Power List

POWERLIST

The 50 most powerful people in the media, marketing and advertising industry

2011

A Mediaquest Corp publication

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OUTER CVR_POWERLIST@[email protected] [email protected] 1 6/16/11 9:14:09 PM6/16/11 9:14:09 PM

POWERLIST


2011


Information partner


Communicate I 3

POWER LISTContents

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Letter from the editorWhat’s a Power List, we hear you ask.Well, here’s where you can find out.What is a Power List, and why should you care?

11 to 40That’s not all of them.Here’s the next bunch.

Top 10So who’s at the top of the list?Here’s the top 10.

MethodologyAnd this Power List… How do you work it out?We explain how we came up with our rankings.

41 to 50And here’s the last of them.That’s the 50 most powerful people in advertising,ranked by the power they wield.

Through the course our our research we have sourced the information and photographs in this publication from many sources. We have done our best to make sure that the information is factually accurate and that we have the rights to use all the photographs we have published. If we have made any factual errors or have accidentally infringed copyright, this was unintentional and we will strive to rectify the error. If you wish to contact us about any such errors, please e-mail [email protected]. Please include the words “Power List” in your e-mail subject line.

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4 I Communicate I Power List

Power play

elcome to the first Communicate Power List, where we rank the top 50 players in the region’s media, marketing and advertising industry.

Many of the names and faces will be familiar, although some of those who made the list prefer to operate more in the background. As well as a bare-bones ranking, we have tried to present a snap-shot of the people behind the power. In many cases we managed to meet with the power players. Others we hope to meet soon. It was a privilege talking to the people we met, and a shame to have missed the others. But we hope to redress that balance soon, as we continue to cover the movers and shakers in this industry.

Soon we will put together a second list, this time of the next gen-eration of media power players. Keep your eyes peeled.

To establish who is on the power list and where they sit, we have addressed a subjective issue in an objective manner.

We had to answer the question: What is power?It is a number of things: It encompasses the ability to make things

happen within the industry, authority over others, and respect.The ability to make things happen is largely due to the size of

one’s company, and the amount of money that it controls; after all, this industry is a commercially driven one. Authority stems from one’s position in the company; a CEO has more authority than a junior account director; respect comes from many areas, but can be measured by seeing how often others quote the person.

With the help of data partners Ipsos and Zawya, we gathered infor-mation on companies and the amount of money clients spend through their agencies on media. Then we dug to get as much information as we could on the top companies and the people who run them.

When we had all the data we could get our hands on, we parsed it through a formula where we awarded points for each of a series of categories. We added the points together and came up with this list. On the following pages, you can read more about the criteria we examined.

Since much of the data we have used to come up with our list is sensitive, we have kept both it and our exact formula confidential.

We hope you find the list interesting. We certainly do. It’s been fascinating finding out who wields the power within the changing media industry, how they came to be where they are, and how they see the business evolving.

Congratulations to all who made the list.Enjoy, and power to ya!

Austyn Allison, managing editor, Communicate

Letter from the editor

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seddiqi.com

It’s time to tell the story...


The methodology behind the Power List

he idea of the Power List was to come up with a ranking of the people who hold power and influ-ence in the Middle East’s media, marketing and advertising industry. The process was complex, as from the start we wanted to move subjectivity out of the equation and use hard data as much as possible to rank the most influential people in the industry. We feel this list represents a good snapshot of the business over the past 12 months. Of course, the industry has many other influential people; some are not here for either lack of hard data or because they did not make the cut. We chose to limit the list to 50.

Communicate worked hard to find industry data and personal data on the entrants, and collate existing data. We also requested companies and people disclose data to us. Some did; others did not. If certain data could not be verified, we had to remove it from the equation.

Data gatheringAs we started gathering data, our initial list had more than 150 companies and people on it. We relied on our partners at Zawya and Ipsos to find the monitored corporate data and ad spend for the region.

Who is on the list?Most of the people on the list are either chief executive officers or chief marketing officers. They are people that control the advertising and marketing budget of their companies, or professionals whose jobs are to manage advertising and media-related companies. There are a few exceptions on the list – for example when the CEO is not active and the chairman fills in as acting CEO, or the chief operating officer has an unusually important role.

The points systemWe allocated points according to the criteria below. Some criteria earned more points than others (for example, company revenue earned more points than membership of associations). But even the categories in which we awarded fewer points made a difference in some cases. Some of the people in our final list were very close together.

Since much of the information we used to put our list together is sensitive, we have chosen not to publish our raw data or our weighting, but simply to explain how we worked out the list.

Company dataThe first step was to evaluate the various companies that operate in the business as the more important a company is, the more influence the people within it wield. The criteria we used to evaluate companies were: • Number of employees in the region• Size of monitored advertising budget for clients• Billings for agencies and media agencies• Revenues for media companies• Numbers of years the company has existed in the region

Size: The more employees a company has in the region, the more it can influence the industry. However some companies could have thousands of people but very limited influence as their core activities are not in the marketing and advertising industry. We awarded extra points to companies whose core business is in marketing and advertising. We then awarded points based on the number of employees, until a company reached 700 employees. That was the maximum.

Budget: A client that spends a marketing/advertising budget of $100,000 doesn’t have the same voice in the industry as a client that spends $100 million. The bigger a company’s spend, the more points we awarded it.

For agencies and media agencies, we had to use estimates from our data partners as well as industry intelligence to find the amount of money agencies were bringing in. When creative agencies were shareholders in media agencies, we only measured their income from the creative side of their business, as we measured their media agencies as companies in their own right.

For the media, we had to rely on monitored figures as well as industry estimates to see how much revenue the media owners were bringing in.

Show your working

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seddiqi.com

It’s time to persevere. Abdulmagied Ahmed Seddiqi, Chairman of Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons, joined the business in 1969 and opened the second store in Bur Dubai selling timepieces. He continues the legacy of his late father and guides the new generation towards the future of the company.


Years in the region: The longer a company has been in the region, the more people have worked with it. Calling upon people who have worked with you or your company is easier than calling on those with whom you’ve not worked as closely.

Some companies group agencies under a mother company. In those cases the mother company with the officially consolidated figures was taken into account, and individual units were also listed.

Personal dataThe next step after the company ranking was done was to evaluate the power of individuals and the influence they have on the industry.

We decided to stick to the regional heads of the companies, or regional CMOs and their equivalents. Many in the industry are very influential, but the regional head is most powerful in terms of crafting the future of his company and having a strong voice in the industry.

The personal criteria we measured includes:• Years in business• Years in the region• Shareholding• Google effect• Associations• Social media

Years in business: The more time a person has spent in the industry, the more he has devel-oped his network of connections, friends and colleagues. Therefore he is better able to move the industry. Any person with fewer than 10 years in the industry would not get points on this criteria. We awarded more points to those who have been in the industry longer, up to a limit of 30 years.

Years in the region: Even the person most knowledgeable about a particular industry can be puzzled by the region and the way it works, so the more time someone has spent in the region, the more important his network of colleagues, business associates, friends and enemies. We saw some powerful firms headed by newcomers with limited experience of the region. They are ranked lower than some might expect, as the connection factor is important in this part of the world.

Shareholding: This was an important factor, as major shareholders in large companies in the region have an important impact on their companies and the industry. This was one of the most difficult criteria as this information is not readily available and we had to rely on industry intelligence.

Google effect: We used Google searches to see how many times people were quoted in the media and on websites. The more a person was quoted, the more points we gave them. We capped this at 5,000 Google hits.

Associations: Involvement with NGOs and other associations earned people points. Social media: This was a good view on the connections people have developed in the industry and beyond. Strangely, few people had more than 500 connections on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn combined.

Published by: Medialeader FZ/MediaquestCorpMedialeader, P O Box 72184, Dubai Media City, Al Thuraya Tower 2,

Office 2402, Dubai, Tel: (971) 4 391 0760

CO-CEO Alexandre Hawari CO-CEO Julien Hawari MANAGING DIRECTOR Ayman Haydar CFO Abdul Rahman Siddiqui CREATIVE DIRECTOR Aziz Kamel HEAD OF CIRCULATION Haries Raghavan, [email protected] MARKETING MANAGER Maya Kerbage, [email protected] KSA GM Walid Ramadan, [email protected], Tel: +966 1 4194061 LEBANON GM Nathalie Bontems, [email protected], Tel: +961 1 492801 NORTH AFRICA GM Adil Abdel Wahab, [email protected], Tel: +213 661 562 660 FRANCE SALES DIRECTOR Manuel Dias, [email protected], Tel: +33 1 4766 46 00

FOUNDER Yasser Hawari MANAGING DIRECTOR Julien Hawari GROUP MANAGING EDITOR Siobhan Adams MANAGING EDITOR Austyn Allison CONTRIBUTORS P. Manglani, Jonathon Savill, Sidra Tariq SENIOR SUB EDITOR Elizabeth McGlynn ART DIRECTOR Aziz Kamel ART CONTRIBUTORS Jean-Cristophe Nys, Sheela Jeevan, Janett Kheil, Alvin Cha RESEARCH Neena Mathew, Harsha Balwani 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, [email protected] Lebanon Peggy El-Zyr [email protected], Tel: (961) 149 2801 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Walid Ramadan, [email protected], Tel: (966) 1 419 40 61, Ghassan A. Rbeiz, [email protected], 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

POWER LIST


2011


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seddiqi.com

It’s time to build. Abdulhamied Ahmed Seddiqi, Vice Chairman of Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons, joined the company in 1979 and later created the property arm of the company, which owns the Capricorn Tower and Rolex Tower among other luxurious properties.

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Middle East media mogul

here are very few people in the Arab world’s media scene who can be described as having revolutionized the industry. Yet, as chairman of the first independent pan-Arab satellite television station, MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Center), Sheikh Waleed Bin Ibrahim Al Ibrahim is one of the biggest media moguls around.

He was just 28 years old in 1991 when he launched MBC in a region teeming with state-owned broadcasters, aiming to bring a new kind of media to a region that was “fresh, dynamic, young, independent, self-empowering and free-spirited.”

Al Ibrahim, brother-in-law of the late King Fahd, was born and brought up in Saudi Arabia before he went to the States to pursue his higher education.

When he returned to the Middle East in 1987, he established ARA Productions and Television Studios, a first step in his endeavors to set up his own satellite channel.

But it was the private-run channel he launched in London that he wanted to bring to a region that, as he said, “really didn’t have television.”

“We had propaganda. Media machines for government [that didn’t really look to being commercial television]. The need was obvious,” he said, speaking to radio program Marketplace.

“I’m Saudi, but I’m also an Arab Muslim in the Middle East who, like many people in my generation, is looking to see this part of the world evolve to become modern and fit for our children to live in. Everyone tries from his side.”

And try he did, bringing MBC to the Middle East in 1991. “This has been my dream from the start. I have always been in-

terested in media since I was a child. When I was a student, I was always keen on researching methods to improve Arab media and make it independent and contemporary, so I started with [this] channel,” he added in an interview with a publication of the International Advertising Association, UAE Chapter.

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Since starting at MBC, Al Ibrahim has been bestowed with several media awards, including Media Man of

the Year at the Mena Cristal Awards 2008.

01/Sheikh Waleed Al Ibrahim/

01In the 20 years since its launch, the MBC Group has broadened its

reach from family entertainment programs to new channels focusing on specific audiences such as children’s entertainment (MBC 3) and women’s issues (MBC 4).

Under Al Ibrahim, the firm also rolled out MBC Action, MBC Persia, and channels dedicated to screening movies: MBC 2 and MBC Max. The conglomerate has also expanded out into other forms of media and runs two radio stations (MBC FM and Panorama FM), in addition to developing several online platforms.

As the firm grew it relocated its office to Dubai Media City. It was, however, the launch of MBC’s 24-hour Arabic language news

channel, Al Arabiya, that created the most waves in the region. Al Ib-rahim’s vision for the station’s news agency post 9/11 was to position it “as the CNN to Al Jazeera’s Fox News, as a calm, cool, professional media outlet that would be known for objective reporting rather than shouted opinions,” The New York Times reported.

During his interview with the American daily, he said he thought the market was ready for change. ‘‘After the events of September 11, events in Afghanistan and Iraq, people want the truth,’’ he said. ‘‘They don’t want their news from the Pentagon or from Al Jazeera.’’

Despite controversies that have surrounded it, Al Arabiya has emerged as the main Arab competitor to Doha-based Al Jazeera, with both sta-tions screening gory footage of the Iraq war in their attempt to show the ‘real truth’. The difference between the channels, however, is the approach taken. While Al Jazeera has been unpopular with most Arab regimes and has had offices shut in several countries at different points of time, MBC’s news network takes the stand of talking about everything, “but in a respectful way,” says Annet Aris, adjunct professor of strategy at Insead.

Since he started MBC, Al Ibrahim has been bestowed with several media awards, including the Knight of the Arab Media award by the Arab League in 2006 for his role in the industry. He has also been given the Arab Media Luminary Award and was named Media Man of the Year at the fourth MENA Cristal Awards in Lebanon in 2008.

Sam Barnett, chief operating officer and general manager, MBC, who has worked with Al Ibrahim since 2002, told Communicate when the Cristal award was announced that Al Ibrahim is also well liked by his employees. “People are prepared to follow someone who is quite clearly very passionate about his field – and so evidently successful in it,” he said. And while Barnett noted that the founder of MBC is reluctant to take his breaks and is a bit of a workaholic, Al Ibrahim would like an early retirement. “I’d love that, you know. Spend some time with my children,” he says.

ChairmanMiddle East Broadcasting Corporation

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“This has been my dream from the start. I have always been interested in media since I was a child. When I was a student, I was always keen on researching methods to improve Arab media.”

ChairmanMiddle East Broadcasting Corporation

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The art collector

CEOOMG MENA

t is coming to the end of the Gulf winter when Communicate meets Elie Khouri, the CEO of regional media powerhouse Omnicom Media Group (OMG) MENA. As we walk to his office through the steel, glass and concrete hallways, there are large artworks on the walls and Khouri explains he has been involved not only in choosing them, but also in the whole aesthetic of the new headquarters of the company he set up in 2001. He’s clearly enjoying this.

Khouri graduated from the American University of Beirut’s MBA program in 1988, which he undertook as he worked on his first career, finance. But the Black Monday stock market crash of October 1987 had already shaken not only the economy, but also the faith of many of its engineers. Khouri was no exception.

So he got into advertising “by accident.” He says, “By chance I caught up with a friend and I asked him what he did. He said, ‘Advertising: it’s a great business. We’re working with clients, we have meetings, we travel, etcetera. It’s an exciting world, so why don’t you check it out?’”

He did. Then he applied for jobs and got two offers. One was from Alain Khouri at Impact BBDO in Cyprus; the other was from Rafic Saadeh at FCB in Athens. Impact was offering a bit more per month, so Khouri joined the company as a junior account executive.

Khouri formed OMD from the media departments of Impact BBDO, TBWA\Raad and the Saudi and UAE DDB agencies in the region. “In this part of the world, and in our business specifically, it’s all about managing cultures and sensitivities,” he says. “My job was to help them conceive a different path and realize the opportunity that the consolidation of their media interests would bring about for them and their clients.”

Besides OMD, OMG also includes PHD, a global planning network with offices in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Integral, a research and insights consultancy and, most recently, M2M, also part of a global planning network. Several business units and divisions have also been added over the years.

OMG today is a company with a strong digital focus. “We were the first to create a stand-alone digital company in 2005,” says Khouri. “We have major

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“Our business is going to become more accountable, more analytical, more data-driven, more measureable,

and more ROI-driven.”

02/Elie Khouri/

02investments in mobile, because we see that mobile in 2014 will become crucial, so we are starting now,” he says.

What irritates Khouri about the industry is dishonesty. “It’s not about the financial thing,” he says. “It’s about the moral and the ethical component of our industry. Basically we need to say things as they are.”

The industry is changing, though. “Our business is going to become more accountable, more analytical, more data-driven, more measurable, and more ROI-driven because it’s all about delivering results,” he says. Even so, he argues many agencies are more concerned with awards.

This should change as global holding companies buy out the founders of the region’s communication industry. “I think there is little effort by everybody to move forward,” he says. “Everybody is driven by short-termism versus doing things for the long term. But that’s changing for the better, because as hold-ing companies gain control, our regional industry is more and more driven by international best practices and follows the thinking of publicly listed companies.”

Khouri’s legacy will eventually be the talent that has worked with him and will carry on his business. “I hope I will leave behind me an organization that is built on people, basically,” he says. “Not on money and profit and awards, and what have you. I also hope that I have a succession plan and a team that can take it on and continue doing a brilliant job.”

When he is ready to move on, perhaps he will turn to art. Along with an interest in wine, art is becoming a growing part of Khouri’s life. He’s lining the walls of the new offices with contemporary work of the sort that he admires and is beginning to collect.

If he could buy a work by only one artist, it would be Jean-Michel Basquiat, the New York graffiti artist who died of a heroin overdose aged 27 in 1988 – the year Khouri started in advertising. Now Basquiat’s paintings are worth as much as big-ticket works of art. “I appreciate Picasso,” says Khouri. “But I wouldn’t buy a Picasso myself; I’d buy a Basquiat instead. A Basquiat is worth $5 million, $6 million, $10 million, when a Picasso is maybe $20 million. I can’t afford it, but I would love eventually to buy one of his works because he is fresh. He gives a new dimension to things.”

The last artwork Khouri bought before Communicate met him was a steel dog statue. “I found this Italian artist named Velasco Vitali, who specializes in statues of dogs in metal, steel sheets mainly. They are amazing. I found a gallery that sells his art in Belgium. I got in touch with them and bought one of his pieces. This was last week. I’m so happy. Art makes me happy.”

Then Khouri points to an artwork in his office. It is a perspex box, perhaps 40cm by 20cm. It contains red shapes looking like straws and pieces of paper.

“This red box, what does it mean to you?” he asks. Communicate is torn between “shredded documents” and “scaffolding.”

“The beautiful thing about art is that everyone has his own interpretation,” says Khouri. “To me this is organized chaos, because it’s boxed. It’s chaos in a box, it’s organized chaos.”

And that’s a metaphor for the world, he says. “It’s a messy world, but it still functions. It’s there. It works and our job as communication experts is to make sense of this complexity around us.”

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“I hope I will leave behind me an organization that is built on people, basically. Not on money and profit and awards. I also hope that I have a succession plan and a team that can take it on and continue doing a brilliant job.”

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Trading up

hen Akram Miknas, chairman of the Middle East Communication Network (MCN) was a student in Lebanon, he used to take time off to sell encyclopedias in Libya. He wasn’t quite a door-to-door salesman, but he would go from shop-to-shop in Benghazi.

“One of the shopkeepers was sitting on a platform selling commodities like rice and salt,” says Miknas. “I said, ‘If your son asks you a question, don’t you want to answer?’ and he said, ‘Yes; and how do I answer?’ I said, ‘You just open the encyclopedia and look at that question and you have an answer.’ He said, ‘Wow, that’s important.’ I forgot to tell him it’s in English, but he said, ‘I’ll buy it.’

“I said there are 21 volumes, and he said, ‘What is this volume on business? How many kilos?’ I said you don’t sell them by kilos, you sell them by numbers.’

He said, ‘No, no, no, I only buy by kilo.’ So I weighed the encyclopedia and went back and said, ‘They are 362kg, at $1,100.’ He signed the contract and then I gave him the books, and in the contract I said, ‘21 volumes at equivalent to 362kg.’”

When he did these aptitude tests at university they pointed him towards anything to do with communication, rather than science. It seems fitting that he is still selling things, at the helm of one of the region’s biggest advertising, media and PR agency networks. He also owns the McDonald’s franchise in Lebanon.

Miknas got a scholarship from Chrysler to study in Detroit. He also worked part-time at JWT, when they were handling Pepsi. He looked at marketing on the client side or advertising as a career.

“Advertising seems to be fun, because I used to do pamphlets and booklets and cut and paste this and that for my exhibitions,” he says. “And also it has girls and models and it’s sexy.” His father almost had a heart attack when he told him. “Couldn’t you be a doctor?” he asked.

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Today Miknas’s MCN - which encompasses Fortune Promoseven, Universal Media, Waber Shandwick and

more - has billings of around $800 million.

03/Akram Miknas/

Back in Beirut, Miknas went to ad agency Pimo. At the interview, the owner, George Nader, said Miknas would be over-qualified. “In this business we don’t need someone who’s got BAs and stuff like that.” It was 1968. “Whatever we offer you as a salary will be too little.” He was right; Miknas had been earning more than the offered $260 when he was driving buses in Detroit.

So he gathered six university friends, who each put in 1,000 Lebanese lira as silent partners. That was around $300 per person. They called the agency Promotion Seven.

“Six months later we had a bad client,” says Miknas. “He gave us business for 60,000 lira and didn’t pay, so the company was almost cut.” His partners’ fathers (“We were all kids”) wanted to bankrupt the company, but Miknas said he could still make it work.

He paid the liabilities and changed the name to Promoseven. It was a one-man show, with Miknas using architecture students to design ads. A chicken brand, Le Poul, gave the company enough busi-ness to grow. “The guy [Philip Nasrallah] started from nothing, and I had nothing, and he had a vision of branding a chicken.” They start-ed adding aluminum bracelets to the chickens. “That chicken, within three years, became 70 percent of the Lebanese market.” People could trust the brand.

In 1975, Miknas moved to Dubai, but within a year he was based in Bahrain (he’s since become a citizen of the country, a rare honor). Cathay Pacific had started flying there, and the airline’s MD asked Promoseven, the agency it used in Lebanon, to pitch. Promoseven won, and shortly afterwards partnered with Cathay Pacific’s Hong Kong agency, Fortune. Fortune Promoseven was born.

Much of the agency’s business was in Saudi Arabia, and it grew fast. In 1985 it started handling Coca-Cola’s advertising. In 1986, McCann took a 15 percent share in the business (recently Interpublic, McCann’s holding group raised its investment to 51 percent in MCN, Miknas’s group). Today MCN (which encompasses Fortune Promoseven, UM, Weber Shandwick MENA and more) has billings of around $800 million, he says.

“To me, money has never been an issue,” he says. “I’m ready to lose any amount of money to make sure I am getting results.” Like the boxer Muhammad Ali, he says, his philosophy is to win, not to make money. “Because he’s number one, he makes money.”

With the money Miknas makes, he indulges himself with “everything,” he says. He has built a home in Bahrain made from imported Leba-nese stone. Next door is his “antique house.” It has collections of music boxes, old cars, and more.

“I love man’s ability to do things,” he says.” When MCN moves to its own 15-storey building in Dubai’s Tecom area, it will contain Miknas’s “dream museum” – of the moving image, prior to electricity.

Miknas has been trading up since he was a student, and now he’s enjoying the proceeds.

Chairman / Middle EastCommunication Network

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“To me money has never been an issue. I’m ready to lose any amount of money to make sure I am getting results.”

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The patient man

Chairman & CEOMenacom Group

oseph Ghossoub, chairman and CEO of Menacom, joined the advertising industry by chance. War was raging in Lebanon and it it became too danger-ous to stay, so he looked abroad.

In 1979 he got his first job as a junior account executive with Intermarkets in Saudi Arabia, “not knowing much about the business.” “But I’m a fast learner,” he says. After a couple of years he had been promoted to group account director, and went back to Beirut.

Two years later he moved to Dubai as deputy general manager of the Dubai office of Intermarkets. Within three months he was general manager, and a year later was regional director for Intermarkets. “As I said,” he says, “I’m a very fast learner.”

From 1985 to 1993, Ghossoub built the Dubai office of Intermarkets from less than 10 employees to 100. “At that time it was huge in Dubai,” he says.

At the end of 1993, Intermarkets was leading its field, but things weren’t working out for Ghossoub. “I wasn’t seeing eye-to-eye with the management of the company, and the shareholding wasn’t happening,” he says. “Suddenly I decided to go on my own.”

So, as a joint venture with Talal Makdessi, Ghossoub formed his own agency, Team. In 1996 he started talking with Young & Rubicam and, in 1999, the New York-based agency took a 25 percent share in the company. Later that year Team Y&R bought Intermarkets.

Since 2000, Team Y&R has grown other brands, including direct marketing shop Wunderman, and PR agencies Asda’a and Polaris. “It’s a long story,” says Ghossoub, of the years when he was setting up the company. “Full of long hours and a lot of thinking, and a lot of putting together things as well.”

It meant that he seldom saw his family. “I was so much taken by building the company and the agencies and what have you that the time when my children were growing up, I used to go home when they were sleeping,” he says. Even at weekends he was often traveling abroad. “So I missed a lot of time, and that is something I regret. But hey, you can’t have it all.”

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“The company will continue to grow, that’s for sure, because we are set on growth all the way, and without

growth you die.”

04/Joseph Ghossoub/

04Luckily, Ghossoub’s home was kept under control by his wife, he says. “I

was a visitor for more than 10 years of my life.”But he says he’s pleased with his children now. “Let’s say that I’ve given

them something that probably now they will enjoy more,” he says. He wouldn’t have done it differently.

If his children are benefitting from Ghossoub’s hard work, so is he. In 2008, at the height of the economic boom, he sold 60 percent of the company to London-based holding group (and Y&R parent) WPP.

Now Ghossoub is concerning himself with developing the business. “The company will continue to grow, that’s for sure, because we are set on growth all the way, and without growth you die,” he says. Ghossoub is always look-ing for acquisitions, particularly in Egypt and other parts of North Africa. But the current crises there have put them “on a back burner” till Menacom can see what will happen.

“The way I see it, my job now is to make sure the continuity of the com-pany is secure,” says Ghossoub. “Having the right people running the right companies, giving them advice from what I can give them, putting them on the right track, helping them to grow, helping them to become what they should become on their own.”

The industry has become more corporate, says Ghossoub. “Now, today, I can say we have moved from the entrepreneur. It was a regional agency that used to work on its own, independent, with an affiliation with a multinational. Today I think all the big agencies that we see here are fully owned or majority owned by multinationals. There is a big difference between the corporate world and the independent way of operation that used to be.”

“Today is much more financially driven,” he adds. “Today is much more earnings-driven, today is much more corporately driven than it used to be.”

But because companies now are more accountable, says Ghossoub, there is less room for one man to drive the business with his own vision. “When I was on my own I used to take decisions that I could see would lead into trouble probably in the future. Today you cannot do that because you have to work the figures and make sure they match what you are doing.”

There have been hard times: 1994 was tough, he says. That was when he left Intermarkets and decided to move on. “It wasn’t easy,” he says. “Because you are starting from scratch, you are starting fresh with new people, and it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of time to get to where you want.”

It took Ghossoub a year and a half to reach that point. He had left an agency of 100 employees (in Dubai alone – he had grown it from seven or eight) to start one with five, and it took 18 months to grow Team to the same size as Intermarkets in terms of revenues and billings.

When we ask Ghossoub what he would like to be if he weren’t in advertising, he says, “I have always loved machines and manufacturing. And the simple fact for me to see something starting from nothing, the ingredients being put together, and ending up with something packed, has always fascinating me. I can sit in front of a machine for a day watching. It’s like a child in front of a toy. This is something I have always enjoyed watching.”

Perhaps that’s what he’s built: a well-oiled machine.

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Communicate I 19

Chairman & CEOMenacom Group

“The way I see it, my job now is to make sure the continuity of the company is secure. . . It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of time to get to where you want.”

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Listening and learning

CEOChoueiri Group

edia sales is in Pierre Choueiri’s blood. His father, Antoine, who died last year, is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Middle East’s media, marketing and advertising community. In 1970 Antoine began building the Choueiri Group to become the most powerful media representation firm in the region.

So it’s just as well that Pierre, after flirting with the thought of becoming an engineer “for maybe three seconds” found he liked sales. “Even when I was still at school, and during university, I knew I would hopefully end up working with the Group.” Choueiri is now its CEO.

“I started in the UAE on June 27, 1988, handling Abu Dhabi TV,” he says. “I started from the bottom of the whole thing, from A to Z of how the business works: managing booking orders, how do you get a spot on the air, the sales, the whole story. From the bottom of the stairs.”

Pierre Choueiri’s dad didn’t give him an easy ride. “He was very tough,” says Pierre. “If he was here today I would have thanked him personally. By being so tough with me, this is what made me stronger. It wasn’t easy, and it should be this way, especially because I am his son.”

“You should not take things for granted in life,” he adds. “Noth-ing is for granted.”

Antoine taught his son to be transparent and fair. “Be transpar-ent in your dealings with everybody,” is one of the main lessons Pierre learned from his father. “Be fair, transparent and get the respect of the media owners. Don’t play it smart in your dealings, in your contracts, in your way of doing things. If you do that, you will get caught – if not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, the day after tomorrow.”

Under his father’s guidance, Pierre rose to the top of the company

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The Choueiri Group is moving into new technology, with its digital

operation launched in January.

05/Pierre Choueiri/

05until, in 2005, the final transition began. Antoine guided more, while Pierre became more involved in the day-to-day running of the company.

While Pierre may carry a lot of his father’s wisdom, though, there are differences in how the company will be run now. “We are going to be much more technologically advanced,” says Choueiri. He has introduced new projects and new fields (which were delayed by a year due to his father’s death). “Our digital operation has been launched in January, and the market will hear a lot about Digital Media Services (DMS) in due course.”

Even so, digital will never take over from television. It’s no surprise that Pierre is a firm believer in TV; the Choueiri Group represents pan-Arab broadcast giant MBC Group, among several other broadcasters.

The medium may change, but the essence of programming won’t. “The digital world is complementary to traditional media,” he says. “At least for the foreseeable future. In my opinion, TV will never ever be replaced by the Internet or digital, in advertising terms.”

“You might be watching TV over your iPad or something else,” he continues. “But this is still TV; you’re going to watch it. I’m not talking about video-on-demand, I’m not talking about the channels’ plus-one and plus-two and plus-three delayed broadcast. I’m talking about the initial broadcast.

“On your TV set or your iPad or your Playbook, or I don’t know which platform, you are going to watch TV. And by TV I mean the first broadcast.” People want to be the first to know what is hap-pening, and Choueiri Group will be there to sell advertising to the marketers who want to reach them.

Communicate asks why there is a need for a middle-man company such as Choueiri Group. Choueiri replies that the model has proved itself over the three decades the Group has been in business. “Don’t you think that it crossed the mind of those media [we represent] at some point in time to open their own sales department?” he asks. “They did not do it for one simple reason: They have peace of mind. Sometimes you buy peace of mind.”

When it comes to earning the trust of the people who work for him, Choueiri says, the trick is listening. “What did I learn from my dad? It was to listen. One thing which is very difficult is to listen. It is very important, and I am trying to teach everybody around me to listen.” He insists that the people he works with are colleagues, not employees.

And to buy peace of mind for himself, Pierre Choueiri’s currency is distance. “I like to spend four or five days with my wife somewhere remote, where there is no mobile phone.” That’s harder these days, he admits. “Because I cannot switch it off.” He can still play the time differences, though. “I try to be somewhere where there are eight or nine hours’ difference; whenever they are awake in the Gulf I am sleeping. And my phone’s still on; that’s the trick.”

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Communicate I 21

“What did I learn from my dad? It was to listen. One thing that is very difficult to do is listen.

It is very important and I am trying to teach everybody around me to listen.”

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Measured steps

CEOLeo Burnett Group of Companies MENA

aja Trad runs the Leo Burnett Group of Companies MENA by objectives. And he carries those objectives with him in a notebook. They were devised by Leo Burnett Worldwide’s Global Leadership Council, of which he is a board member. “First of all, to be the world’s best creator of ideas that truly move people, bar none,” he says. “It’s not only about a creative idea; it’s about any idea that can contribute to our well-being through the well-being of our clients. This is what drives us all.”

“Creativity has the power to transform human behavior” is an-other Burnett belief, says Trad. “If you want to have creativity that will transform human behavior, it has to be based on solid ideas. Big ideas.”

Raja Trad’s own objective is simply “Keep walking.” And even that is the tag line for a successful Leo Burnett client, Johnnie Walker whisky. It’s an appropriate mantra, though, for a man who has got where he is today with very deliberate steps.

After graduating from the American University of Beirut with a degree in political science and public administration, Trad had no clear direction. He got two job offers: a sales job with 3M and one as a junior account executive with Young & Rubicam ad agency, handling Procter & Gamble.

He chose the latter. He spent a year with Y&R, in Lebanon, then a year in Athens. When Y&R left the region at the end of 1979, Trad returned to Beirut to market Reader’s Digest and An Nahar magazines.

The publications’ ad agency was H&C, and the owners told Trad that Leo Burnett was coming to partner with them. When Leo Burnett opened on January 1, 1981, he moved back to advertising – which he had missed – and in 1984 he was named regional account director on the Philip Morris account.

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“It’s not only about a creative idea; it’s about any idea that can contribute to our well-being through the

well-being of our clients. That is what drives us all.”

06/Raja Trad/

06In 1987 he became sub-regional managing director for Bahrain,

Dubai and Kuwait, based in Bahrain, as well as regional account director for Philip Morris. In 1989 Leo Burnett moved to Dubai. In 1991, 10 years after he’d joined the agency, Raja Trad was named CEO of Leo Burnett Middle East. North Africa wa added to his geographic scope in 2000.

During the good times, Trad has had a light step. “We had some golden years that we will not forget,” he says. “Us and the whole industry. From 2004 to 2008, those were the years when we delivered high double-digit growth figures – in some years in the region of 27 to 29 percent.”

And in the tough times Trad has trudged. The agency had been growing fast when the first Gulf War delivered a big shock to the economic system and knocked the region’s economy down. “I will not forget this,” he says. “It was the first time I really had to take difficult, tough decisions, to ask some people to leave and cut some salaries, because it was about survival of the community and not individuals.”

But he’s also prepared to take a step backwards now and again, and when that year ended more positively than the agency had predicted, Leo Burnett returned the cuts to its employees.

Trad’s agency has a strong sense of community. It is instilled with Leo Burnett beliefs and a sense of camaraderie. The industry has changed, with Starcom coming out of Leo Burnett as a media agency, and MS&L coming to handle PR. But Trad says the com-pany’s philosophy has stayed the same.

“I don’t think that the agency changed, honestly speaking,” he says. “We have built a spirit and a culture in this agency. We cre-ated a culture in this agency that prevailed through all the changes that we have witnessed.”

He keeps the agency together by keeping his team aligned on vision and principles. And, he says, “We have a policy in the MENA region that whenever we have a key position, I will never go and hire someone from outside.

“It has to be from within the agency. Why? Because they under-stand what the brand stands for, they understand what the agency stands for, they respect the culture, they share a vision, and they understand what we went through in order to reach where we are today.”

And that will be what Trad will one day leave behind. “My legacy will be I did what I did: Leo Burnett. When you are part of a company for 30 years, what other legacy do you want? This is my legacy.”

He quotes the agency’s founder, saying, “Leo Burnett once said no one is stronger than all of us. It’s not about one; it’s about all of us. I was very lucky to have around me a team of passionate, committed Burnetters, and together with this team we were able to get to where we are today.”

And from here, Trad will keep walking.

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Communicate I 23

“My legacy will be I did what I did: Leo Burnett. When you are part of a company for 30 years, what other legacy do you want? This is my legacy.”

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Great philosopher

CEOJWT Middle East and Africa

oy Haddad, the chairman and CEO of JWT MENA, is a philosopher – in his education as well as his outlook. He read philosophy at the Sorbonne and graduated from Sciences Po. LAter in his career he attended the executive MBA at Columbia in New York.

He is as fiercely intellectual when he talks about his pastimes as when he talks about work. Haddad laments that people don’t read as much today as they used to, and says he always has at least three books on the go: an essay, a novel and a biography. “I am fascinated with history and I am fascinated with human thinking,” he says.

“My real indulgences in life are effectively books and music,” he says. Although he will listen to any kind of music, Haddad’s desert island discs would be jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, and pian-ist Glenn Gould’s recordings of Bach (“the greatest musician who ever existed”).

His favorite author is the existentialist French writer Camus, which helps explain why he refers often to anxiety when he talks about advertising.

For example, when he talks about what makes JWT different. “Fun-damentally, our anxiety to understand the consumer like no one else; we are first anthropologists.” he says.

Haddad began investing his own intellectual capital in his company in 1984.

He had worked with McCann Erickson in the US and the UK before joining Publi-Graphics in Dubai, a McCann affiliate then. But he felt he could make a go of it with his own agency, Al Mona (“wish,” in Arabic), with two offices – in London and Jeddah.

“What we brought to the party was multinational disciplines, having a multinational background, with a very good understanding of local insights.”

Although the agency quickly grew with clients such as Honda and

According to Haddad, the three characteristics you need to succeed in the communications business are: curiosity, culture, and courage to innovate.

07/Roy Haddad/

07Pif Paf insect killer, it began with one account, RJ Reynolds’ Camel cigarettes, which Haddad won before he even opened the agency.

“RJR made a huge leap of faith at that time,” says Haddad. “The pitch took place in June 1983, and at that time I pitched against big agencies. I was an ambitious young man, but with no agency and no portfolio. But I think they liked what they heard.” He attributes the win to “a very good understanding of the brand and a very good understanding of the consumer, and how these two can be married.”

In 1987, Al Mona and Saudi-based Tihama merged. At the same time, the newly formed agency, TMI, signed an affiliation agreement with US-based JWT, which had previously had a loose agreement with Tihama. In the late 1990s, JWT took a majority share, and TMI was renamed JWT MENA. Haddad has been a JWT man for 24 years. “I’m very much JWT,” says Haddad. “Some people consider me of the old guard.” At the start of 2011 he was named CEO of the newly created region of Middle East and Africa.

Nonetheless, Haddad drives his agency to stay ahead of the game. Another JWT attribute is “our anxiety to stay innovative and abreast of all the changes, from the channel evolution to the solidity of the intellectual capital of the company.”

They do that through good and bad. “For me, failure is part of learning,” he says. “Like any company, you go through peaks and troughs. But learn from your troughs and you don’t get complacent with your peaks.”

“I’m very critical of our agency’s work,” he adds. “This attitude – I think – has always put us where we are today. How can we do it better? Where are we adding value?

“We ask fundamental questions about us, about our relations with clients, about our value to clients. I think as long as we do that and don’t fall in the trap of either complacency or arrogance, that’s the formula for success.

“Some would call it resilience and determination. For me, it’s just striving ahead.”

To succeed in the communications business you need three char-acteristics, says Haddad. First, and most important, is curiosity, and a desire to keep up to date with all that is happening with consumers, clients and markets.

Second is culture. “If you are to distill that curiosity into an actionable plan, you need this culture to be able to sensitize all that – if you learn something from the market, what does it mean for your business, the category, the client, the consumer?”

The third attribute is the courage to innovate. “If you are to offer innovative solutions, business-building solutions, sometimes they might be controversial and you need to have the courage to stick by them,” he says.

“If you have these three characteristics within the industry, you will do well,” says Haddad. He evidently has all three. He is cultured, and the curious philosopher in him has the courage to keep asking those fundamental questions.

R

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Communicate I 25

“My real indulgences in life are effectively books and music.” Haddad’s desert island discs would be Miles Davis and Glenn Gould’s recordings of Bach, “the greatest musician who ever existed.”

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Intrepid explorer

Chairman & CEO TBWA/Raad

amzi Raad, the chairman and CEO of regional agency network TBWA/Raad (a group that includes Ketchum-Raad and Integer Middle East), likes exploring. If he wasn’t in advertising, that’s what he’d like to be: an explorer. Even within his work, he likes to stray from the beaten path.

Raad is from a family of pharmacists. The Raads still have a pharmacy in Perth, Australia. But Ramzi refused to join the American University of Beirut’s School of Pharmacy as his parents wanted. Instead, he studied business administration with an emphasis on marketing (AUB didn’t have a mass communications program in the 1960s).

He was passionate about advertising from early on, and an uncle managed to get him an internship at a small but growing agency called Publicite Universeale. “I got into this agency, which had a lot of contacts, at a time when they wanted to change and become more professional,” he says. “Maybe I was a catalyst in helping them do that while I was doing my internship. Very quickly I climbed the ranks. The year I graduated, I had almost become a full-time employee. I was choosing the timing of my courses to allow me to stay at work.”

Raad’s official title was junior account manager, working on Cutty Sark Scotch and Ronson lighters, among other accounts, but he says he became a “jack of all trades.” He was handling business, but at the same time he was a writer and photographer and crea-tive director.

Then he moved to a new agency formed by a merger between Middle East Marketing and Advertising Services (MEMAS), Hanna International Marketing and Advertising (HIMA), and Pharaon Ad-vertising. These agencies had come together to form Intermarkets, and the agency hired Raad to lead the Shell oil business.

Raad’s first visit to the UAE was in 1969. “The managing direc-

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TBWA\RAAD today boasts more than 600 people

on its staff.

08/Ramzi Raad/

08tor of Shell said, ‘You’re the advertising agency guy, right?’” says Raad. “He called his PA, who came in with a bundle. She gave it to me; it contained an overall. He said, ‘You put on the overall and this is the roster of the service stations where you have to go on duty. You go, you fill gasoline, you wipe the windshields of cars, you cash the tips, and you will get a real feel of how the business runs. And then after a week you come and we will have our discussion.’”

Raad says it was “a great way to learn the business.” He com-plained to his boss at the time, but he’s a man who likes trying things. And he learned from it.

The experience stood him in good stead. He won Canada Dry in Oman when a former client was transferred there. The client explained to his boss why they should hire Raad’s agency: When Canada Dry Cola had been launched in the UAE, Raad took the whole agency team on the delivery trucks, and they went to all the shops in order to get a feel of the market.

Raad stayed with Intermarkets while it worked in partnership with Saatchi & Saatchi in the region (previously it had worked with internationals including JWT, Ogilvy and Lintas, but the Saatchi partnership was an exclusive one). For a period he was in London, working closely with Saatchi’s office there.

But then Saatchi looked to restructure, and offered to buy majority shares in Intermarkets. When Intermarkets refused, Saatchi went on its own (poaching some staff from Intermarkets in the process).

Suddenly Intermarkets was on its own. Raad had risen to execu-tive vice-president, working with Erwin Guerrovich.

The agency looked for a new international partner, and Raad says that since most global agencies had already formed regional alliances, there were few left to choose from. BDDP and TBWA were the two most likely candidates. Then Omnicom merged the two together.

But TBWA wanted more than an affiliation from day one. Guerrovich said no, and TBWA walked away. Guerrovich sold his agency to The Holding Group (Team Y&R). The moment Intermarkets was sold, Raad left.

For several months, Raad worked with Dubai Government to establish the Dubai Press Club and other information infrastructure projects – until September 1999, when TBWA, looking to get into the market, backed Raad in launching a new agency.

With Raad’s government contacts it was easy to find both a li-cense and an office, and he was back in the business as a majority partner in TBWA/Raad. Ten years on, that agency has more than 600 people on its staff.

Raad is still exploring. In his free time he wanders the villages of his native Lebanon, meeting and painting people who practice forgotten crafts. It’s not a regular hobby, but Raad’s not a regular guy.

He has striven with TBWA to change the rules of advertising, as he likes to say. And he’s always trying something different.

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Communicate I 27

Raad is still exploring. In his free time he wanders the villages of his native Lebanon, meeting and painting people who practice forgotten crafts. It’s not a regular hobby, but Raad’s not a regular guy.

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All in good time

fter more than 40 years in the advertising business, Memac Ogilvy CEO Edmond Moutran says he has learned not to rush.

“Take everything in God’s good time,” he says. “Rushing knowledge is not good. So many young people join the industry because it is ‘sexy.’ It is a very, very interesting industry, but everybody is in too much of a hurry.”

“People will give up a job at a big agency to go to a tiny agency just for a different title,” he says. He wasn’t in such a hurry when he started out.

But then again, his first title was managing director. He admits that it was of an office that only had one person – himself. It was 1969, and he had been hired to open Intermarkets’ Bahrain office.

Moutran had stopped by Intermarkets’ Lebanon office with a girlfriend who was one of the agency’s clients. While he was waiting for her to finish a meeting, one of the partners asked him who he was. Moutran said he had just graduated from Southwest Missouri State University with a degree in marketing, and was taken to see Erwin Guerrovich, the head of Intermarkets at the time. Guerrovich hired him on the spot and sent him to Bahrain.

Despite his high-ranking start, Moutran says people should earn their titles. “When you go to the military, you don’t become a general because you threaten to leave; you become a general because you are a true leader. “

If he wasn’t in advertising, Moutran would have liked to be in the military – army or airforce, he says. He did one month’s mandatory military service in Lebanon, but admires discipline. “I love armies, I love parades, I love the hierarchy and discipline of an army,” he adds. “I always describe my team as an army with a big heart.”

Moutran may admire discipline, but he also admires the showy side of the services. And there’s a flamboyant, renegade streak about him. When he tried to explain to his mother what marketing was, his father helped out, saying in Arabic, “He sells words.” His hobbies include driving classic cars (he has three E-type Jaguars in Beirut) and motorboating, and he bought his first motor boat to get himself out of trouble.

A

Moutran is looking to sell and become a minority shareholder. He has been in talks with WPP, Ogilvy’s

holding group, and is close to an agreement.

09/Edmond Moutran/

09In 1983 Moutran left Intermarkets to found Memac, with one client, Silk Cut

cigarettes. His capital was only $13,000 of his own money, and he quickly ran up debts.

Moutran heard a major media owner was coming from Saudi to see him in a month. Memac owed him money, and he was coming to tell Moutran he would only accept cash from now on.

“My only client at the time, Silk Cut, said to me, ‘I hear you don’t have any money,’ and I said, ‘You heard right,’” says Moutran. “He said, ‘How can I help you? You are doing a good job for us.’”

Silk Cut payed Moutran some of the money it owed him. “And that first cheque arrived, for 187,000 Bahraini dinars,” says Moutran “I put 100,000 dinars in a blocked account (which is still there today – still that same 100,000 in that bank account in Bahrain) and the other amount of money I took and I thought, how can I kill this damn rumor that I am bankrupt?”

He continues, “People know I am energetic, people know I am adventurous, but nobody would think I am stupid.” So he bought furniture for the office. And a large yacht.

“[The media owners] arrived and I told them, ‘Let’s go and have lunch,’ and I took them to the marina. And I made sure that the guys at the marina came and talked to me about my boat, which I just bought in the marina.

“So the first guy said, ‘Oh, Eddie, we’ve just washed your boat.’ ‘Oh Eddie, we’ve just fuelled your boat.’ So [my visitors] started looking at each other. ‘What boat?’

“‘That boat.’“‘When did you buy that?’“‘Oh, about a month ago. I’ve got money; I bought a boat. What’s wrong

with that?’“And they said, ‘So there’s no need to ask you for cash.’“‘Of course you can ask me for cash payment; what discount will you give me?’”That killed the rumor, and Moutran fell in love with boating.There’s a playful side to Moutran, and he says he would like other agencies

to be friends as well as competitors. “Roy Haddad of JWT was a competitor and an enemy, but I didn’t know him,” says Moutran. “After, I got to know him. We started working together as partners in many ways [Memac Ogilvy and JWT both have shares in Mindshare in the region] and competitors in many ways. He’s my best friend; I trust him with my life.”

Now he’s looking to sell, and become a minority shareholder in the company he started. Moutran has been in talks with WPP, Ogilvy’s holding group, for several years now. He says they are close to an agreement.

“It had nothing to do with the money, funnily enough” he says. “And it’s nothing to do with WPP; I think it’s me. I have a very complicated set-up. My children being in the business – all three sons are in the business – that becomes complicated. This needed some careful handling.”

When the deal goes through, perhaps it will give Eddie Moutran some more time to spend with his wife (who he calls his best friend) and some time to drive his cars and cruise in his boat.

Whatever he will do, he doesn’t seem in a hurry to get there.

CEOMemac Ogilvy and Mather

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Communicate I 29

“Take everything in God’s good time. Rushing knowledge is not good. So many young people join the industry because it is ‘sexy.’ It is a very, very interesting industry, but everybody is in too much of a hurry.”

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Steps to success

Chairman & CEOImpact BBDO

ife can take unexpected turns. That’s what Dani Richa found in the early ’80s, when he was in Paris studying to become an architect. The chairman and CEO of regional ad agency network Impact BBDO recalls the moment that changed his career: It was the Night of the Ad Eaters, an extravaganza of television ads shown in a Paris cinema. “I stayed overnight, and the next morning I was determined that this was what I wanted to do in life,” he says.

He changed his major, but held out for several months before he plucked up the courage to tell his father there wouldn’t be another architect in the family.

Richa graduated in 1986. Although there were job opportunities in Paris, he rushed back to Beirut after a girl, and landed a job with local agency Lead Advertising (which also boasted talent such as Ramsey Naja and Joe Ayache). Richa is a man who climbs fast, and he earned three promotions in six months. By the third he had become head of creative. But the 22-year-old Richa resigned on the spot. “I said, ‘Look, I cannot be that good. So if I go up this fast, there’s something wrong with this place,’” he says.

Richa asked around to find a good agency and was told to check out Leo Burnett. So he went to meet Farid Chehab, its head at the time. “It looked more like an agency,” he says. After a few months, Richa had proved his worth and was put on Procter & Gamble. P&G put pressure on the agency to move a creative director to Saudi Arabia, and Richa was asked to relocate.

A good salary with a favorable exchange rate meant Richa was looking at a raise of 20 times his salary. Plans were made and he was due to leave at the end of his first year. But again fate knocked on his door, in the form of Impact BBDO boss Alain Khouri. “Alain had a great eye for talent,” says Richa, who flew to Cyprus for a weekend to discuss an offer. He met Lance de Masi, who was heading up the Cyprus office. He liked Khouri, de Masi and Cyprus, and Impact BBDO made him an offer in Cypriot pounds. “I didn’t know what it represented, so I said, ‘No, no, it’s too little,’ he says.” They raised it. Twice. Then he realized that in dollars, it was more than Leo Burnett’s Saudi offer. “Better money, better place,” he says.

L

After a year-and-a-half break, Richa returned to BBDO, becoming managing director of the agency, as well

as running regional creative.

10/Dani Richa/

10He told Chehab he was leaving and his boss “went berserk.” He told Richa

to put a number against each office in the region. Richa reluctantly complied. “I made something very ridiculous. I put in Lebanon twice what I was going to get in Saudi. And I put in Saudi four or five times what they had offered me.” He expected, and wanted, to be turned down.

The next morning Chehab told him he’d give him Richa what he asked for in Saudi. Taken aback, Richa said he’d need to think about it. “He fumed,” says Richa. “He thought I wanted to go and negotiate.”

Richa asked his father what to do. His Dad’s advice was, “If they are paying you that kind of money, it means you must end up making that kind of money at some time. You are not in a hurry to make the money; don’t go to Saudi. Cyprus is a better place.” Richa resigned, and had to clear his desk immediately.

He and Chehab are good friends today, but it took a while to patch things up.BBDO was “going through a transition” when Richa arrived. “They had some

issues, and there was a restructuring, people left and people came,” he says. Richa arrived just after Tony Camp and Joe Saadeh left to form CS&S Grey. He became creative director when he was 23.

In 1989 BBDO won Pepsi from Leo Burnett, and the brand is still one of BBDO’s big clients. In 1993, though, clients started leaving, and there was pressure to move to Dubai. Dubai was quiet, while Lebanon was becoming more attractive as the war settled and Hariri came to power. “I wanted to go back,” says Richa. He took a job for a year and three months, between 1994 and 1995, when he was regional creative director for Publigraphics. He was based in Lebanon, but covering the region.

“I belong to BBDO,” says Richa. And in 1995 he was asked to come back as a partner. “I wasn’t just doing the creative; I was doing the whole thing,” he says. “That’s when I started seeing the other side of the business.”

“I never thought I wanted to go into management and get out of creative work,” he says. “But I was so worried that if they would bring somebody new, they would change the agency, and it would take the agency somewhere else.”

So Richa became managing director of the agency as well as running regional creative. Elie Khouri, now CEO of Omnicom Media Group MENA, was his as-sociate managing director, until he left to start the media agency.

Richa stayed in Beirut, then expanded BBDO’s operations in the Levant, then Algeria. Then he was named chief operating officer, covering the Levant, North Africa and Saudi Arabia. He was still chief creative officer too.

In February of this year, Impact BBDO’s chairman and CEO became chairman emeritus, and Richa took over his job. Now he’s running the whole agency.

Perhaps one day he’ll turn to politics. In the last parliamentary elections, BBDO ran campaigns for 21 candidates of Hariri’s Future Movement. “The beauty of this,” he says, “is usually you do a campaign and you wait to see the results. This was sitting there at night seeing the votes come up.” He says it is one of his proudest moments. “It’s not just they will sell or they will not sell. If you really believe that these guys are better for the country, you feel that what you are doing is important for your kids.”

He’s certainly good at getting people – like those 21 candidates – to where they want to be. And is sure to do the same for himself.

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“I belong to BBDO . . . I was so worried that if they would bring somebody new, they would change the agency, and it would take the agency somewhere else.”

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The workaholic

ChairmanVivaki MENA

ave no doubt about it, Alex Saber is a workaholic. He says so himself. As chairman of Publicis Groupe’s media communications arm Vivaki in the MENA region, he works 18 hours a day, he tells Communicate. His family lives in his home country of Lebanon, and he visits them regularly. But when he is in Dubai he is all about work. So much so, he says, that his main hobby – if you can call it that – is simply spending time by himself.

Even Saber’s favorite book is business title: Who Moved My Cheese?, Spencer Johnson’s 1998 fable about change in the workplace.

When Saber is not actively managing the company, he stays up to speed on digital developments in the fast-changing world of media. “What I push myself a lot to do right now is try to be up to speed on the changes that are happening on the digital front,” he says.

He admits, though, that the region is not as digitally advanced as other markets. “Our actual digital billings are not more than 5 percent of our total billings,” he says. “They are still fairly low; there is still a lot of room for growth.” The agency, he says, is bigger than any of its competitors in terms of billings, and digital is Vivaki’s “key focus.” “Our objective is that in three years’ time it will be 20 percent,” he adds. “I think it is a stretched objective, but I think it is definitely going to grow significantly in the com-ing two or three years. We are working on it. That is the future.”

That future, with its digital focus, is about people rather than technology. “I think one of the greatest assets of this group is the people that we have,” he says. He admits that one of his character flaws might be trying to make life too easy for them. “My weak spot is: I want people around me to be comfortable. I would re-ally go out of my way to make sure people are comfortable and satisfied, and I think it kills me.”

Saber began his career in August 1989 with the research firm Pan-Arab Research Company (PARC), after graduating from the University of Iowa with a master’s degree in business administration. Two years later, in January 1991, he took a job with one of PARC’s clients, Leo Burnett. He became an executive in the advertising agency’s media department, handling its Philip Morris tobacco account.

Media was more of an afterthought to creative work then, he says. “We were, if you want to call it, the second-class citizen of an agency,” he says. But Saber worked to change that. When Starcom separated from Leo Burnett to handle the agency’s me-dia externally, Saber moved with it. At the start of 2011 he was made chairman of Vivaki MENA, the umbrella entity that contains Zenithmedia and Starcom MediaVest Group.

Every question about himself Saber turns back to the agency. “This is my problem,” he says. “I think a lot about work. That’s what my wife tells me: ‘Alex, you are too much geared into work,’ and I sometimes lose track of myself.”

But it makes him happy, and looking at where Vivaki is today, he’s good at it.

“I think a lot about work. That’s what my wife tells me.

I sometimes lose track of myself.”

At the start of 2011 Saber was made

chairman of Vivaki MENA.

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Power List Communicate I 33

Not one to brag

CEOMindshare MENA

amir Ayoub doesn’t like the press. Before Communicate’s microphone goes on, he tells us this is the first time he has spoken to the media in ages. But in the middle of last year, Mind-share employed a public relations manager and began seeking more coverage.

Ayoub is proud of being unlike many in the industry, saying he doesn’t like to brag. Even when we ask him to describe himself, he is coy. “I don’t like to describe myself, but people describe me,” he says. “Other people say that I am tough, but friendly; some say that I am very honest; some say that I am successful; stubborn. At the end of the day, let other people talk about myself, rather than me talking. I would rather criticize myself than give credit to myself.”

Ayoub has two masters degrees – in computer science and in math statistics. “They have nothing to do with advertising,” he admits. His first job was with PARC (Pan-Arab Research Company) in 1987 in Lebanon. He moved to Kuwait in 1990 and stayed there until Iraq invaded, when he moved to Dubai. He stayed in Dubai from late in 1992 and joined Memac in 1993. When Mind-share launched in October 1999 (it sprang from Memac Ogilvy’s media department), Ayoub was appointed managing director for the Gulf. And in October 2004, he became CEO of Mindshare in the MENA region.

Ayoub still holds analysis in high regard. “Research is in my blood,” he says. That’s one of the reasons that he launched Mindshare’s research arm, Mindsight, in 2006. Having research in-house gives Mindshare “a strong, competitive edge,” he says.

Ayoub refuses to be drawn on his weaknesses, other than saying, “I don’t care about myself. I never think of myself. Some people say it’s a strength, some people say a weakness.”

As for material indulgences, “Fancy things mean nothing to me,” he says.

But Ayoub gets satisfaction from his work. One of his proudest moments was winning Unilever’s business in 1993. “No one at the time expected that Memac Ogilvy would win the business,” he says. “When you go to any pitch you predict who has the biggest chance of winning the business. At that time, Memac probably had the lowest chance.”

Communicate asks Ayoub how he celebrated when the win came through. “It’s not about the celebration, it’s about how big the assignment was,” he says. Memac’s media duties began on Jan. 1, and one of the agencies had material to send to Saudi Televi-sion (the agencies dealt with strategy and planning, then; media buying units such as Mindshare dealt with the implementation and buying). The agency had left the request to the last minute.

Ayoub’s team had to stay in the office until the small hours to deliver. The team was only a handful of people.

“I don’t remember the celebration. I’m not into celebration. I’m into doing the job,” he says.

And that’s what he does: He gets the job done. Effectively, meticulously, and without flourish.

“I don’t care about myself. I never think of myself. Some people say it’s a strength,

some say it’s a weakness.”

Ayoub still holds analysis in high regard. That’s one of the reasons that he launched

Mindshare’s research arm.

12/Samir Ayoub/

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Keeping it together

Managing directorHavas Middle East

avas Middle East’s regional managing director likes to keep it together. His business, that is. Pierre Soued heads up not just Euro RSCG’s advertising and public relations arms, but also Havas’s buy-ing unit MPG, and Havas Digital, the French holding company’s new media arm, in the region (combined as Havas Media).

“I represent all Havas activities in this area,” says Soued. “Because you have one point of this, it is much easier; you enter less into the realms of politics or ego.”

Soued’s companies are part-owned by regional business con-glomerate Chalhoub Group. They sprang from Chalhoub’s in-house ad agency, Promopub, which Soued joined in 1983, when Chalhoub was headquartered in Kuwait.

In 1999, Soued reviewed with Patrick Chalhoub, the head of the Chalhoub Group, the strategy for the company. “We started to ask what we want Promopub to do,” he says. “We had two options: either to continue to ‘milk the cow’ with Promopub, and then phase out from the business, or to commit.”

Promopub flirted with other agencies, but then settled on Euro RSCG, part of the French holding group Havas. “The beauty of this melange between Chalhoub and Havas is excellent, because first of all, Havas’s biggest shareholder is Vincent Bolloré; it’s a family business, like Chalhoub,” says Soued. “They both have a tendency to think about the long term. We are not obsessed, if you want, by the quarterly financial report that we have to give. There is a vision more into the long term.”

“They are obsessed with cash,” as is the regional entity, he says. “I mean, cash is king.”

This financial conservatism paid off during the 2008 crisis. “Due to that, we are one of the few agencies in the business that did not have an issue of cash or anything like that,” he says.

And Havas is coming out of the recession with a strong focus on digital. Soued says he is “obsessed” with digital. “I have put everything under the same umbrella,” he says. “What we call Havas Digital is encompassing the expertise of Euro RSCG (that we call Euro RSCG 4D) and Havas Digital as well.”

“Everybody is talking about integration,” he says. “It is a mixture of everything, and in order for the client to respect you, you have to come as a person who believes in a unified approach.” Soued doesn’t like the word “integration.” “It has been overused,” he says. He prefers “unification.”

He’s not always been about unification, though. When ad agencies began spawning breakaway buying units in the late 1990s, Promopub was ahead of the unbundling curve. “We were the first people to cre-ate the first MBU,” he says. “But it was not declared. It was between us and (at that time) Tamra DMB&B, and we used to act as a media buying unit between us and them. From 1995 to 1999 we used to do the media buying for Mars, for General Motors, for Philips and so forth.” When other agencies announced they were creating media buying units, says Soued, “I had a small smile.”

He’s smiling again now as he pulls the different parts of his agency back together.

“I represent all Havas activities in this area. Because you have one point of this, you enter

less into the realms of politics or ego.”

Havas is coming out of the recession

with a strong focus on digital.

13/Pierre Soued/

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Free spirit

CEOPublicis

ustapha Assad, the CEO of Publicis Graphics, started working when he was a student in order to be independent. It’s a personal conviction, he says.

He was born in Senegal, and studied in Paris, where he de-scribed himself as “a happy bachelor.” But for family reasons he returned to Lebanon in 1967 and tried to get himself a job with computer manufacturer IBM.

He was offered the job in March, and told he would start in September. In the interim, he answered a job ad at an agency called Promotec, and was hired. He would work for two months without a salary, before his salary of 150 Lebanese pounds kicked in. It wasn’t a lot.

As an account executive, his clients included Biersdorf and Schwarzkopf and Orlane. He did a good job, his salary was dou-bled, and even though IBM told him he would be starting on 750 Lebanese pounds, he was enjoying himself too much and declined the offer.

After a couple of years, he moved to Pharaon, the oldest ad agency in Lebanon. It had been started by Fouad Pharaon, who Assad calls “the guy who really started advertising in the Arab World.” But Pharaon was ill, and passed away a year later.

Assad moved to the media side of the business for the publish-ing house Edition Oriental, which published Al Ousbou Al Arabi and Magazine.

But in 1973 he left and acquired Publigraphics, a small, strug-gling advertising agency. Assad went looking for business to build the agency, and soon managed to grow his client base with multinationals including General Motors and Nestlé.

Lebanon was at war, and Publigraphics had recently opened in Kuwait. “By hook or crook I wanted Nestlé, and finally I got a job for 500 Kuwaiti dinars,” says Assad. It’s been worth it. “I owe the growth of Publigraphics to Nestlé,” he says.

Publigraphics represented McCann from 1974 to 1986, but their visions began to differ, and they parted ways. Assad’s agency, still independent, was building relationships with Japanese business and other agencies, including Dentsu.

And Assad remained independent until Publicis Groupe’s Mau-rice Levy spoke to him at an IAA meeting in Paris in 1998. “Why don’t we do something together?” asked Levy. After 20 years as an independent, it took Assad 10 minutes to agree. “The overall sensibilities and understanding and vision were more or less easy-going and identical,” he says.

Assad’s still a free thinker, though. He’s not afraid to call out the industry as depressing “Look at the media agencies,” he says. “They are making media lose money, they are losing money, the clients are demanding more and more and are not happy, and it’s becoming discouraging. It’s no more fun.”

“I wouldn’t like to accuse people,” he adds. “But I can tell you there are a few players who damaged the industry.” That’s a typi-cally frank comment from a man who calls himself too emotional and blunt. He remains a free spirit.

After 20 years as an independent, it took Assad 10 minutes to

join Publicis Groupe.

The CEO of Publicis Graphics, Assad started working when he was a student in order

to be independent.

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Human touch

Chairman / UnileverNorth Africa and Middle East

anjiv Mehta, chairman of Unilever in North Africa and the Middle East, had a debut by f ire. Or to be more accurate, by pesticide.

As a rookie accountant with Union Carbide chemical com-pany, he was on the task force sent to Bhopal, India, in 1984, when one of the f irm’s plants released methyl isocyanate gas, ki l l ing and maiming thousands.

“I was a young guy,” he says, “And I believe that was the t ime that a boy became a man.”

Mehta had to go to work under pol ice protect ion, but i t wasn’t the danger that changed him; i t was the exper ience of handl ing people. “As a 23-year-old, one of the tasks I was given was to handle the separat ion of thousands of people,” he says. “ I had grown-up men si t before me with tears rol l ing down their cheeks because they were losing their jobs.”

Through trial and error, Mehta learned how to let people go. “If you have to take a tough l ine, don’t take too much time; don’t delay. Do it in the most humane manner. The important bit is never to let the self-esteem of a person get destroyed. A person may be a worker in your factory, but when he goes home he is a king within his household, so never trample on his self esteem.”

“One of the things that really got ingrained in me is that the certainty of misery is much better than the misery of uncertainty,” he adds.

He was lured to Unilever when the company invited him to visit Dubai in 1992. “What made a difference to me was the way the company treated me for those two days,” he says. A senior manager met him at the airport, and he was entertained by board members for the fol lowing two days. “I st i l l tel l the guys that whenever anyone comes to you to join the company, treat him well,” he says. “Treat him with respect, treat him l ike a king, and he wil l really get interested.”

When Mehta was offered the chance to go to Bangladesh, it was 1998 and the country was in the middle of terrible f looding. The company was in negative growth, and the chal-lenge was huge. Again he was hesitant. But he and his wife, a corporate banker, talked it over. “We said where in your l i fe would you get a great opportunity to turn around a business?” he says. They took the risk.

Over the next three years, he did just that. “The Bangladesh business today is one of Unilever’s iconic businesses,” he says.

His strategy included developing a network of pallydutt rural ambassadors to distr ibute products to their vi l lages. “For the rural youth it became a source of gainful employment.”

Mehta has also worked for Unilever in the Phil ippines, but has been in his current, Dubai-based role since 2008. “I’ve been lucky,” he says of his opportunit ies in l i fe. And he’s made the most of them by being authentic and respectful, and never losing touch with human dignity.

“One of the things that really got ingrained in me is that the certainty of misery is much better than the

misery of uncertainty.”

Sanjiv Mehta, chairman of Unilever in North Africa, was lured to the company when they invited him to

visit them in Dubai in 1992.

15/Sanjiv Mehta/

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Global citizen

global citizen in every sense of the phrase, Gregory Tikhanoff was born to a Russian family in Beirut, and later went on to move to Greece when he was starting his career in marketing. He’s definitely had a taste of different worlds.

Now president and chief operating officer of the Horizon Group in the region, Tikhanoff has worked his way up, since joining the firm in 1984. With an existing combined portfolio in excess of 100 clients, and with more than 400 employees, the group operates offices across the GCC, North Africa and the Levant.

Tikhanoff graduated with a degree in business administration and started with a job in advertising, after which he moved to Greece to market high-end Swiss brands.

He joined the Horizon Group in the 1980s, at a time when it was still struggling to expand its presence in the Middle East, and he was soon made responsible for accounts including everything from FMCG to fashion.

In 2005 he brought GolinHarris, the regional arm of the Chicago-headquartered PR firm, to Dubai. The PR agency operates across 31 offices globally and Tikhanoff became the regional marketing director for its divisions in the Emirates.

In 2010, GolinHarris was named Large PR Agency of the Year at the 11th annual PR Week Awards. “To be recognized as the leading PR agency in the world … is a unique achievement and the Middle East operations’ performance and high quality standards contributed to the firm’s global success,” he said in a company statement.

Meanwhile, under Tikhanoff, the firm expanded its reach further in 2010 with an office in Abu Dhabi, where, according to him, there is great promise for both local and international markets. He noted that there is much to be said about the Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030 in order to attract more stakeholders.

“Telling a story and making it spread by leveraging every com-munications discipline and tool is the only way to achieve author-ity; and this should be the minimum that Abu Dhabi should ask for,” added Tikhanoff, in a statement, marking the launch of the new office.

As one of the first integrated, global marketing communication agencies, Draftcb also launched its innovative “The 6.5 Seconds That Matter” initiative, which focuses on how to target consumers as effectively as possible, making use of the time they are really tuned into programming.

“Telling a story and making it spread by leveraging every communications discipline and tool is the only

way to achieve authority.”

As one of the first integrated, global marketing communication agencies, Horizon Draftcb launched

its “The 6.5 Seconds That Matter” Initiative.

16/Gregory Tikhanoff/

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Brand practice

Regional head of marketingHSBC

ark Mullen’s passion is guitars. “I make quite a lot of noise,” says HSBC’s regional head of marketing. “That’s the bane of my wife’s life, because the guitars are beginning to clog up things.”

He makes less noise at work, though. Mullen, who is from Ireland, has spent most of his career working around the UK from Birmingham to Leeds to London, and is quiet, modest and skeptical. “You’ve got to step out of it to be able to look objectively from the point of view of not being on the inside of the industry. What does this look like to somebody who’s go-ing about their daily lives consuming marketing or consuming communications? Do they believe in it? Is it credible? Then you marry that with knowing how it was created. You’ve got a bit of schizophrenia.”

Mullen certainly gives the impression of an outsider looking in, in the way he talks about the brands he has worked for – including Midland Bank’s Forward Trust Group subsidiary, HSBC’s Internet banking division (which he helped set up), and First Direct, the service-focused direct-banking subsidiary of HSBC. “It’s the UK’s best service delivery organization,” he says of First Direct.

That’s the bank, though, not him. “I am an employee or servant of a brand,” he says. “I’m not the brand.” HSBC is 147 years old (“I’m thankfully not,” says Mullen; he’s 43) and has a personality of its own. Mullen says he’s not patient, but the business is.

HSBC is strategically committed to the Middle East, and it needs to behave that way during the financial crisis, rather than “batten down the hatches, ride it out and keep our heads down.” Big investments like HSBC’s three-to-five-year, multi-million-dollar branding in Dubai Airport, and its five-year commitment to the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship help prove that it’s strong now and will be strong in the long-run.

Mullen, too, is thinking about the long-term. “I’d quite like to work in a different part of the world,” he says. “I’ve worked in Europe, I’ve lived in America, but not worked there, and I’ve worked in the Middle East – and I think the Middle East is a fantastically vibrant and exciting part of the world. I’d like to work in Asia-Pac at some stage, and get a sense of what that is like.”

With 22 years of experience, Mullen says he’s at the mid-point in his career. “But it is the mid-point, it’s not the last quarter,” he says.

Mullen would like to have the opportunity to run a business – not necessarily his own – as opposed to running marketing for a business.

“Absolutely nowhere is it written in any book that I’ve read that you can’t be something else for the second 20 years of your career than you were for the first.”

He says it’s his life’s regret that he was never in a band. “If I could dial back 20 or 30 years, I probably would.” We’re guessing his wife wouldn’t be too happy.

At 43, with 22 years of experience, Mullen says he’s at the mid-point in his career,

not the last quarter.

HSBC is strategically committed to the Middle East, and it needs to behave that way

during the financial crisis.

17/Mark Mullen/

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EffiE® and “E Logo” arE rEgistErEd tradEmarks of EffiE WorLdWidE, inc. and arE usEd undEr LicEnsE by mEdiaquEst corp. aLL rights rEsErvEd.

Prove it

20

11

mena

gemas

DeaDline for entries: 29th september, 2011The GEMAS Effie Mena Awards is the regional version of the Effies, the world’s premier awards for marketing excellence, judged upon real, quantifiable and measurable results from marketing campaigns.

Gala aWarDs CeremonY: 24th november 2011, maDinat Jumeirah, DubaiFor MorE inForMATion, plEASE EMAil: [email protected]

WWW.Gemaseffie.Com

EFFIES A4.indd 1 6/13/11 2:57 PM


Eyes straight ahead

Chief marketing officerGeneral Motors Middle East

adi Ghosn, the chief marketing off icer for General Motors Middle East, manages to be both decisive and flexible at the same time.

He tel ls Communicate that he wil l make a decision fast, then adjust his tactics as that decision is executed, according to how the situation changes. “You need to be f lexible enough to read the environment and to know the right thing to do in order to get the results,” he says. “I’m not changing course, yet I’m adapting to things happening. I can tel l you that if you do something the same way you did three years ago, it won’t lead you to the results.”

This strategy has obviously worked for Ghosn. In 1999, when he started with GM as the brand manager for the f irm’s Cadil lac l ine of cars, GM sold 24,000 vehicles a year. Now it moves 123,000, down from a peak of 144,000 in 2008.

The next move, he says, is to grow market share in the car (as opposed to truck) business. New models such as the C-segment Chevrolet Cruze, and the B-segment Sonic (the smallest cars are in the A-segment; size increases as the segments move through the alphabet) wil l help it compete in a crowded market.

Ghosn refuses to take credit for his company’s growth. “I was part of a team that worked with GM and eventually helped move the business from 24,000 to almost 150,000,” he says. “Everybody has his part, including the dealers and every single sales person.”

When pushed on what makes him successful in his role, though, Ghosn says he is focused on what he does, keeps the big picture in mind, and is discipl ined and consistent. “Because you know where you are heading to, and you just need to keep doing it and keep moving in the right direction,” he says. “Don’t get distracted with X and Y; you need a laser focus on things.”

And he doesn’t get distracted. When his conversation veers off on a tangent, i t quickly swings back to his work. It’s hard to get the man to talk about himself. Instead he tel ls us how GM is concentrating on individual markets these days, rather than treating the region as one entity, as it did unti l 2008.

“It’s easy to say that’s my plan,” he says. “Now, execut-ing the plan and winning is something else. You can do the campaign, you can do the communication, you can do the event, but how can you improve your standing in every single market and segment? That’s a challenge.”

But Ghosn is focused on that challenge. And he l ikes the industry. “Obviously you cannot go into that without hav-ing some passion for cars,” he says. His dream car is the Cadil lac he drives now, a CTS-V Coupe. “It’s a great car to drive. It’s very sporty, i t’s very fun, it’s very powerful, yet it’s understated.”

A l i tt le l ike the man himself. He’s not taking his eyes off the road.

“You need to be flexible enough to read the environment and to know the right thing

to do in order to get results.”

“You can do the campaign, you can do the communication, you can do the event, but how

can you improve your standing?”

18/Fadi Ghosn/

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Critical thinking

Regional Managing DirectorMEC MENA

ohan Nambiar, who heads up MEC in the region, started at the bottom of the advertising ladder when he was 19. His brother got him a job typing up media schedules and presenta-tions part-time. It was 1988 and he was studying part-time as he typed presentations in the corridor of Karishma, a sister agency to Lintas, in Mumbai.

“Once they realised I was too good at typing they directed me into a little corner to write the media booking orders,” he says. His boss then was Satish Mayya, who is now the head operating officer at BPG Maxus, another WPP buying unit in Dubai.

In 1989 he put himself through an advertising and media plan-ning course organized by the Advertising Agencies Association of India. It helped him meet industry seniors, and he was given a project to market the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). He and his team polled people on the street and met with LIC. He still remembers how nervous he was presenting the final plan to the top industry people judging the course. He was the only person awarded a gold certificate.

He was recognized by Karishma, and made a media executive on the textile company Mafat Lal. He also managed consumer electronic goods, carpets, jam and more. Four years into his career he had made planning manager. “Unlike what you see in this part of the world,” he says. “[Here] you become a media director overnight.”

Nambiar moved briefly to Leo Burnett, but didn’t enjoy it. Six months later he wrote to Mayya, and to Kevin Rapose, who was heading media agency Initiative. They put him in touch with Madco, where he worked for two years before joining Joe Ghossoub’s Team Advertising in 1993 (which would later buy Madco). “It’s been a journey since then,” he says. The Mediaedge was born in 2003.

“One of the things about working with Joe is he’s a very smooth operator, a very calm operator,” Nambiar says of Ghossoub. “You’ve studied all of this 10,000 times before you actually do it. There’s no impulsiveness; you don’t jump into certain things.”

Nambiar, too, likes to think things through. “I take my own time to decide, and I don’t jump to conclusions” he says. He doesn’t chase short-term gain. “I only see the long-term plan. I will always see the negative side of it before I jump in; I will study that first.”

This cautiousness echoes the steady steps he has taken to reach where he is today. “When you come up, you will always look down and recognize that you’ve climbed this way,” he says.

“I take my own time to decide, and I don’t jump to conclusions. I only see the long-term plan.”

Nambiar, who heads up MEC in the region, started at the bottom of the advertising ladder when he was 19.

19/Mohan Nambiar/

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20Digital native

Regional vice-president and managing director / Yahoo

ahoo’s regional vice-president and managing director, Ahmed Nassef, is born of the boom. With a background in direct marketing, he cut his digital teeth in dot-com start-ups in California (where he grew up) and New York. He was work-ing on a company developing Napster-era desktop software called OmniPod when the bubble burst and he was left with reams of valueless stock for a product that hadn’t even been completed. “The classic Internet situation,” he calls it.

He heard a radio interview with Samih Toukan, one of the co-founders of Jordanian Internet company Maktoob, and got in touch. Nassef moved to Jordan to head up Maktoob’s sales and marketing and help monetize the company.

Amman was a far cry from the Sil icone Valley and Alley where Nassef had practiced his trade before. “I had been to Cairo on vacations for a week to 10 days a year, and I expected Amman to be Cairo. This was 2001.” But Amman wasn’t Cairo. Nor was it Los Angeles or New York. “I checked into the hotel,” he continues. “It was 7 o’clock in the evening and there were no cars on the street and no one around. It wasn’t my image of an Arab city at al l .” Amman has got busier since then, he adds.

Looking back, he regrets not capital izing more on the Ara-bic offerings of Maktoob. “We started off as the world’s f irst Arabic-English e-mail product, and we had the opportunity to keep growing it but we lost that space.” Instead, Maktoob concentrated more on user-generated content and online communities. It simply wasn’t able to invest in the e-mail offering that would have gone up against the l ikes of Yahoo and Hotmail. “These are some of the challenges faced by a lot of entrepreneurs today when they are competing against a global business. If they don’t have enough funding, they have to make compromises.”

Yahoo bought Maktoob in 2009 (the company previously received financing from investors including Abraaj Capital), and the company now has money to spend on building its offering. Yahoo is making a push for growth in the Middle East, but Nassef says the region is unique in many ways.

“One of the challenges is clearly that in the region, as much as we have a lot of similarit ies, a lot of unifying factors such as culture, language and so on, we also have very distinct differences at a local level,” he says. “It’s not just about having strong international content and local content, but there is a layer of regional content as well, so we have a third layer.”

When Nassef ’s not working (even when he is – he’s a workaholic, he says), he’s often smoking sheesha. “It’s a bad habit I picked up when I moved here,” he says. “When Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo, came over to announce the deal, we were in Cairo and the f irst thing we did was take him to a sheesha spot.”

Nassef ’s favorite place for sheesha is The Sequoia in Cairo. I t’s got some l ife to it.

Nassef cut his digital teeth in dot-com start-ups in California and New York.

“It’s not just about having strong international content and local content, but there is a layer of

regional content as well.”

20/Ahmed Nassef/

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Keeping his focus

COOZain Group

n a wor ld o f Tweets and wa l l pos t ings , be ing in the te lecommunica t ions indus t r y requ i res some leve l o f tech-savvy. The ch ie f opera t ing o f f i ce r o f the Kuwa i t -based Za in Group, Dr. Abdu l Ma lek A l Jaber, i s we l l aware o f th i s , and cons tan t l y s tays in touch w i th h is fans and fo l l owers on Twi t te r and Facebook .

The indus t r y i s a l so one tha t i s cons tan t l y in f lux , re-qu i r ing te lecom f i rms to come up w i th new ideas , wh ich , says A l Jaber, has been one o f the cha l lenges he has faced in h i s p ro fess iona l l i f e .

In an in te r v iew fo r 101 Top Bus iness Leaders , he says , “Th is i s why I a lways s t r i ve to l ea rn more . I have th i s hab i t o f go ing back to schoo l on a year l y bas is desp i te be ing a CEO. I t i s one o f the mag ica l ac t i v i t i es tha t have he lped me dea l w i th a l l the cha l lenges fac ing our bus i -ness , espec ia l l y a f te r the g loba l economic c r i s i s . ”

And dea l he has . No t on l y does he manage the Za in b rand across the GCC, he a lso looks a f te r Za in Jordan , where the f i rm i s qu ick l y mak ing i t s p resence fe l t . “We are look ing to become the opera to r o f cho ice in the in t roduc-t ion o f new and modern te lecommunica t ions ser v ices ,” sa id A l Jaber, wh i le speak ing to CommsMEA .

“The name o f the game i s be ing focused. A l ign ing and a l l y ing w i th marke t l eaders in to ad jacen t a reas i s key. A cus tomer p re fe rs a one-s top shop, and we want to be ab le to o f fe r tha t . ”

In 2010, G loba l Te lecoms Bus iness Magaz ine ranked Dr A l Jaber 62 on i t s year l y G loba l Power 100 l i s t , wh ich i s a l i s t ing o f the most power fu l peop le in the indus t r y.

Bu t wh i le he has taken Za in th rough grea t s t r ides s ince he jo ined the f i rm, he fee ls tha t h i s g rea tes t ach ievements have been in g i v ing back to soc ie ty.

C lear l y want ing to be more than jus t ano ther co rpora te , Dr A l Jaber po in ted ou t in the in te r v iew w i th 101 top bus iness leaders tha t CSR has a lways been a p r io r i t y fo r h im. “ I remember vo lun teer ing to teach ch i ld ren l i v ing in Canada’s Ind ian Reser ves when I was a s tudent a t McGi l l Un i ve rs i t y. I a lways had an ac t i ve ro le in severa l in te rna-t iona l and reg iona l in i t i a t i ves… [and] have a lways been gu ided by the va lue sys tem tha t was deep ly engraved in me f rom my ch i ldhood: to ca re fo r o thers and to care a l l the t ime.”

Be fo re Za in , Dr A l Jaber was v ice-cha i rman and CEO o f the Pa l te l Group. Under h im, i t became the f i r s t Pa les t in ian company to adopt the G loba l Repor t ing In i t i a t i ve on CSR prac t i ces and repor t ing . He a lso founded the A l Ra fah Bank , wh ich i s the f i r s t m ic ro- f inance bank in the reg ion .

Drawing on h is own exper iences , key essen t ia l s up-and-coming en t repreneurs shou ld keep in mind a re , “Be dar ing , be pers i s ten t , be f resh and rema in focused on your d reams.”

“The name of the game is being focused. Aligning and allying with market leaders into adjacent

areas is key.”

The chief operating officer of the Kuwait-based Zain Group constantly stays in touch with his fans and

followers on Twitter and Facebook.

21/Dr. Abdul Malek Al Jaber/

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COOZain Group

Different approach

Managing director GCCKraft Foods

ishal Tikku, managing director of Kraft Foods in the GCC, is nei ther awkward nor obst inate, but beneath a casual ly relaxed att i tude he l ikes to be di f ferent. Take his mous-tache, for example. When Communicate compl imented him on his trademark whiskers, he repl ied, “ I t ’s just a thing that I do.”

At universi ty, says Tikku, he studied not to be a lawyer. “ I had a certain manner of arguing things,” he says. “ I was advised ei ther to be a lawyer or a marketeer. I thought, Lord, I d idn’t want to be a lawyer, so I studied to be a marketeer.”

When he graduated, Tikku got a job with Ogi lvy in Delhi . I t wasn’t as glamorous as he had hoped, though; i t was hard work. Tikku was a lowly account execut ive. “ I struggled to buy soap, often, because shops closed by the t ime I got out of the off ice. I could only buy stuff on the weekend.” The accounts he handled included Br i t ish Airways, Beechams, and Marmite.

In 1989 he came to Dubai on Uni lever’s management scheme, and stayed with the company for 16 years. He st i l l cal ls i t a great company. Among other roles, he headed up Uni lever’s consumer research div is ion, and between 2000 and 2005 he l ived in Saudi Arabia.

Going against the grain of expat opinion, Tikku l ikes Saudi. “Saudi gets a lot of bad press, but i t ’s a nice place to l ive,” he says. “Communit ies are very strong, especial ly the expat community. I was in Jeddah. I d ived, which was real ly good. I f you pick up div ing in Saudi i t ’s real ly special . The Red Sea is beaut i fu l .”

Tikku saw Uni lever becoming top-heavy and slowing down, though, and in 2005 he took the market ing director job at Kraft .

He misses old fr iends such as Omo, Comfort and Uni lever’s shampoos, though. “What you are fond of are your brands, real ly,” he says.

As wel l as being fond of his brands, Tikku is also fond of the region’s consumers. “ I t ’s a real pr iv i lege to be part of brands l ike Tang,” he says. “When you si t and talk with consumers you get a real k ind of warmth from consumers, and that humbles you as to how that brand is part of their l ives. I t g ives your work some meaning.”

Tikku has learned that whi le Tang may generate a cosy glow, the powdered dr ink is not a brand to be messed with. When Kraft t r ied to bui ld luncht ime consumption, he says, “We didn’t give the consumer a good reason to use Tang at lunch. … Not that i t took us back in a manner – brands cont inued to grow – but we probably missed a growth op-portunity in moving the brand forward.”

As Tikku says, i t is hard to change consumer habits. But marketers can chal lenge habits in their own way. That’s how Tikku works. Like his moustache, i t ’s something that makes him dif ferent.

“When you sit and talk with consumers you get a real kind of warmth from consumers,

and that humbles you.”

As Tikku says, it is hard to change consumer habits. But marketers can challenge

habits in their own way.

22/Vishal Tikku/

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Heavy metal marketing

Senior vice-presidentDu

ubhra Das i s sen io r v i ce-pres iden t o f marke t ing and cus tomer exper ience a t UAE te lecoms company du .

H is educa t ion and ach ievements a re fo rmidab le – Das i s an a lumnus o f Har vard Bus iness Schoo l , hav ing com-p le ted the Advanced Management Program. He ho lds a bache lo r ’s degree in eng ineer ing f rom the Un ive rs i t y o f De lh i , and an MBA f rom the Ind ian Ins t i tu te o f Manage-ment , Ahmedabad.

He a lso has 15 years o f exper ience in the te lecoms indus t r y and has he ld consu l t ing and sen io r management ro les in ne tworks ac ross As ia , A f r i ca , M idd le Eas t , Europe and South Amer ica .

Bu t somehow you jus t know he re fe rs to a l l o f th i s as “ the day job .” Because Das i s a 100 percen t rock and ro l l pa r t y an ima l . H is heroes a re S lash and C lap ton , no t Branson and Buf fe t .

Look a t the o ther b i t s o f h i s educa t ion – jazz /b lues/rock gu i ta r p layer ; s tud ied a t the Gu i ta r Ins t i tu te , London, and la te r a t Berk lee Mus ic , Bos ton . And no t on l y tha t , bu t he a l so p layed in a rock band in N iger ia .

There i s an o ld joke in rock and ro l l wh ich i s : “What do you say to a gu i ta r p layer w i th a job?” Answer “Can I have f r i es w i th tha t p lease?” Bu t he ’s the except ion .

Fur thermore there i s a v ideo on YouTube showing h im p lay ing to h i s s ta f f , and they seem to love h im.

Recent l y du and Montb lanc b rands “ jo ined hands .” Montb lanc launched the f i r s t - in- the-wor ld luxur y range fo r du e l i t e cus tomers us ing iPhones o r B lackBer r ys . So the wor lds o f g lamor and phones commi t to a l i f e t ime o f toge therness . Das even Tweeted i t .

He has p layed a key ro le in du ’s ascent to a 42 percen t mob i le marke t -share pos i t i on w i th in four years o f i t s l aunch, in what i s regarded as the wor ld ’s mos t h igh l y pene t ra ted mob i le marke t . Wh ich must make Das , as SVP o f marke t ing and cus tomer exper ience , ve r y p roud.

So what you have in Das i s a ded ica ted marke t ing p ro-fess iona l who has a s t rong in te res t in someth ing e lse . He ’s k ind o f the rea l dea l .

He ’s the k ind o f marke t ing and cus tomer exper ience execu t i ve who wou ld engender max imum cus tomer loy-a l t y – o r as e igh t ies rock band B lond ie wou ld have pu t i t ( those o f a sens i t i ve na tu re p lease look away now) “You keep me hang ing on the te lephone.”

Das has played a key role in du’s ascent to a 42 percent mobile market-share position

within four years of its launch

Das is the kind of marketing and customer experience executive who would engender

maximum customer loyalty.

23/Subhra Das/

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Made to measure

CEOIpsos MENA

douard Mon in has been in the research bus iness fo r a l ong t ime, and he c lea r l y has fa i th in i t . “When we a re in a marke t where there i s in te res t ing deve lopment , research i s a must ,” says the man who brought F rance-based in te rna t iona l research o rgan i za t ion Ipsos to the Midd le Eas t . “You cannot bu i ld any th ing w i thou t do ing research . You cannot p red ic t the fu tu re w i thou t knowing exac t l y what ’s happen ing now,” he to ld Communica te in an in te r v iew.

The CEO o f marke t research and med ia mon i to r ing f i rm Ipsos MENA bu i l t h i s own fu tu re w i th research . In 1988, Mon in was a 27-year-o ld marke t ing g raduate embark-ing on a PhD in s t ra teg ic p lann ing in Lebanon when he agreed to he lp a f r i end in an ad agency bu i ld a marke t ing p lan fo r A lpha ghee and K ing corn o i l i n the count r y. He rea l i zed tha t in o rder to do the job fu l l y, he needed to do some research and ge t some da ta .

Un l i ke nowadays , Mon in d idn ’ t have the luxur y o f a computer, so he d id the research the o ld- fash ioned way : manua l l y. He p repared a ques t ionna i re , d id f i e ld in te r v iews and wrapped up the p ro jec t in a month and a ha l f – a l l the wh i le jugg l ing a job in sa les .

A f te r success fu l l y comple t ing the p ro jec t and rece i v ing o f fe rs f rom the l i kes o f ad agency P imo, Mon in se t up h is own company, S ta t . “ In 1992 I made my f i r s t con tac t w i th Ipsos ,” he says . “ I conv inced them i t was t ime to move to the Midd le Eas t . I t was a tough job , bu t in the end I conv inced Ipsos tha t we cou ld work toge ther and deve lop the bus iness in th i s reg ion .” And so they d id . In 1995, S ta t Ipsos opened i t s o f f i ces in the Arab wor ld a f te r Ipsos bought shares in Mon in ’s company. And in 1999 the company became Ipsos S ta t a f te r Ipsos took a con t ro l l i ng share .

S ince then , the company has opened o f f i ces a round the reg ion , w i th some acqu is i t i ons and s ta r t -ups , and in 2007 i t came to be known as Ipsos MENA.

Mon in i s a g rea t p roponent o f peop le mete rs fo r TV aud ience measurement and has a lways been keen on in t roduc ing more in the reg ion . Lebanon a l ready has them and Saud i A rab ia has been work ing on i t . He a lso looks fo rward to t ransparency o f med ia-buy ing d iscounts . Ipsos records adver t i s ing spend based on ra te card f igures , bu t w i th d iscounts , reba tes , f ree spo ts and f ree campa igns , “ i t i s imposs ib le to con t ro l the adver t i s ing in te rms o f rea l adver t i s ing expend i tu re . ”

Mon in i s ded ica ted to h i s work . “When I am no t do ing Ipsos , I am do ing Ipsos ,” he says . “ I am Ipsos 24-hours-a-day.” Even so , he says , h i s k ids a re “ the g rea tes t ach ieve-ment in my l i f e . ”

“Of course , there a re a l l the o ther ach ievements inc lud ing my bus iness ,” he says . “Bu t my k ids a re number one .”

Monin is dedicated to his work. “When I am not doing Ipsos, I am doing Ipsos.

I am Ipsos 24-hours-a-day.”

The CEO of market research and media monitoring firm Ipsos MENA, Monin has built

his future with research.

24/Edouard Monin/

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Globe-trotter

Marketing director Procter & Gamble

aymond Khoury has trotted across the globe for more than a decade of his life representing the international Procter & Gamble. He is now based in Dubai, where he is a marketing director for the firm, which manufactures an array of consumer products.

After four years of school at Washington University’s St. Louis Olin Business School, Khoury started off his 16 years with P&G. Since then, he has worked in Western Europe, including a three -year stint at the company’s headquarters in Geneva.

But just as P&G is a global firm, Khoury has moved between geographies, exploring the group’s divisions in the Middle East after his time in Europe. Climbing up the corporate ladder, he was then appointed director and site leader of its Lebanon office in 2008 (he shares a name with an acclaimed Lebanese novelist).

Managing a brand like P&G in the Middle East meant that he soon moved on to explore the markets in the Emirates as well.

Despite being in the marketing industry in an evolving world, Khoury seems to opt out of the social media trend. He has never used his Twitter account to update his nine followers with P&G’s latest developments.

Marketing director Khoury has moved between geographies, exploring the group’s divisions

in the Middle East.

Khoury is based in Dubai, where he is hair care marketing director

for Procter & Gamble

25/Raymond Khoury/

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Marketing director Procter & Gamble

Journeyman

Marketing vice-president and CMO / Pepsico

hen he’s not marketing Pepsico’s products, the firm’s market-ing vice-president and CMO for Asia, the Middle East and Africa, is playing Pro Evolution Soccer as Barcelona or Real Madrid. He says they are the strongest teams, but he must also have an af-finity from when he took his MBA in Spain.

El Azizi’s other indulgence when he has time to himself is read-ing. He likes sci-fi fantasy and historical fiction, and is currently reading a trilogy about Genghis Khan.

“What’s interesting is the culture; it’s not just about the person,” he says. “You read a lot of things about Genghis Khan, about how he bought the Mongols together and how they were aggressive and oppressive. But if you go into the culture of the people, how they work together, how they bond together, the importance of the tribe and the family, you get a lot of insight into a bigger sense of you as a leader, and teamwork, and you as a parent of the family.”

If you “sort of brush away” some of Genghis Khan’s issues, he says, you can see how he used cultural insights to his advantage. “For example, how he went into China. He learned the culture and themes that conquered them later on; he made a few trips into China before he conquered them.”

El Azizi is big into learning about cultures (and less into pillaging, he assures Communicate). For example, when he returned from Spain to work for German company Henkel’s detergents division. He initially worked on the Persil hand-wash products, and quickly learned that most Egyptians can’t afford washing machines.

He also learned, as Persil developed more products, that Arab consumers like their detergents to be more perfumed than western consumers, so the product appears more robust and their clothes smell cleaner.

When he moved to Eastern Europe with Coca-Cola, consumers were in a state of flux. It was 1997 and the Soviet Union had recently collapsed. “Pricing was very, very important, because a lot of things you take for granted in this part of the world or in Western Europe or the US, about the price of a can of Pepsi, you don’t really think about it that much, but in those places people at the beginning were thinking about the price of a can or a bottle.”

In 2002, El Azizi left Hungary to come home to Egypt with Pepsico. He says he would never have made the move to Coke’s rival in the same market, but Pepsi is a great place to work.

“Pepsi is really a company that is high on being entrepreneurial; it’s very high on moving fast, very high on creative solutions to the businesses and the brands, and it’s a company that has a vast portfolio from foods and beverages,” he says. This means there’s plenty to learn.

There is also plenty to learn about consumers in the region. “We approach consumers in a different way because we are market leaders,” he says. “We need to continue to connect with the consumer, to innovate with the consumer, and we ought to be asking, ‘What is it they want next from us?’ rather than reacting to others or to them as well.”

Then El Azizi can send in the Mongol hordes.

“We approach consumers in a different way because we are market leaders. We need to continue to

connect with the consumer.”

“Pepsi is really a company that is high on being entrepreneurial; it’s very high on moving fast, very

high on creative soloutions.”

26/Ahmed El Azizi/

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Risk taker

r. Amina Al Rustamani does not shy away from taking risks. In fact, from the career path she has gone down, it is clear that she’s all for tackling new challenges and working her way up the corporate ladder, despite the risks.

Rustamani is currently the chief executive officer of Tecom Business Parks and is responsible for overlooking all nine free zone clusters of Dubai Holding’s Tecom Investments.

But in 2001, she had only just finished her doctorate in elec-trical engineering and was engrossed in academic research.

Despite her background in engineering, she got involved in a project with Tecom, putting her skills to use in marketing and product development. But when she heard that Dubai was plan-ning on setting up Internet City, she decided to take the leap and sought a full-time position as a project engineer.

“Changing your career and doing something completely dif-ferent is a very serious step, and it takes courage. Starting as a project engineer was exciting for me, but other people thought I was crazy,” explained Rustamani while speaking to Strategy+Business.

The daring strides she was willing to make with her career did not stop there. She moved up the ranks quickly with Tecom and became the executive director of media.

“Moving from that to real estate and cluster development was another major shift,” she says. “It is a risk, and you have to work hard. But I like that.” And not only did she like what she was doing, she was good at it.

Her original approach to the media sector got her recognized at a federal level and she was appointed as a board member on the National Media Council.

Looking over the umbrella organization of Tecom Business Parks means she is involved with free zones as diverse as Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai Studio City and DuBiotech, and despite the demanding position she holds, Rustamani never seems to stay put.

Whether it is to launch a new initiative to boost the film and production industry in the Emirates, develop a green approach for Tecom’s activities or advocate for a push to the country’s knowledge-based economy, she’s always in the picture.

She has also played a significant role in pushing the Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF), which has now become a staple cultural event in the region.

Discussing cultural movements in other Gulf states in a 2008 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Rustamani noted, “It makes me proud when we see other places implement the suc-cess that we’ve enjoyed with our entities. It’s not competition. It is complementary to what we do. … Before Dubai Media City or Dubai Studio City there were centers of production in the region such as Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait. You can’t confine the media to any one physical location. The media also needs to be present in different centers in order to get a more accurate perspective of the culture.”

“Changing your career and doing something completely different is a very serious step,

and it takes courage.”

Looking over the umbrella organization of Tecom Business Parks means she is involved

with diverse free zones.

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27CEO / TecomBusiness Parks 27/Dr. Amina Al Rustamani/

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Private, yet public

CEOSRMG

s you would expect from the CEO of the Saudi Research and Marketing Group (SRMG), Dr. Azzam Al Dakhil has an im-pressive online presence. A cursory search on Google reveals his presence on Zoom info, Xing.com, LinkedIn, Picasa, Flickr and Twitter. This is a man who is at the vanguard of the digital advance. It is rare to find a regional CEO with his own website. Yet Al Dakhil’s pages are much less revealing about the man and tell much more about his mission

SRMG is endeavoring to issue Arabic versions of the 50 top international specialized magazines, based on licensing agree-ments signed with key international publishers.

This is an ambitious target in a media where European pub-lishers are wondering where their readership has gone. But Al Dakhil seems philosophical about the change. “So far the Middle-East, fortunately, has been affected the least by these changes, partly because the local economy in many countries is doing quite well, and partly because the transition to new media channels is still in its development phase,” he said at a recent conference.

It seems that the Doctor is something of an all rounder – Az-zam Al Dakhil has an impressive academic record. After gaining a doctorate in civil engineering from Dundee University in 2002, he obtained a masters in architecture from California State Uni-versity, Los Angeles, in 1985; and his bachelor of engineering in architecture from King Saud University in 1981.

Al Dakhil is a private man with a public face. He is a family man (his daughter recently married), an academic and a shrewd and experienced business power. He is one of the men who will drive the region to negotiate a passage through the digital river that is the future not only of the MENA region, but the world. “So far the Middle East, fortunately, has been affected

the least by these changes, partly because the local economy in many countries is doing quite well.”

SRMG is endeavoring to issue Arabic versions of the 50 top international

specialized magazines

28/Dr. Azzam Al Dakhil/

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Building awareness

MD MENA L’Oréal

nthony Ponsford is the voice for global beauty brand L’Oréal, in the Middle East, which first set up base in the region in 1998 in Jebel Ali.

As managing director for the Mideast, his goal has been to boost the firm’s more “mass market” offerings such as Garnier, L’Oréal Paris and Maybelline, especially in a period where more consum-ers are cutting down their costs on high-end beauty products.

“That element of accessibility is integral to these brands,” he pointed out in an interview with Gulf News.

The cosmetics giant aims to expand its consumer base by one billion people globally within the decade, and to do this, it is focusing on doubling its customers in the Middle East.

“L’Oréal wants to develop products specific to emerging coun-tries,” explained Ponsford. “To design products specifically suited to emerging countries, it is essential to innovate where the consumer is and to know the culture, eating habits, climate, etcetera.”

Now based in Dubai, that’s exactly what he has been doing – launching “Arabised” versions of cosmetics to appeal to cus-tomers in the region. To launch its first “Arab” fragrance, L’Oréal collaborated with Giorgio Armani and rolled out the Armani Privé to come up with a product that could connect to a larger audience in the Arab world.

Ponsford attended high school in Scotland at Fettes College, the same boarding and day school that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair studied at.

He later went on to study at Insead, one of the largest global business schools in the world. He then began working for L’Oréal in France, the headquarters of the cosmetics firm, before he came to represent the brand in the Middle East, and was well-versed in the company’s offerings and goals.

When examining the region’s specific trends, he noted in an article in The Saudi Gazette that the speed at which shopping malls have developed across the region has had a huge impact on the luxury sector. “Malls are open access academies of social distinction.”

According to him, brands, including L’Oréal, need to stir up more awareness to make connections with their audience.

While building up a brand name for L’Oréal in the region, Ponsford also helped push forward a new launch of pan-Arab fellowships for women in science in partnership with the Arab Science and Technology Foundation (ASTF) in 2010. The fellow-ships aimed at empowering Arab women scientists and recognizing their contributions in science.

“Women across the pan-Arab region are changing the face of science and we want to ensure they get the recognition they deserve,” he said in a company statement.

Ponsford’s goal hs been to boost the firm’s more “mass market” offerings such as Garnier,

L’Oréal Paris and Maybelline.

Ponsford has also helped push a new launch of pan-Arab fellowships for women in science in

partnership with ASTF.

29/Anthony Ponsford/

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The pioneer

Franchise director Africa, Indiaand the Middle East / Mars

ars is one of the world’s largest family-owned companies, and since its corporate strategy is not driven by shareholder returns, this can make it a little different. Omar Salim, Mars’ franchise director for Africa, India and the Middle East, was tempted by this difference.

In the late 1990s he was contacted by Mars when he was working in Procter & Gamble’s development arm in the UK. Mars asked Salim, a Jordanian who has also lived in Egypt, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, to come out to Dubai where Mars was still a fresh company.

“It was a pioneering environment,” he says. It moved fast, and impressed on employees that it was all right to make mistakes if they learned from them.

Salim worked on Mars’ “sugar business” (brands such as Skittles and Starburst) and M&Ms. Then he took over the Galaxy portfolio, “the heart and soul, the backbone of this business,” in 2001. Gal-axy products make up around 40 percent of Mars’ business in the region. He became marketing manager for all Mars brands, and three years ago was promoted to his current position.

In developing relationships with agencies, Salim took on the company’s open, family ethos. “We built a lot on our relationships with suppliers,” he says. This applied to Mars’ growing relation-ship with Mediavest media agency and D’Arcy, the creative agency (since reabsorbed into Leo Burnett) that launched Galaxy Jewels. “We acknowledge that we are going to have a mutual benefit, and that also gives us so much confidence that we’re not going to be hiding things,” he says. “In my previous job, it was about tread with care. Tread with care is incredibly slow, and it doesn’t necessarily bring a lot of trust with your suppliers.”

Galaxy’s growth was one of Salim’s big achievements. He worked with his agencies to develop Galaxy Jewels as a Ramadan offering. Before, chocolate sales had dipped during the holy month, but by adopting a “Christmas model” of seasonal packaging and promo-tion, Mars raised sales. Salim would also sit with its media agency and plan media buys based on actors and program topics, as well as raw data. Previously, Galaxy hadn’t advertised during Ramadan, but it spent a “a lot” (several hundred thousand dollars was a lot to the brand then, says Salim) to start Jewels on the rise to its current 40 percent market share.

In the free-to-succeed model, Salim says, Mars doesn’t have a central unit. This means that the Middle East can play a role in global policy. The region is becoming more corporate, dividing its activities into divisions (chocolate, drinks, pet food, and so on), and Salim is sharing what he has learned about emerging markets. “This region has almost been a role model,” he says. “But also it can have a lot of applications to the rest of the emerging markets.”

But Salim isn’t cocky about his achievements. In his free time, he enjoys playing with his two-year-old son, debates the state of the world with friends, and reads history books. We ask him about his indulgences. Cars, perhaps? “I drive a Honda,” he says. “If that gives you an idea. It’s a great car.” And this is from a man who’s taking Mars in the region to a global level.

“This region has almost been a role model. But also it can have a lot of applications to the rest of

the emerging markets.”

Galaxy’s growth was one of Salim’s big achievements. He worked with his agencies to develop Galaxy Jewels

as a Ramadan offering.

30/Omar Salim/

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Bigger picture

PresidentRotana Media Services

n a recent in ter v iew wi th Communicate, Nezar H. Nagro, pres ident o f Rotana Media Ser v ices, s ta ted that “Rotana’s new channel cou ld break even in f i ve years. That ’s i f they get the focus r ight .”

RMS’s great ach ievements dur ing the management of Nagro inc lude br ing ing FOX Movies and FOX Ser ies to the reg ion through a s t ra teg ic par tnersh ip wi th Fox In terna-t iona l Channels (F IC) .

Ruper t Murdoch, in Februar y 2010, bought a 9.09 per-cent s take in Rotana, the Saudi-based Middle Eastern music and enter ta inment group whol ly owned by Pr ince A lwaleed b in Ta la l .

Pr ince A lwaleed a l ready ho lds a 7 percent s take in News Corp, whose stab le inc ludes 20th Centur y Fox, Fox News, the New York Post , the London Times and Sky TV.

Accord ing to the Pr ince, the $70 mi l l ion dea l was not cash-dr iven. I t went “way beyond f inance.” Rotana, which owns the largest record labe l in the Arab wor ld and 11 te lev is ion channels , was “ fu l l y f inanced,” he sa id. The dea l was about News Corp’s conf idence in Rotana and commitment to i t .

Meanwhi le , Nezar Nagro is deta i l ing the future of the Rotana group, espec ia l l y the upcoming Rotana news stat ion.

“ I t is due to be launched in October 2011,” Nagro ex-p la ins. “We are look ing for a prof i t center, fac i l i t ies and f reedom. Our main market wi l l be Saudi Arab ia, and for the f i rs t phase we’ l l broadcast on ly in Arab ic .”

He cont inues, say ing, “We wi l l d i f ferent ia te ourse lves by be ing more loca l , by look ing at loca l issues wi th a pos i t i ve perspect ive.”

“We’ l l suppor t cu l ture. But there’s no po l i t ica l agenda behind th is s ta t ion. To be c lear, we want to become a major p layer, and we p lan to be prof i tab le .”

How much wi l l th is in i t ia t ive cost? “We’ l l invest $200 mi l l ion in the s tat ion, and our year ly operat iona l costs are est imated at $70 to $80 mi l l ion.”

We found Nezar Nagro to be a smart guy. He ho lds a degree in economics and bus iness admin is t ra t ion f rom King Abdul-Az iz Univers i ty in Jeddah. But he s t i l l has a b ig job ahead.

He is in charge of se l l ing and promot ing a l l o f Rotana’s TV s tat ions, magaz ines, rad io , out-of-home, in teract ive media technology, new media, cafés, mov ie and music v ideo p lacements in the future. He has a t rack record wi th the company. He was made pres ident o f Rotana Media Ser v-ices in 2003, and before that he was appointed execut ive manager for admin is t ra t ion in 1998, and genera l manager for pro jects and deve lopment in 2000.

So he has a dea l wi th Sky, a cross-p lat form sharehold ing wi th h is b iggest suppler and an owner who is beyond money when i t comes to making dea ls . The future looks br ight .

“We’ll invest $200 million in the station, and our yearly operational costs are estimated

at $70 to $80 million.”

RMS’s great achievements during the management of Nagro include bringing FOX Movies and

FOX Series to the region.

31/Nezar Nagro/

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Proponent of proper planning

General manager of marketingNissan Middle East

yed Ahmed only started his job as Nissan’s regional general manager of marketing recently. Before that he had worked all over the world and all over the marketing industry.

Ahmed, whose parents are from Pakistan and were living in Dubai, began his studies at business school in Cyprus, and quickly got a taste for marketing when PepsiCo ran a competition to promote one-liter bottles of their drink. Ahmed’s team won with a TVC using the tagline “Tall, dark and wholesome.” “That’s how my interest became a passion,” he says.

Shortly after that he transferred to a university in Oklahoma, then moved to Boston to work as a management trainee at retail holding company, Melville Corporation. In 1992 he came back to Dubai to work as a marketing officer at Middle East Bank. “That’s where I experienced service marketing,” he says.

From there he moved to a business-to-business role with Du-bai Cable Company (Ducab) as assistant marketing manager. He says, “In engineering in an industrial marketing world, you need a lot of third-party test certifications and endorsements to lend credibility to your product.”

He moved to Arabian Automobiles, the Nissan dealership in Dubai. Moving to consumer marketing, he says, “You are dealing with human psychology. It is more intriguing, more challenging, because here you are supposed to read people’s minds and ask why they buy your product.”

Between 1995 and 2001, he tripled Nissan’s business – from 4,000 units to 12,000. Previously the products (the Sunny, the Patrol, the Pathfinder and so on) had been better known than the Nissan brand. “My mission really was to strengthen Nissan as a brand in our market, then have the products feed off that brand strength, not the other way around.” PR, involvement with local sport and events, and CSR all played a role in this.

After a two-year stint back at Ducab, this time as head of global marketing, he came back to Nissan as regional market-ing manager for Nissan Middle East. “Once an automobile man, always an automobile man,” he says. “You can’t take that away.”

But you can take Ahmed away. And three months later, Nissan did. He was seconded to the company’s headquarters in Japan to spread his franchise experience around the company’s global network, and to establish global guidelines and best practice.

After that, he went to Canada as the head of light commercial vehicles and national corporate sales. “I had to establish commer-cial vehicles as a brand in Canada,” he says. This meant dealing with everything from the legalities of setting up a dealer network to the logistics of importing vans from the US.

Through all this, he has become a proponent of proper plan-ning. “The marketing planning process is an art and a science,” he says. Even in his free time he’s planning in a way. “If I were not a marketeer I would probably have been an interior designer. …One bad habit I have is when I go to people’s houses, I am always imagining how I would change this house.” He’d probably make some impressive improvements.

“My mission really was to strengthen Nissan as a brand in our market, then have the

products feed off that brand strength.”

Between 1995 and 2001, Ahmed tripled Nissan’s

business – from 4,000 units to 12,000.

32/Syed Ahmed/

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Ready for the challenge

Marketing director Sony Gulf

or Mathew Matha i , ever y j ob he tack les i s a new pos i -t i on , a new cha l lenge , b r ing ing w i th i t a new and d i ve rse se t o f peop le to in te rac t w i th .

As the marke t ing d i rec to r o f Sony Gu l f , Matha i works on s t ra teg ies to p romote Sony in about 20 count r ies in the reg ion . He says , “There rea l l y never i s a du l l moment in adver t i s ing , PR and even ts , i s the re?”

Wi th a pos t -g rad degree in marke t ing f rom the Bombay Un ive rs i t y, Matha i worked in the sa les and marke t ing d i v i s ions o f f i rms such as P f i ze r and Novar t i s be fo re he go t invo l ved w i th Sony. The tu rn ing po in t came in Duba i in 1992, the year wh ich marked the beg inn ing o f h i s 19 long years w i th the consumer and home e lec t ron ics b rand.

When, th ree years la te r, Sony Gu l f se t up a corpora te and marke t ing communica t ions d i v i s ion , he was asked to head i t . “ I suspec t the reason i s I used to make the bes t bus iness and t ra in ing p resen ta t ions among the marke t -ing team in Sony Gu l f a t the t ime, and I used to wr i te speeches fo r the MD,” says Matha i , con f iden t o f the work he pu t in w i th the f i rm.

S ince then , i t ’s been Sony a l l o f the way. He says tha t even though he ’s been w i th the same group fo r so long , there ’s a lways a chance to mix th ings up . The b rand i s no t on l y about e lec t ron ics , bu t about ever y th ing tha t fa l l s under the consumer e lec t ron ics p roduc t ca tegor y, he po in ts ou t , g i v ing examples such as “en te r ta inment , mov ies , mus ic , P layS ta t ion , te lev i s ion p rograms, and p ro-fess iona l b roadcas t equ ipment and con ten t . ”

“There ’s a lo t o f c ross-po l l i na t ion and synerg ies , [and tha t ] makes i t more fun ,” he adds .

He ’s had a th ree-year s t in t w i th the marke ts o f As ia Pac i f i c , wh ich he descr ibes as a “ fan tas t i c oppor tun i t y,” bu t overa l l , Matha i has been based in Duba i and i s de f i -n i te l y no s t ranger to the Emi ra tes a f te r about 15 years o f work ing in the count r y.

Ta lk ing about cha l lenges he has faced in h i s ca reer, he no tes tha t one i s the fac t tha t there a re peop le f rom a l l over the g lobe l i v ing and work ing in the Midd le Eas t , and communica t ing to such a b road aud ience i s no easy fea t . “We rea l l y have to s imp l i f y the message and re l y on bas ic human t ru ths ,” he says .

Bu t i t doesn ’ t seem l i ke he ’s had much t roub le in con-nec t ing w i th the aud ience here . He has he lped se t up a name fo r Sony in the soc ia l med ia scene . Accord ing to the reg ion ’s f i r s t Soc ia l Med ia Brands Index , Sony ME’s Facebook page ranked as the th i rd mos t in f luen t ia l p ro f i l e on the l i s t .

Asked about h i s p lans fo r the fu tu re , he te l l s one in-te r v iewer, “Sony i s one o f the most recogn i zed b rands in the wor ld and I hope to keep i t re levan t and exc i t ing in the fas t -chang ing communica t ions space .”

“Sony is one of the most recognized brands in the world and I hope to keep it relevant and exciting in the

fast-changing communications space.”

The brand is not only about electronics, but about everything that falls under the consumer

electronic product category.

33/Mathew Mathai/

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Numbers man

General manager of marketing / Almarai

ussam Abdul Qader is general manager marketing, and group executive member, of the Almarai Company in Saudi Arabia.

He used to work for Nielsen Market Research so he’s a numbers man, and the numbers he deals with now are staggering.

Start with 90,000 cows producing milk that is processed on more than 70 production lines by 2,500 employees. Then 400 refrigerated trucks move it to 90 sales depots and then to 40,000 sales outlets across the region.

So Qader must feel very positive about his achievements. Well, yes and no. “We want to grow our market shares in all categories faster than the competition,” he says.

He seems driven to capitalize on the company’s 25 years of success and has appointed a team of more then 40 professionals to build the brand. The team is split into four strategic product categories: dairy liquid, fruit juices, potted products, foods.

This specialization is key, according to Qader, who says, “Our strategy is to be the leader in every segment and to be recognized as best-quality products and packaging.”

Qader is committed to making his customers healthier, trying to switch them from powdered to fresh milk and persuading them to increase their liking of fruit juice (it must be working – consump-tion of fruit juice in Saudi Arabia has doubled over the past year). “This confirms the company’s move from a pure dairy company to a food and beverage company offering a broader range of food products,” he says.

He has worked his way up and around the region with postings in Amman, Beirut, Dubai and Riyadh. His leadership over the past six years has helped in turning Al Marai from a regional dairy company into a major international force.

Al Marai is already the largest vertically integrated dairy company in the world and is set to become one of the next global brands, according to the Financial Times. So you’d think that Qader could relax in his spare time. Not really; he talks about his hobbies as “The outdoors, automotive, riding horses and cultural experiences.” He is also a deeply committed family man.

It takes strong drive to manage a company with sales of more than 113 million euros and whose employees number well over 10,000. Qader’s education at Amman Private University, Jordan, and the University of Kansas have helped give him an international perspective and to look at his operation from a global viewpoint.

The adoption of international brand values and strict market research have lead to a disciplined – even multi-disciplined ap-proach to what is essentially very competitive business in a tough trading environment. His marketplace is an attractive target for large multinationals and his dominance of it is a salute to his ad-herence to traditional values of customer satisfaction and respect.

These values have helped the company into double-digit growth. “We invest large sums of our marketing budget in consumer understanding and communications,” he says.

Qader is totally sure of what makes his brand great. As he puts it himself, “Our consumers are the key.”

“Our strategy is to be the leader in every segment and to be recognized as best-quality

products and packaging.”

Qader’s marketplace is an attractive target for large multinationals and his dominance of it is a salute to his

adherence to traditional values.

34/Hussam Abdul Qader/

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Tactful tactician

Managing director MENAGoogle

r i Kes isog lu , Goog le ’s manag ing d i rec to r, M idd le Eas t and Nor th A f r i ca , ob ta ined a BA in bus iness f rom the Bogaz iç i Ün ive rs i tes i . H is to r y does no t record the ac t i v i -t i es o f the 15 most success fu l scho la rs in un i ve rs i t i es in Turkey the year he g raduated , bu t the 16th p roudes t mother was Kes isog lu ’s – fo r tha t i s where he was p laced in Turkey ’s e l i t e .

S ince then he has worked fo r Andersen Corpora te F i -nance , was founder and manag ing d i rec to r o f en te r ta in-ment s i te Kahkaha.com and jo ined Goog le in 2005, r i s ing to h i s cur ren t pos i t i on as manag ing d i rec to r o f the MENA reg ion las t year.

In 2010, when reg iona l manager o f M idd le Eas t Nor th A f r i ca , Kes isog lu sa id , “The UAE resu l t s show tha t more peop le a re us ing the In te rne t to ob ta in in fo rmat ion tha t i s re levan t to them such as u t i l i t y b i l l payments th rough DEWA and on l ine bank ing . Searches fo r on l ine se r v ices a re on the up take , wh ich underp ins the need fo r bus inesses to be on l ine ca te r ing to the i r cus tomer requ i rements . ”

He seems to say the r igh t th ings a t the r igh t t ime. For example , on a dea l w i th the Jordan ian Min is t r y o f Com-mun ica t ion and In fo rmat ion Techno logy las t year, he sa id , “Th is i s a b reak th rough dea l wh ich we a im to dup l i ca te th roughout the Midd le Eas t . I t shows how bo th Goog le and governments can work toge ther to c rea te a v i r tuous economic c i rc le . ”

Kes isog lu i s sound ly p laced a t the cen te r o f a g rowing marke t wh ich i s deve lop ing n iche components . G i ven h is so l id t rack record and obv ious tac t we th ink he i s a r i s ing s ta r in the d ig i ta l f i rmament .“The UAE results show that more

are using the Internet to obtain information that is relevant to them.”

Searches for online services are on the uptake, which underpins the need for businesses to be online,

catering to their customer requirements.

35/Ari Kesisoglu/

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On top of it all

CEORotana Holding

ahad A lsuka i t i s CEO o f P r ince A lwa leed B in Ta la l ’s Ro tana Ho ld ing . The p r ince has recen t l y approved a dec is ion to res t ruc tu re the company A lsuka i t l eads in to four separa te bus iness un i t s .

The un i t s w i l l be : te lev i s ion b roadcas t ing , s tud ios , aud io , and Ro tana Med ia Ser v ices (RMS, the company ’s med ia represen ta t ion a rm) . A l l un i t s w i l l repor t to A lsuka i t . The med ia cong lomera te was launched in 2003, and has g rown f rom s t reng th to s t reng th s ince then . I t owns a g igan t i c a rch i ve o f A rab ic f i lms and mus ic , and p roduces and manages many top reg iona l A rab ic a r t i s t s . I t owns severa l te lev i s ion channe ls and has more than 1 ,300 employees across the GCC and w ider Midd le Eas t .

Ruper t Murdoch’s Newscorp recen t l y bought a 9 per-cen t share in the company fo r a round $70 mi l l i on , and i t recen t l y won one o f the cove ted rad io l i censes fo r Saud i A rab ia when tha t marke t f i r s t opened i t s a i rwaves a t the end o f l as t year.

A lsuka i t was p rev ious l y the g roup’s ch ie f opera t ing o f f i ce r, answer ing to CEO Dr. Wa l id Arab Hashem. Now Hashem is v i ce-cha i rman and A lsuka i t CEO.

Alsukait was previously the group’s chief operating officer.

Now he is CEO.

Rotana Holding owns several TV channels and has more than 1,300 employees across the GCC and

wider Middle East.

36/Fahad Alsukait/

F

36

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 65 6/16/11 7:26 PM


Chill factor

Regional marketing managerCoca-Cola Middle East

o lga Cebe i s reg iona l marke t ing manager a t Coca-Co la Midd le Eas t and has jus t overseen the launch o f the “Br r r r r ” campa ign , o f wh ich more la te r.

Me l i ssa Gates (o f the Gates Foundat ion and a lso B i l l Ga tes ’ w i fe ) recen t l y gave an impass ioned lec tu re a t TED, in wh ich she a rgued tha t ch i ld ren in Ind ia cou ld no t ge t med ic ines o r vacc ines . “But ,” she added qu ie t l y, “ they can a l l ge t Coca-Co la . ” Her l ec tu re went on to advoca te tha t the wor ld shou ld copy Coca-Co la ’s d i s t r ibu t ion methods to reach a round the g lobe .

The Coca-Co la Company was es tab l i shed in 1886 in the USA. I t owns four o f the wor ld ’s top f i ve non-a lcoho l i c spark l ing beverage b rands and has more than 90,000 assoc ia tes wor ldw ide , reach ing more than 200 count r ies . On any g i ven day, 1 .5 b i l l i on se r v ings o f 2 ,800 d i f fe ren t p roduc ts a re consumed wor ldw ide .

Cebe was educa ted a t Bogaz iç i Ün ive rs i tes i i n Turkey. He then went on to become an ass is tan t b rand manager a t P roc te r & Gamble , be fo re f ina l l y coming in to the Coca-Co la ten t .

He i s the man beh ind the “Br r r r ” campa ign be ing ex tended across the GCC, I raq , Jo rdan and Pa les t ine . I t i s the f i r s t t ime the concept has been launched in the Midd le Eas t .

I t i s an ex tens ion o f Coca-Co la ’s ac t i v i t i es in o ther par ts o f the wor ld , w i th the “Br r r ’ ”concept f i r s t l aunched in A f r i ca . We a l l know the phrase “ I t ’s the rea l th ing ,” bu t th i s s logan i s in tended to loca l i ze our th i r s t .

Cebe p icked a mix tu re o f foo tba l l and mus ic to ign i te the f l ame o f the reg ion ’s consumers . He wants peop le to say “Br r r ” when they d r ink Coke . Us ing Omar Shar i f he lps .

He has the luxur y o f a b rand tha t can ’ t be damaged, bu t tha t ’s a doub le-edged sword – i t can ’ t be made much be t te r e i the r.

Th is i s no t jus t marke t ing – Cebe’s p roduc t a f fec ts peop le ’s l i ves . Here i s a s to r y f rom the Coke webs i te – one o f dozens : “ I remember the f i r s t Coke I had a lso i s the f i r s t k i ss tha t I had . I was seven and her name was Debb ie . No t on l y am I s t i l l an av id Coke d r inker, bu t I a l so mar r ied Debb ie . We have two k ids , and they w i l l be Coke d r inkers as we l l . ”

Le t ’s hope fo r Cebe’s sake tha t the new campa ign w i l l i gn i te a huge inc rease in Coke d r ink ing in the reg ion and doesn ’ t l eave consumers co ld .

He is the man behind the “Brrrr” campaign being extended across the GCC, Iraq,

Jordan and Palestine.

On any given day, 1.5 billion servings of 2,800 different products

are consumed worldwide.

37/Tolga Cebe/

T

37

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 66 6/16/11 3:50 PM


Wide remit

Senior managing director Toyota

orn in 1947, Akira Okabe has been with Toyota since 1971, after graduating in the same year with a bachelor’s degree in social engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology in his native Japan. And since 1997, he has been tied to the Oceania, Middle East and Southwest Asia division. He has been senior managing director and chief Asia, Oceania & Middle East Operations officer since 2005, and serves as its chief officer of the Africa and Latin America Operations Group.

He’s got a wide remit in his role at the world’s biggest man-ufacturer of cars (in terms of both sales and production). In 2010 Toyota Motor Corporation employed more than 300,000 people worldwide.

Toyota has been in the passenger car market since 1936. In the region, as well as worldwide, it is well known for brands including Land Cruiser, Camry and Corolla.

Saudi Arabia is the company’s biggest market for Land Cruisers worldwide, and across the region a white Toyota 4x4 is a regular sight on and off the roads.

Toyota regularly competes in motorsports, and has taken part in more top-line categories across the spectrum of motor racing than any other car company.

In March, the company issued a statement saying, “Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) announces that it will modify its management structures and implement executive, organizational and personnel changes in conjunction with the structural modifications effective April 1, as part of realization of the Toyota Global Vision.”

The statement adds, “The changes are intended to create struc-tures that can meet the following objectives: 1) convey customer opinions and on-site information to management in a timely manner, 2) make prompt management decisions based on on-site informa-tion, and 3) make constant checks as to whether management decisions are acceptable to society.”

Okabe’s has a wide remit in his role at the world’s biggest

manufacturer of cars.

Toyota has been in the passenger car market since 1936. In the region, as well as worldwide, it is well known for

brands including Land Cruiser, Camry and Corolla.

38/Akira Okabe/

B

38

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 67 6/16/11 7:28 PM


Driving force

Marketing managerHyundai Middle East

ike Lee is the marketing manger at Hyundai Middle East. He came to the job around a year ago, replacing Johnny Lee, the previ-ous marketing manager. He is in charge of marketing for the regional branch of the Korean car giant Hyundai Motor Company.

In the region, Hyundai’s main representative is Juma Al Majid Est in Dubai, which began as a trading company in 1950.

Hyundai was founded more than 100 years before that, in 1847, as a construction company in Korea. Its motor division is the fifth-largest car manufacturer, and after the East Asian financial crisis in 1998 it bought another South Korean car company, Kia Motors. It sells more than 1.7 million vehicles a year, globally.

With Hyundai’s Genesis awarded Car of the Year in the United States, and the Hyundai TAU engine ranked as one of the 10 best engines by Ward’s Auto World, Lee has plenty of solid ground to build on in his job.

With Hyundai’s Genesis awarded Car of the Year, and the TAU engine ranked as one of the 10 best, Lee

has plenty of solid ground to build on in his job.

Hyundai is the fifth-largest car manufacturer, and in 1998 it bought another South Korean

car company, Kia Motors.

39/Mike Lee/

M

39

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 68 6/16/11 3:51 PM


Media missionary

CEOtwofour54

ony Orsten is chief executive officer of twofour54. He’s the “Meeja,” addresses you with a straight gaze and a gravelly voice, speaks in sound bites just perfect for print or radio and is as perfectly developed for the media as a shark is for the ocean.

He’s a man on a mission – he provides “strategic leadership” for twofour54 which, according to him, is provided by an enlightened government because “it is really important for the development of the nation.”

It is a long-term project that may not show results for a “few more years.” And while for some that could mean “I can get away with this for a while,” to Orsten it really is a mission.

He’s got a serious CV. Not only has he been an Academy Award-winning director – for most of the major UK networks – but he was also in charge of the comedy output at MTV in Europe and teamed up with Skype to launch Joost, the world’s first broadcast-quality television platform on the Internet. He’s made a few dirhams along the way.

But there is a degree of altruism in Orsten’s choice of this venture: “After 30 years of saying take, take, take, I can give it all back to the people here, and hopefully they can benefit and prosper.”

Twofour54 has been staggeringly successful. At just two years old, it has deals including a joint venture with US media conglomerate Viacom, a tie-in with Cartoon Network and contracts with the BBC and Thomson Reuters.

Orsten is a player. When he’s in London he’s lunching at the Ivy and having dinner at Groucho’s.

In many way’s he’s almost inherited “BBC East” with this job. Government-funded artsy output with a mission to improve the lot of the people. The BBC was instructed to “educate, inform, enter-tain” by Lord Reith, and in some ways Orsten’s remit is similar, if not broader.

“This is all about people believing the Middle East is a new place for them to come and make a business work,” says Orsten. “It has double-digit growth potential going forward across all media. That’s why they’re here.”

There are 300 million Arabic speakers around the world, but the three gaming giants, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony don’t produce a single video game in Arabic. So there is work to do then.

Twofour54 splits into three arms – intaj, production facilities; tadreeb, a training academy; and ibtikar, a funding unit to give seed capital to new businesses.

It is all set out in a trendy campus of pastel-colored buildings with salad bars just outside Abu Dhabi. You just know that at some point someone has said, “Let’s run this up the flagpole and see if it salutes.”

The name is based on the map co-ordinates of the region, and the aim of the group is noble and achievable. It’s trying to attract the brains of the West to help develop the hidden talent of this region.

“There’s a lot more coming. It’s across all areas; it’s production, it’s gaming, it’s Internet,” Orsten says. And he’s definitely right. We ought to do lunch sometime.

“This is all about people believing the Middle East is a new place for them to come

and make a business work.”

At just two years old, twofour54 has deals including a joint venture with Viacom, a tie-in with the Cartoon

Network and contracts with the BBC and Thomson Reuters.

40/Tony Orsten/

T

40

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 69 6/16/11 3:51 PM


Safe hands

Telco techie

Acting CEOAbu Dhabi Media

Marketing communication director / STC

Unlike many of the other people in this list, Frank Mooty is in an acting capacity – as CEO of Abu Dhabi Media. He got the acting role following the sudden departure of CEO Ed Borgerding earlier this year. After three years in the role, Borgerding left the company to concentrate on independent projects.

The Abu Dhabi Media Company (now Abu Dhabi Media) was established in 2007 and has interests in free and pay-to-view television, radio, publishing, digital media, games, feature films, music, digital signage, outside broadcast, production, and printing.

When he joined the company Mooty said, “Abu Dhabi Media Company has achieved phenomenal growth and international recognition over the past year. This is a great opportunity to improve, protect and build the commercial position of one of the Arab world’s most exciting media companies.” He didn’t shout “Party on – the drinks are on me.”

Mooty, it seems, is a safe pair of hands. His Scottish accountancy background (he was previously ADMC’s chief financial officer) and his doubtless Calvinistic work ethic means that he is perfectly

capable of running the ship until someone else good comes along.

Yet Mooty’s CV and achievements are formi-dable. In his corporate biography we find that Mooty was group chief financial officer at quoted newspaper group Metro International SA, where he helped deliver the group’s first profit. He has held director positions with the BBC, ITEL-Time Warner and De Agostini.

A graduate from the Saudi-based Jamiat Al-Malik Saud, Mohammed Al Assaf is the marketing communication director for STC (Saudi Telecom Company). Active on both Twitter and Facebook, Al Assaf appears to be a bit of a techie, and he probably should know a little about the latest gadgets, seeing as he handles the branding for the kingdom’s largest telecom operator.

STC was established in 1998. It now oper-ates beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia, and is present in Kuwait, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, South Africa and Bahrain.

In 2009, Saudi Telecom was named the Dubai Lynx Advertiser of the Year.

“This is a great opportunity to improve, protect and build one of

the Arab world’s most exciting media companies.”

Active on both Twitter and Facebook, Al Assaf appears

to be a bit of a techie.

Abu Dhabi Media was established

in 2007 and has interests in media across the board.

In 2009, Saudi Telecom was named the Dubai Lynx Advertiser of the Year.

41/Frank Mooty/

42/Mohammed Al Assaf/

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 70 6/16/11 3:51 PM


Telling a different story

Smartphone strategist

Director general Al Jazeera Network

CEOMobily

Born in Jenin, Wadah Khanfar, the director general of the Al Jazeera Network, has studied engineer-ing, philosophy, African studies and international politics. It was while doing graduate research and consultancy in South Africa that he was approached by the newly launched Al Jazeera news channel in 1996.

Al Jazeera asked Khanfar to provide analysis on African affairs, and he became a correspond-ent in South Africa in 2001.

Khanfar has reported from countries including Afghanistan and Iraq, and became managing director of the Al Jazeera Channel in 2003, and became director general of the network in 2006.

“Ten years ago, Arabia was controlled by gov-ernments, and therefore the media – mainly TV stations – were pushing only one line, which was the government’s vision about reality and politics,” he said in an interview with PBS. “When Al Jazeera came, it changed all of that, and suddenly you find people from different politi-cal parties and opposition leaders appearing

on the screen, speaking to the audiences with their opinions.”

Al Jazeera has faced ostracism not only from the West, but also from states within the region itself. Offices of the network have been closed in several Arab states at various points in time. Recently, during the uprisings in Egypt, Al Jazeera offices were shut again to prevent broadcasting of the happenings in the country.

As CEO of Mobily, Khalid Al Kaf is no small figure in the Arab world’s telecom scene.

He manages a firm that owns one of the region’s biggest broadband networks. Mobily, or Etisalat Etihad, was the second telecom operator to be granted a license in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, according to an article in Khaleej Times, “it is entirely possible that [it] will have 22 million subscribers by the end of the year.”

A graduate from George Washington University, Al Kaf worked for Etisalat for more than 17 years before he joined Mobily in 2004. In his previous position, he played a significant role in building up the UAE’s third-generation mobile network.

Al Kaf argues that mobile data and wire-less subscriptions will overtake fixed-line data subscriptions, and this seems to be the basis for his strategy for Mobily, focusing on Saudi’s mobile network. When discussing what he sees as the future for the telecom industry, Al Kaf told Arabian Business that growth and innovation will come from users shifting their preference to connecting online through their smartphones.

For him the important aspect is the impact it will have on the telecom industry. “The challenge for traditional telcos will be how to culturally and mentally change our way of doing business.”

Al Khaf is a “strong leader,” nominators said when he was short-listed for the World Com-munication Awards 2009 as CEO of the year. “He considers himself one of the company… He loves his work and therefore we love his too.”

Khanfar has reported from Afghanistan and Iraq, becoming

director general of the Al Jazeera Network in 2006.

Al Kaf argues mobile data and wireless subscriptions will overtake

fixed-line data subscriptions.

Al Jazeera has faced ostracism not only from

the West, but also from states within the region.

Mobily was the second telecom operator to be granted

a license in Saudi Arabia.

43/Wadah Khanfar/

44/Khalid Al Kaf/

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 71 6/16/11 3:51 PM


All-rounder

Seeing both sides

Head of group marketingEmirates NBD

Vice-president Etihad

Vikram Krishna is head of Group Marketing at Emirates NBD. He’s also pretty smart because his brand is currently on the up. In 2010, the value of the Emir-ates NBD brand increased by $295 million, making it the most valuable banking brand in the UAE, and resulting in position 132 in The Banker magazine’s global “Top 500 banking brands” ranking 2011.

Not bad for a brand which is only two years old. And how does Krishna think this happened? Luck? No – think again. “One major step was the insti-tutionalization of a holistic market research-driven brand value management system. Based on customer insights we have been able to refine our brand value proposition and align all of our marketing and PR activities in a high-impact fashion.”

He also thinks that “A key success factor has been our comprehensive and innovative ‘360-degree marketing’ approach. ‘360’ because our approach covers every angle of any potential interaction with our stakeholders from a marketing point of view.”

His degree is from Delhi University and he’s the sort of chap you would want in a 360-degree marketing campaign if you were a bank. And if you were won-

dering what 360-degree marketing encompasses, let us enlighten you.

The Emirates NBD ‘360 degree marketing’ ap-proach encompasses eight distinct fields, including consumer insights, product innovation, branding, brand activation, events and sponsorships, local area marketing, digital marketing and communications.

Let’s just hope it’s one of the questions in our next general knowledge quiz.

Thinking outside the box can often help stir up that right amount of buzz that a firm needs, and that’s exactly the strategy Andrew Ward seems to be following. As vice-president of Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Airways, he strives to do things “differently” and “break through the clutter” while working on building the brand.

Since joining the airlines about two years back, he has focused on several non-traditional marketing campaigns, including targeting the Indian market through a dance competition and roping in Indian actress Katrina Kaif as the new brand ambassador.

And according to him, the amount of money spent on advertising and marketing should not be the main consideration while coming up with a successful strategy, “but [what matters is] the way you spend it.”

Ward started his career in marketing at Uni-lever in the UK after graduating from Oxford University. He then went to work for advertising agencies such as BDDP and McCann Erickson in London, before landing in the Emirates in 2005

and setting up TBWA Abu Dhabi. According to him, it is all these different experiences that have encouraged him to think creatively. “Not just in terms of advertising, but it is in terms of marketing programs, promotional ideas, and new ways of doing things. Basically you are constantly challenging people to be different,” he said in an interview with media and market-ing website Adgully.

“A key success factor has been our comprehensive

and innovative ‘360-degree marketing’ approach.”

“Basically you are constantly challenging people to be different.”

In 2010, the value of the Emirates NBD brand increased by $295

million, making it the most valuable banking brand in the UAE.

Ward has introduced non-traditional marketing campaigns, including

roping in Indian actress Katrina Kaif as brand ambassador.

45/Vikram Krishna/

46/Andrew Ward/

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 72 6/16/11 7:29 PM


Follow the plan

Evolve and grow

Communication and marketing services director/ Nestlé Middle East

Chief marketing officerEmirates

There is always a goal; you plan where you want to go,” says Raef Labaky, communication and marketing services director at Nestlé.

When he started at Leo Burnett in Lebanon, his first assignment was to work on Philip Morris. The yearly plan was a thick, daunting document. “It was exciting, dealing with something for the first time, and I felt proud at the end of the day, after two months, when you see this document that you worked on.”

Labaky had come to Leo Burnett after a very short stint in a bank. “After three days I left the bank,” he says. “Banking for me was a bit too serious and strict.” And advertising suited his plan better.

He was with BBDO when he was approached by Nestlé in 1999. “If I managed to grow within the company, it’s good,” he says. “If not, I could always go back to the agency world with additional experience.”

From a department of one – himself – Labaky now has 16 people directly reporting to him. And he is still developing the company’s marketing. Four years ago he hired someone to work specifically on digital, and the company now spends between 5 percent and 10 percent of its marketing budget

on digital, depending on categories. That’s a long way from when Labaky was in Saudi Arabia with BBDO. “For Pepsi they had an e-mail via Bahrain that I was the only one at the agency connected to it,” he says. “And because of the shortage of phone lines, we used to have a switch. If I wanted to use the email I would flick the switch to steal a line from the company just to download the e-mails, and then put it back again.”

In an interview with Gulf News, Boutros Boutros, chief marketing officer at Emirates, explained that he has watched the brand “evolve and grow significantly” during his time at the company, with Emirates now ranking among the top 10 carriers globally.

Coming from a journalism background, Boutros started his career with the airlines in 1991, when he was appointed the media relations manager for the Middle East region. Soon after, his job duties were expanded to include Europe and North America, before he was promoted to oversee all aspects of public relations. He now looks after all marketing and communication activities for the Emirates Group, overseeing a team of more than 100 staff and more than 100 agencies.

Sponsorship plays a key role in that market-ing, including sport. “It has been working and created a good reputation for us and in some countries we look much bigger than we are,” he said in an interview with The Australian.

However, he says, “Your loyalty to an airline

should be no different to your loyalty to your football club or the coffee shop in your street.”

He was awarded the Gulf Marketing Review Effectiveness in Marketing Awards (GEMAS) Marketer of the Year in 2010.

His advice for successful corporate com-munications is: “Be highly qualified, passionate about the brand, open to new ideas, creative and have excellent communication.”

“After three days I left the bank. Banking for me

was a bit too serious and strict.”

“Your loyalty to an airline should be no different to your loyalty

to your football club or the coffee shop in your street.”

47/Raef Labaky/

48/Boutros Boutros/

He looks after all marketing and communication for the Emirates

Group, overseeing a team of more than 100 staff and 100 agencies.

From a department of one, Labaky now has 16 people directly reporting

to him. He is still developing the company’s marketing

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 73 6/16/11 3:51 PM


The milk man

Technical expert

Marketing director Middle EastDanone

Group chief marketing officerEtisalat

Tomas Hajek has t rave led around a lo t . He has s tud ied at the Univers i ty o f L imer ick in I re land, Hanzehogeschool Gron ingen in the Nether lands, and Vys-oká ško la ekonomická v Praze in the Czech Republ ic .

Now market ing d i rector for the Mid-d le East for the French da i r y company Danone, he worked wi th Procter & Gamble in the Czech Republ ic , Hungary and Canada, before mov ing to Danone in Saudi Arab ia in 2008. In Ju ly 2009 he was promoted f rom market ing d i rector, Saudi Arab ia, to h is current pos i t ion.

Danone in the reg ion is par tnered wi th A l Saf i , a Saudi company that ’s par t o f the A l Fa isa l iah Group. I t produces and d is t r ibutes more than 300,000 tons of da i r y products a year under the s lo-gan, “Good heal th tastes great .” I t has been act ive in the Middle East s ince 2001, and suppl ies 30,000 reta i lers in 11 countr ies.

Essa Al Haddad joined Etisalat more than 25 years ago, beginning his career in the network planning section of the engineer-ing department. He moved through project implementation and technology strategy development to become executive vice-president of engineering.

He was then appointed as chief marketing officer in May 2006, to develop Etisalat’s marketing strategy with the goal of making the telco a customer-centric operation.

This is a man with a solid engineering background, who will ensure robust technical answers to customer requirements.

He is also a true corporate officer; he chairs several internal committees including the numbering plan committee, next genera-tion network steering committee, and the corporate billing and customer care steering committee, among others.

So basically Al Haddad is solid as a rock in the Etisalat universe. He has spent his life supporting the company and growing

within it. This sort of career is getting rarer in commerce and Al Haddad should continue to get rewarded for his loyalty.

Hajek worked with Procter & Gamble in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Canada before moving to Danone in

Saudi Arabia in 2008.

Essa Al Haddad joined Etisalat more than 25 years ago,

beginning his career in the engineering department.

Danone in the region is partnered with Al Safi,

a Saudi company that’s part of the Al Faisaliah Group.

He was made chief marketing officer in May 2006, with the

goal of making the telco a customer-centric operation.

49/Tomas Hajek/

50/Essa Al Haddad/

32-PWL-Top 20-50.indd 74 6/16/11 3:51 PM

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