There is a special bathtub in Dubai. You find it in a place that could compete for the honor of being the spiffiest office in the Arab world’s most posh business quarter — but this plain bathtub’s absolute simplicity is antithetical to any luxury. Its host is visibly proud of it, because it is, of course, a symbol.
Its belongs to Ramzi Raad, chairman and chief executive officer of the agency TBWA Raad. Being one of the Middle East’s advertising fathers and a steward for 43 years of the regional industry’s narrative, he fondly explains the bathtub’s raison d’être as a reminder that creativity, even when under monumental pressures, sometimes requires one to step out and relax. As a gift of TBWA Worldwide, the tub also has other implications. Here on the sixth floor of this Dubai advertising hub it is a reminder of how the regional advertising agencies are anchored to global corporations.
This question of ownership is on a lot of industry minds these days, following the onset of a global takeover through which the big multinational advertising groups are cementing control of regional agencies.
As Raad tells it, ownership of the regional agencies follows a straightforward logic. “Today, most of us have become majority-owned by the multinationals,” long-established agencies that command the rules of the game, he says. “They allow you the privilege of having majority at the beginning but then the roles are reversed because it is part of their global policy. They own the work that they want you to develop. It is their brand that you are operating under and so on. It’s a fair deal at the end of the day.”
Fair as it may be, Raad has misgivings regarding multinationals’ record in the slow delivering of, and low investment in, nurturing local talent. For the future, however, he and other heads of regional agencies share much optimism on the rise of regional talent, as evidenced by the industry accolades won in recent years outside the region.
As Chuck Brymer, president and CEO of DDB Worldwide Communications, tells Executive, “the creative product here in the Middle East is good but I think it’s going to get a lot better. We’re investing in our people, in cross-pollination and in training.”
The global aspirations of Middle East and North African firms, while in deference to the obligations toward the holding companies, actually seem to exceed what is easily granted by the multinationals.
“I want this whole network to feel as part of one family, and I’d like to build collaboration between our agency and [our international partner] agencies,” exclaims Tarek Miknas, CEO of creative agency Fortune Promoseven. In his perception of the work in the Middle East, “I think that the state of the entire industry right now is a level playing field and we could come up with the greatest innovation, greatest work, and we could challenge the rest of the globe by doing greater things than they can do.”
One area in which the presence of the multinationals has contributed to improvements in the region is in transparency.
Many industry representatives (off the record, naturally) have told Executive that “grey” areas of financial misconduct — read ‘forgetting’ to tell clients about discounts the agencies received from media as volume rebates, faking invoices, fraudulent accounting, illicit kickbacks and bribery, etc. — persisted in the darker annals of MENA advertising. Several agency leaders who sat down with Executive openly compared the industry with prostitution, if only in jest.
But this wickedness is on the way out, they say, in large part due to the global stakeholders who are pushing transparency into the system because of financial and reputational risk.
Still, transparency is a term that a high number of industry leaders tell Executive is overused and has been abused. “I had to smile when you used this word,” was the comment of more than one agency manager during our research.
In terms of the perception of the industry, transparency is required in any agency-client relationship and profits the enterprise in its interaction with market partners. You cannot own 100 percent of the market, says Pierre Choueiri, CEO of Choueiri Group. “That doesn’t exist. You gain whatever you deserve by how serious you are, how transparent you are and how devoted to your media. This is how you gain your market share.”
Given that these monumental improvements were made essentially under pressure from the parent companies, it begs the question of whether such reforms and progress could be made on a local level. For this to occur, strong and disciplined leadership is a must. Especially so in an industry that values its own integrity, sophistication and creativity as its prime assets — but whose reputation is at the same time tarnished by perceptions of being a primal trade of cheap favors.
Mohan Nambiar, CEO of MEC MENA, says, “We should not be blaming the industry if we cannot add any value into it. The only way you can blame it is if you don’t want to lead it. People who want to lead it have to make it change.”
