Omnicom’s Dani Richa talks Lebanese dominance

ENAR

  With 25 years of experience at Impact BBDO, a leading regional advertising agency, Dani Richa has assumed different roles within the company, including chief creative officer. Chairman and chief executive of the Omnicom subsidiary since 2009, he is one of the most influential ad executives in the region. Executive sat with Richa in his Beirut office to discuss Lebanon’s prominence in the ad industry and the main changes in the market in recent years.    How did the Lebanese become so dominant in the region’s advertising industry?  It was triggered by the [Lebanese] Civil War [which started in 1975]. You had clusters of regional clients and agencies that moved to Cyprus and started operating out of there. We were all offshore [in Cyprus] and covering the Middle East from there. Then Dubai started becoming what it is today and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, companies started moving