressions as participants shopped. This work identified opportunities to improve the consumer’s emotional response to labels and shelf cards. The repositioning included changes to the label, including removing the spoon, adding steam, and redesigning the bowl. The more contemporary design aided consumers in recalling a positive emotional connection to soup as nurturing. The company also retooled its

merchandising approach, creating color-coded “benefit clusters” on labels and shelf cards, specifying a particular variety as “Classic Favorite” or “Great for Cooking.” Eye tracking found that consumers considered the famous red Campbell logo at the top of the product distracting – so the logo got smaller and dropped to a lower position on the label. Before implementing those changes, Campbell first wanted to use virtual reality to test them out. So a third study, in 2010, incorporated Innerscope’s technology – this time using a biometric belt rather than a vest, plus eye tracking and the measurement of pupil dilation – with interactive research company Vision Critical’s virtual shopping environment. After the study, Campbell moved forward with in-store changes. “Neuroscience methods measure various areas of activity in the nervous system and these areas of activity are proxies for – and not direct measurements of – the psychological processes that we all recognize, such as attention, emotion, memory, etcetera,” Woodard says, adding that’s important because “it encourages us to exercise a bit of healthy restraint when interpreting and using the results of neuroscience studies.”

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Q&A

Zynga’s branding gameplan As the gaming giant prepares to go public Jeff Karp, Zynga’s head of marketing, explains his strategy by Edmund Lee

JEFF KARP. Zynga’s head of marketing

eff Karp, the former executive vice-president at gaming giant Electronic Arts, jumped to Zynga at the beginning of August, a sign that the closely watched startup, which recently filed to go public, is serious about branding. As Zynga’s head of marketing and revenue, Karp is charged with developing the company’s branding and advertising efforts, a unique circumstance at the gaming company, which has grown at a virulent rate within Facebook’s quickly expanding universe. And while which company fueled the other remains a perennial debate, it’s nonetheless clear that Zynga hopes to define itself beyond one venue. As part of that effort, the four-year-old company now features more than 19 games on four different platforms, including, most recently, Google+, the search titan’s latest foray into social media and surest answer to Facebook yet. San Francisco-based Zynga is in a Securities and Exchange Commission-mandated quiet period prior to its public offering and declines to disclose its forward-looking ad budgets, but one indication

of the company’s brand ambitions can be found in Karp’s previous duties at EA. As head of revenue for EA’s Games label, he managed a $1 billion business overseeing all product marketing, branding, public relations and finance for various titles, including Bulletstorm (from producer Epic), Crysis (Crytek), and the ever popular Rock Band (MTV/Harmonix). The upstate New York native responded to some of Ad Age’s questions about the company’s direction. Is Zynga trying to be a company that is synonymous with brand identity, say, like Disney, or is it more akin to Electronic Arts, which has some brand identity but operates more like a movie studio that churns out hits with their own franchise identities? It’s important for us to develop the Zynga brand overall because we want to create a halo effect for our games and products. When a current or potential player sees a Zynga game it should stand for something; it should be meaningful to them and set their expectations. It should stand for fun,

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OCTOBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

PEOPLE’S CHOICE. Zynga has more than 60 million daily active players every day play, entertainment and true connection. At the same time, we need to establish brands within Zynga that build and grow and speak to particular audiences. So, really, it’s both. I really believe Zynga is redefining entertainment, though, so in that way it’s unfair to compare us with anything in the past. We connect with 60 million daily active players each day, which is unprecedented. Zynga has long advertised in Facebook to great effect. What will its media strategy be in the future? We’re going to communicate with players wherever they are. When you’re speaking to 148 million unique users each month [on Facebook], there are several strategies to take into account. I’d say our biggest opportunity, though, is the ability we have to connect directly through the games we

JEFF KARP Age: 46 College: Arizona State University Hometown: Baldwin, NY Favorite game of all time: SSX. The game had a particular reality and great game play with a lot of depth. A ﬁve-year-old could play the game and love it, but a more rabid gamer could also jump in and take a while to master it. That was one of the core games that helped launch the PS2. Favorite Zynga game: CityVille

already have, the network we’ve created. Crosspromotional marketing is a major component for us. We are also fortunate that a lot of our players do the heavy lifting on our behalf through virality and sharing – whether that’s through recommendations or connecting with friends or blog posts. The key for us when we talk about brands entering our game is to make sure that those partnerships and promotions are informative, entertaining and educational for our players. Luckily for us we can be incredibly selective with the partnerships we move forward with, and we won’t just shove in brand promos or branded virtual goods unless they provide real value to our players. What other areas of development is Zynga heading into? We have to be where our players are – it’s that simple. We know a lot of them are on Facebook, but there’s a lot of platform diversity out there. You can see a few examples of how we’ve grown recently, both on Facebook and off. We recently launched Words With Friends, one of our most popular mobile games, on Facebook. We just launched Zynga Poker on Google+. Internationally we’re growing as well. We just built a partnership with Tencent in China to launch games on their platforms. Zynga recently partnered with Google to populate some games within Google+. Will Google+ players have to buy credits as well? Or will it be entirely ad-driven? All Zynga games are free, and people then decide if there are components of a game they’d like to pay for. If they want collectibles or rewards – items that accelerate their game play – then

that option is always available to them, and that’s their choice. You can’t find free entertainment elsewhere. Specifically on Google+, players have the opportunity to buy credits, as they do on other social platforms. Zynga already has relationships with advertisers such as Coca-Cola, Amazon, McDonald’s, and Walmart. What have advertisers been asking for? What do you offer them? We expect partnerships where we can extend our brand to audiences. We want to create content that doesn’t interrupt our players. We’re never going to disrupt game play – it must be additive. But there’s certainly opportunity. If you look at CityVille, there’s a lot of real estate on each person’s game board, and there’s no reason that your city shouldn’t represent who you are as a player and what you’re interested in. A city with the brands you like, and where those brands actually help you in-game, will enhance the reality of that city for you. What’s signiﬁcant about Zynga? It’s a social network, but it’s also games. I feel strongly about the opportunity at Zynga, and really one of the reasons I took this job is because my 80-year-old uncle isn’t a gamer in any sense of the traditional word, but he loves CityVille. He’s in there every day, and he’s sending me gifts left and right. He’s in Canada and I’m in California, and now we’re reconnected through CityVille. It’s enhanced our relationship (never mind the fact that he’s beating the crap out of me in terms of levels). He’s an architect and he’s meticulous about the way he builds his city.

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9/29/11 6:38 PM

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OCTOBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

Profile

The storyteller

With a degree in law, a career in trading, and a published novel under his belt, what will Sion Scott-Wilson, Saatchi’s regional creative director for CEMEA bring to his new role? by Sidra Tariq

Sion Scott-Wilson. Regional creative director, Saatchi & Saatchi, CEMEA

f there are three words Sion Scott-Wilson would ban from the advertising industry, they would be “call to action.” The term, used to describe phrases like “buy it now” or “get that subscription” in advertisements, is a bit of a pet peeve of his. “I’ve never seen anyone who sits in a chair and watches a TV ad and suddenly gets up and runs to the shop when someone tells you to do that. Ever. Ever in my life. And I’ve never heard of anyone doing it,” says Saatchi & Saatchi’s regional creative director for Central Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA). Scott-Wilson has been in the advertising business for more than 25 years. He has created several TV and radio commercials around the world, and has large-scale clients such as Sony, Toyota, HP, McDonald’s, Reebok, Nestlé, and P&G (which he is currently working on) in his portfolio. He has also been behind a number of award-winning campaigns. In 2002 Campaign Brief ranked him as the number two creative director in the Asia/Australasia region. However, like many admen, he had never planned to be in advertising. “I have a law degree,” he says. “I was supposed to be a lawyer; in fact, a barrister.” But that is a direction he didn’t take. “My uncle was

a Queen’s Counsel [in the UK] and my career in law would have been fairly straightforward. However, after three years of studying cases at university, I decided that more of the same was not for me. At the time the City seemed a more exciting place to be.” So, before taking the deep dive into advertising, Scott-Wilson was in the stock exchange in London, working as a stockbroker for a while. He moved on from that job as he “found it dull, although very well-paid. A lot of my friends in university were in advertising and it sounded great, and it was very exciting, so I went into advertising from there,” after a year’s course at The School of Communication Arts in London. Moving from a field like law to advertising may not seem like a natural career change, but Scott-Wilson feels there are many similarities between the two: “When I got into advertising, there were – oddly enough – quite a lot of people [with] law degrees who were going into creative departments…and when you think about it, at the end of the day, advertising or communications is effectively making an argument on behalf of a commercial body or client. So, in a funny kind of way, it’s not that different. It’s

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DEPARTMENTS | OCTOBER 2011

coming at your argument from a slightly different perspective, but you’re still making an argument on behalf of something. You’re not making stuff up. You are actually arguing a case.” STEP ON THE LADDER. Scott-Wilson started his advertising career in 1985 as a writer at a London advertising agency DMB&B, and in 1989 he moved to Faulds Advertising as a senior copywriter. Both the agencies are now defunct. But if you’re sensing a pattern here, don’t let it sway you. The rest of the agencies he’s worked at are very much alive and kicking, and are some of the biggest players in the industry: DDB (where he worked as joint creative director), Saatchi & Saatchi (senior writer), and Campaign Palace (group head) in Auckland; Leo Burnett in Sydney (creative director), and so on. He worked as executive creative director for approximately seven years – first joining Saatchi & Saatchi Singapore in 2000, moving to Batey Red Cell and then to Lowe in Auckland. He came back to Asia in 2008, joining Ogilvy & Mather’s Hong Kong office as regional creative director for Asia-Pacific. But the bond between Scott-Wilson and Saatchi & Saatchi seems a strong one, as only a year later (in 2009) he joined the agency for the third time, but this time at its Dubai office, filling his current role. The Middle East is familiar territory for him. Since his father was often contracted here for work, Scott-Wilson visited Oman and Saudi Arabia for holidays when he was young. In fact, his first job was working on a building site in Muscat, Oman. So the transition for him has been rather smooth. CREATIVE OUTLET. Scott-Wilson quite enjoys the environment at the Dubai office. He feels people can do their best work when they are in a “decent” environment and are surrounded by people they like and whose company they enjoy. He has certainly done his, he says. One of the biggest impacts a creative director can have on his or her department is creating such an environment, he adds. Scott-Wilson is also surrounded by creative people whose creativity isn’t limited to their day jobs, he says. The office has people who paint, write poetry, have a band, and so on. Scott-Wilson himself is a published author. His first novel, The Sleepwalker’s Introduction to Flight, which was nominated for the British Crimefest 2009 Last Laugh Award, sells reasonably well, he says. (It is ranked 792,857 on Amazon.co.uk’s bestseller list.) For a person who has worked in the advertising industry for so long, you’d expect Scott-Wilson to write something about advertising, but he has steered clear of that. Writing the novel is like going on a holiday, he says: “I know many people do write about advertising and they sell quite well, and that’s fine. But that is not my intention. My intention is actually to try and clear my head from advertising. It’s creative but in a very different way.” While the novel has received a warm response, he can’t quite put a finger on its genre. “It tends to go a bit into the crimes section, but it’s not crime per se…[and] it’s not a detective novel. It is slightly

Wash this space. Scott-Wilson has worked on brands including Ariel black humor.” “It’s kind of difficult to categorize, as my publishers tell me,” he adds. Scott-Wilson has another book in the pipeline, which is actually the first book he wrote. “[It] took me four years to write and was huge. We’re still waiting for publishing. The problem is it is too long: about 700 pages.” The length maybe a bit discouraging for publishers, but Scott-Wilson says he has hopes with digital publishing. AS THE STORY GOES. Scott-Wilson’s affinity to storytelling is not limited to his novels. He feels storytelling is also the heart of the advertising business. “Storytelling and narrative is only going to get more important as media fragments and continues to fragment. Brands will become more and more reliant on the coherent story in a fragmented landscape, and it’s really important that we do have good stories to tell. Often our stories can come from a consumer experience of our products, of our services, rather than the other way round…I think the genuine story from a genuine consumer has a ring of truth about it, which often manufactured advertising does not.” This is an exciting time for the advertising industry, he says. Opportunities to talk to consumers in different ways have increased tremendously: “What happened a few years ago was that everyone was using the buzz word ‘media neutral.’ It basically meant that they were looking for other forms of media. But what ended up happening was that the same idea was being duplicated across [different media]; they were putting, for example, a still from TV on a billboard, and a TV ad on YouTube with a big logo and a ‘call to action.’” (We sense the sarcasm.)

In contrast, what we’re seeing nowadays is “transmedia,” and Scott-Wilson is a fan. “[It] means that you create a communication strategy that is based on your brand narrative and you take parts of the brand’s story and you play them out according to the medium in question – which element is most appropriate to the media – rather than try to duplicate the same story.” Trans-media can be non-linear too, he says. “You don’t have to be exposed to the entire story… or to the brand narrative in a consecutive sequence.” Consumers can get the message even if exposed to different bits of the entire campaign, he says. There is no scientific formula for creating successful work and harnessing new media, he feels. But he adds that the age-old tendency of relying on instinct and emotions is still a major part of the equation. Strategy is of extreme importance too and one should get that right before moving on to creative. “If we don’t get the strategy right then we are wasting our time at the creative level; we are either producing a sketch or a cartoon, whereas we should be producing something with a commercial function.” He also thinks people have got social media wrong. It’s not even a ‘media,’ he says. “It’s an amplifier of other activities.” While advertising is at an exciting stage right now, it has also become more challenging. “There is a lot of hard work to this business now,” says Scott-Wilson. And that is what he plans to do at Saatchi & Saatchi, while maintaining a balance between his family time and his writing.

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OCTOBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

X-pert Files

Same but different

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

Ahmad Abu Zannad. Strategic planning director at Leo Burnett

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

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

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OCTOBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

Profile

Do it yourself

SMG CEO Philip Jabbour tells Communicate you have to drive your title, and not let it drive you by Austyn Allison

hilip Jabbour was at lunch with a friend when he bit off more than he could chew. He had come to the UAE in 1994 to look for a job, and agreed to give the advertising agencies a go. He’s been in the business ever since. Now he is CEO of SMG (Starcom MediaVest Group) MENA. Jabbour met with Raja Trad at Leo Burnett, and began as one of four people manning the agency’s media department. He handled the Eppco and Citbank accounts. He proved himself fast, though, and within nine months he was handling Burnett’s coveted Philip Morris account. The cigarette brand’s business was worth $7 million to the company. “I had ulcers, I had sleepless nights, I never thought I could do it,” he says. “I had very good support from the company, but at the end of the day it was way bigger than the shoes I was trying to fill.” He survived the first year handling the account, though, and got “some successes” under his belt. We ask him what successes. “Not messing up, basically,” he says. “That was pretty much my success criteria: to make sure we didn’t lose the account.” “Personally I’m probably the least curious person on earth,” says Jabbour. “Professionally I’m the exact opposite. I never thought there was something I couldn’t do. I think the way I got to that first responsibility moulded me in that framework, and I always assumed responsibility for things I wasn’t given.”

Don’t let your title drive you, he says. Instead, you should drive the title, and Jabbour goes so far as to say you should make your manager embarrassed not to give you the title you want. “Prove your worth before you actually have been given the responsibility to do it,” he says. This includes working to time frames shorter than your boss will give you. A key point in Jabbour’s career was when Starcom launched the Dubai International Airport campaign globally out of Dubai in 2000. “It was right around the launch of Starcom at the time,” he says. “It was a major project, a big challenge. That started my exposure globally.” Then Starcom won Emirates airlines, Jabbour’s “ultimate objective,” in 2008. “We were the only agency that pitched for it out of here,” he says, “And we won the global assignment out of here.” Communicate asks Jabbour what made the difference. “Hunger,” he replies. “I knew we didn’t lack on skill sets; I knew we didn’t lack in network; I knew we always have to be consistent through all of the rounds, showing them that we couple a proper understanding of their business, and the communications industry. And our presence in this market allows us just to understand their culture. We drove that.” Jabbour then moved to being in charge of business development for Europe for two years. “I got to see the good, the bad and the ugly,” he says. “Just because a market is more developed doesn’t make it better.” With successful business wins in the bag, the next step for Jabbour’s career would have been New York, but he was asked to become CEO for MENA in September 2010. Currently MENA is the third-largest Starcom operation globally. The US leads, but MENA is snapping at the UK’s heels. “With our growth we can actually become second really soon,” he says. It sounds like he may also develop his own role, driving his title rather than letting it drive him. “As you grow in your career, if you continue expanding vertically, you’re going to have less and less options and more and more bottleneck situations. You have to be able to expand horizontally, and be in a company that allows that. I’m not saying shift your role every year, but doing something for 17 years has taught me that if I had not done this, and I could have done more, I could have definitely got myself into digital a lot earlier than I did. I could have done a lot more. I would have been the biggest beneficiary out of all of this.” When he was younger, Jabbour was a child actor in some successful Lebanese films, over seven years. One of his movies even went to Cannes. He’s still performing well today.

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Ghadeer interior decorations (Qatar)

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RIVA (Kuwait)

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OCTOBER 2011 | DEPARTMENTS

Media Work CK One Shock for Calvin Klein: To introduce CK’s fragrance, CK One Shock, the perfume brand has launched a faux grass-roots movement across the Middle East. A choreographed campaign shows how a bunch of Middle East youth find out about CK One Shock becoming available in the rest of the world, but not this region. They demand its arrival by adding graffiti tags to regular old CK One to turn it into Shock. This group documents its activities on social media sites,

including Facebook and YouTube. A teaser campaign culminates in an event in Dubai. A Facebook page (at FB.me/WeWantShock) was set up on September 14, with the manifesto: “CK, until you bring the new CK One Shock, we will tag your existing CK One media in whatever format until you bring CK One Shock to the entire Middle East. CK One came out in 1994 and doesn’t speak to us – CK One Shock is just coming out and we are what it represents.”

Kids from the “Shock Crew” begin by tagging a CK One truck in Beirut with the line, “Nothing is shocking.” They tag other trucks with the word “Shock” over images of CK One. This should produce the “largest moving graffiti wall” in Middle East history. Other youths produce a hip-hop song in Arabic and English. Calvin Klein acknowledges the activities with a “Wow, we love it” message posted online.

Back in Dubai, more of the Shock Crew tag a CK One security panel in Dubai Mall, and leave some CK One Shock bottles. The store gives these away through its Facebook page. Women in Jeddah’s Roshana mall tag some CK One T-shirts, the story is broken on local radio, and T-shirts are given away. Dancing and CK One-tagged buses are now in play, and CK arranges an event on September 30 at Dubai’s Media One hotel. Then CK One Shock is launched.

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HTML cross-marketing for Microsoft: Dubai-based digital agency Prototype Interactive, working for Microsoft, decided to use an app on various websites in order to promote its clientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s HTML 5-enabled browser, Microsoft Explorer 9. Prototype worked with Microsoft to create a series of HTML5 applications for key brands in the region including ADMC, Dubai Financial Market, Nahel.com and local newspapers. The applications were developed specifically for the users of each brand. For example, the DFM dashboard would allow users to follow the stock market using their HTML5-enabled browser, and the application was sponsored by Internet Explorer 9. Prototype says the benefits are that the use of this sort of cross marketing using apps has a longlasting effect as the apps are accessible much longer by a very specific target audience and thus are much more sustainable and remarkable for all involved parties.

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SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 2011 2011 | departments | departments

Regional Work P R I N C E H AT. S E P R I N C E H AT. S E P R I N C E H AT . S E

You are never lost. Client: Micromax Mobile. Advertising Agency: FP7 / MCT, Oman Creative Director / Copywriter / Art director: Noufal Ali Illustrators: Venugopal V.G, Sanoop. R

J. K. Rowlingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Harry Potter. Client: Jashanmalbooks.com Graphic designer: Patrik Svensson (aka Prince Hat) Media plan agency: INCA Tanvir (http://incatanvir.com/)

Messaging should be as fun as your friends. Advertising Agency: Media Marquee, Cairo, Egypt Creative / Illustrator: Mohamed Gaber

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: Mall of the Emirates, Al Ghurair City, Abu Dhabi Mall, Sahara Centre and in selected Spinneys supermarkets BAHRAIN: Bahrain City Centre, Seef Mall, Al Ali Mall

Want a poster of this? Visit our stores or get it online at jashanmalbooks.com

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

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DEPARTMENTS | OCTOBER 2011

International Work

Life without music would be less noisy, less cluttered and less interesting. Mozambique Music Awards. It’s our music. It’s our culture. Advertising Agency: DDB Mozambique, Maputo, Mozambique Creative Director: Lenilson Lima Art Director: Giuseppe Lira Copywriter: Zeca de Oliveira

Don’t take the risk. Advertising Agency: Conexão, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Creative Directors: André “Mineiro” Ferreira, Eduardo Silva Art Director: Lincoln Tesch Copywriter: Pedro Rosadas Illustrator: Lincoln Tesch

New extra-concetrated Italian dressing Palmeiron. More tomatoes than you imagined. Advertising Agency: Arcos Comunicação, Recife, Brazil Creative Directors: Eduardo Nunes, Carlos Renato Copywriter: Felipe Autran Art Director: Maninho Lyra Illustrator: Leandro Fiuza

Tour de Farms. A 30-mile bike tour of Wisconsin’s top organic farms. Advertising Agency: Cramer-Krasselt, Milwaukee, USA Executive Creative Director: Chris Jacobs Creative Director: Todd Stone Associate Creative Director: Shawn Holpfer

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

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SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 2011 2011 | departments | departments

Regional Work

Client: Ahli International Bank Regional Creative Director: Maya Saab, Spirit Communication Manager: Georges Kallab, Spirit Production House: Clandestino Films Director: Andre Chammas Director Of Photography: Yves Sehnaoui Executive Producer: Ray Barakat

TV just got tougher. FX. Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett Dubai Executive Creative Director: Peter Bidenko Creative Directors: Mohamed Oudaha Copywriters: Sunny Deo, Simon Raffaghello Arabic Copywriter: Rania Badawi Art Directors: Rafael Augusto, Rafael Rizuto Graphic Designers: Ammar Safi, Jad Boureslan

Sharp plasmacluster air purifier Captures odors. Releases clean fresh air. Creative Agency: IKON Advertising & Marketing, Dubai Copywriter: Samson Dsouza Art Director: Jayanand Pujari Executive Creative Director: Shantesh Row These ads (and more) can be found at adsoftheworld.com

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OCTOBER 2011 | departments

International Work

When you only leave crumbs for your people you end up attracting birds. France 24 is now on Twitter. Advertising Agency: Marcel Paris, France Executive Creative Directors: Anne de Maupeou, Veronique Sels, Sebastien Vacherot Art Directors: Souen Le Van Copywriters: Martin Rocaboy

Fish by new oven solardom LG. Six times hotter. Advertising Agency: Y&R, São Paulo, Brazil Executive Creative Director: Rui Branquinho Creative Directors: Flávio Casarotti, Sérgio Fonseca Art Director: Kleyton Mourão Copywriter: Roberto Kilciauskas Agency Producer: Monica Beretta Illustrator: Open The Door

Tamiya. Put it together. Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Vietnam Art Directors: Todd McCracken, Jay Furby, BJ Galinato, Joe Harris, Jeremy Lim, Dang Thuong Do

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

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DEPARTMENTS | OCTOBER 2011

International Work

Mini Chupa Chups Kipik. Advertising Agency: DDB, Paris, France Creative Director: Bertrand Pallatin Art Director: Sophie Montfort Copywriter: Gwen Vatin Photographer: Nicolas Descottes

Gรถrtz 17 Shoelace Box. Design Company: Kempertrautmann, Munich Creative Director: Tim Belser, Creative Director/Designer/Writer Heiko Freyland Designer: Tim Belser Graphic Designer: Christiane Eckhardt Photographer: Peter Ruessmann Producer: Alexander Kate

Nike shox. Advertising Agency: US Sydney, Australia Executive Creative Director: Josh Moore Creative Director: Chad Mackenzie Art Director / Copywriter: Tim Chenery Agency Producer: Corinne Porter Retoucher: Toby and Pete

Teen mom. New season, coming soon. Advertising Agency: McCann Belgrade, Serbia Creative Directors: Jana Savic Rastovac, Vladimir Cosic Art Director: Nenad Dodic Photographer: Branko Sujic Additional credits: Milos Stankovic

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

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OCTOBER 2011 | departments

International Work

1,350lbs of load capacity make you feel powerful. Tacoma. Advertising Agency: Badillo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, Puerto Rico Executive Creative Director: Juan Carlos Rodriguez Art Director: Cristina Burckhart, Fernando Suarez Copywriter: Pedro Perez Associate Creative Director: Mariano German Photographer: Domino Estudio Retoucher: Carlos Nieves

End the pain. Paramex. Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Jakarta, Indonesia Executive Creative Director: Gary Caulfield Creative Directors: Eric Yeo, Troy Lim, Yuwono Widodo Art Director: Anthony Tham Copywriter: Adrian Yeap Illustrator: Eric Foenander,Qiu Jing These ads (and more) can be found at adsoftheworld.com

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DEPARTMENTS | OCTOBER 2011

International Work

Road Safe Hawkes Bay: Available for careless drivers, at all intersections Advertising Agency: Ogilvy, New Zealand Executive Creative Director: Damon Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Leary Senior Copywriter: Ben Pegler Creative Group Head / Art Director: Darran Wong Kam Retoucher: Dan Spataru Typographer: Chris Leskovsek Account manager: Ben Hopkinson

Spaceship. Advertising Agency: TBWA, Costa Rica Creative Director: Byron Balmaceda Art Director/Illustrator: Gabriela Soto Copywriter: Byron Balmaceda

Be patient with people who stutter. Often non-stuttering people (accidentally) interrupt people who stutter, by finishing their sentences. This billboard tells them this isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t necessary: Most of the time just having a little patience is enough. Advertising Agency: Y&R Not Just Film, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Creative Directors: Marq Strooy, Robin Zuiderveld Art Director: Marq Strooy Copywriter: Robin Zuiderveld

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

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OCTOBER 2011 | Off the record

The Dish Snip snip We’ve heard of a former flack who jumped from PR to media, nicknamed “The Hairdresser” by friends in Lebanon. We don’t know why either. But if you know who we’re talking about, send your answer in an e-mail to editor@communicate.vg. First correct answer out of the bag gets a cut and blow dry. Find out the answer next month. For frack’s sake Good luck to Omnicom PR agency Fleishman-Hillard, which has just been hired in the US by the American Petroleum institute to spin hydraulic fracturing. “Fracking” is a process that involves firing high-pressure water underground to break up rocks and release natural gas. It’s the subject of the 2010 Oscar-nominated film Gasland, which showcased the destruction fracking could wreak on people’s health and water supplies (flames coming out of a tap, anyone?). Still, while that documentary might have made Fleishman-Hillard’s job a little tricky, it should justify the project’s $20 million budget. As bad as it gets

Have you seen Sin City? About the most crime-ridden city in the world? Well Folkestone in the UK is worse. Never mind robberies, abductions and murders; the news there is so much more horrific. Just look at the front page of the town’s weekly newspaper, the Folkestone Herald. But please, be careful not to leave it lying around where children can see it. We’d hate to be responsible for them realizing what a hideous world we live in. It’s not all that bad It’s 10 years since the September 11,

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2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, in which nearly 3,000 people died. The mastermind behind those attacks was Osama Bin Laden, the head of Al Qaida. America’s president at the time was George W. Bush, who used the attacks to lead a coalition into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed many more people Gulf News, 10 years on from that history-changing day, ran the headline, “Is the world any safer?” And appears to have answered it by selling stick-on ad space to Daily Gourmet (“an upmarket supermarket,” don’t you know?) Right in the middle of Bin Laden’s and Bush’s faces beneath. The world may or may not be safer, but we can surely believe it’s tastier.

[Your message here] Thanks to PR agency Asda’a for firing over one of those delightful gems of an incomplete press release. (It was sent on “August XX,” but we got it a few days later.) As well as dods of red ink where contacts, and the name of a company winning an award, had been replaced or inserted, there was also the mandatory “Relevant Meed person here; relevant Asda’a person here” line at the bottom. And a couple of word changes (in square brackets). “The conference, organized by MEED and sponsored by Stratus Technologies, HayGroup and Experian, is taking place during a [critical] time for retail banking across the Gulf. Competition between banks is intense, with financial institutions looking for innovative solutions to [retain] existing customers, and attract new ones.” How would you have filled in those blanks? Print perfect If you’re a 24/7 print producer like Kishore, the subject of Nissan’s ad

Poet’s corner This is a story about a dress, a little black dress that reflects the mythical couture of the 1950’s, the essence of Audrey Hepburn, and the taste of pure, contemporary refinement. This dress is ‘the first’ that Serge Cajfinger imagined back in 1988, at the beginning of his label. Paule Ka rings like a dance on rhythmic beats, inspired from the colours of Serge Cajfinger’s Brazilian childhood. Settled in France in 1968, Lille to be precise, this passionate of art, fashion and architecture did not intend to wait for success… he wanted to live his era to its fullest. At the young age of fifteen, Serge Cajfinger spent his days merchandising YSL’s shop windows as well as those of the neighbouring stores. In 1974 he decides to open a multi-label boutique called Paule Ka with both his mother and aunt Paule. This shop carries all the future, fashion `greats’ such as Alaia, Montana, Mugler and Kenzo. The influence of these Parisian labels and his relationship with various clients sharpened his knowledge of the female body and educated him on women’s wants and desires. In 1987, Serge Cajfinger leaves Lille to launch himself into another adventure, his own. He establishes the Paule Ka label in the Marais area of Paris. A style code rapidly emerges: there is the use of black and white, which evolves throughout the seasons from monochromatic flashes to pastel tones. The skirt suit, the bow, the organza and the famous black dresses have remained the signature of Paule ka for the past twenty years. Reflecting glamour from a Hollywood movie screen, but always set against an iconic Parisian backdrop, Paule Ka’s style breaks through conventional ideas and plays with contrasts, volume, symmetry, humour and seduction. The accessory collections express a timeless mood. The signature basket, created in 1995, has been re-invented each season (it pays hommage to the lovely Audrey Hepburn who wore one with her mink coat). After the launch of the 223 SH created in 2007 that coincided with the opening of his flagship store situated at 223 Rue St Honoré, one of the 350 sales points in the world, the ‘Cabas Ka’ is the new signature bag. – From a press release from Paule Ka.

on the back of Dubai Metro’s weekly magazine, Read, then you would be pretty good at putting print ads together. After all, you do it all day, every day. Mind you, if you do it 24/7, presumably that means you do it without sleep. Which might mean you could be a little dozy and forget to, well, make sure the ad ends where it should. If you missed that it would be really

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