Chapter 120\ Qatar’s bumpy journey

To manage the Qatar Foundation business, Haya Al Nasr insisted on an agency set-up independent of our existing agency in Doha. She assured us that the Qatar Foundation contract would allow us the opportunity to establish a new legal entity without the need for a Qatari partner, or even a sponsor.

When we tried, we discovered that this was not applicable to service companies but was meant for contractors whose heavy equipment was considered collateral by the Qatari government. At that stage, Haya Al Nasr, insisted on having an exclusive account team stationed at their office. At first, we resisted, quoting the experience we have had with Etihad Airways in Abu Dhabi, but eventually succumbed. At the same time, we were approached by two young SWAT team members from Los Angeles who asked if we could offer them a permanent job, as they liked Doha. In consultation with John Hunt and TBWA\Chiat\Day, we hired the copywriter Allan Manaysay, who was quickly liked and accepted by the ladies at the Qatar Foundation.

Other than the foundation, we have had a couple of promising new business opportunities in Qatar over the years. The first was Al Jazeera which, via its London-based marketing group, had appointed us to prepare the media launch for Al Jazeera International. For TBWA\RAAD, this was an exciting assignment, since – in 2004 – Al Jazeera had been voted as the 5^th most influential global brands behind Apple, Google, Ikea, and Starbucks. After many revisions due to the indecisiveness of the client, we were invited to present to Wadah Khanfar, the director general of the new TV station. The many people who attended the presentation seemed to be most impressed and, in the typical Arab way, showed all the signs of complementing our work. After a long wait, we were told that Al Jazeera’s management had failed to include any money for their own advertising. All our efforts and all the London and Doha travel expenses went down the drain.

Another sad Qatari experience was the launch of beIN Sports in June 2012, after Al Jazeera Media Network purchased the rights to broadcast France’s Ligue 1 matches from 2012 to 2016 at a cost of €90 million a year. This we executed with great success and the TV, print and outdoor launch material received great acclaim. After around two years of my agency delivering regular work – briefed by a continuously growing number of newcomers to the beIN team – we noticed a pattern of slow payment, accompanied by an annoying process of “who briefed this job?” and “who gave them the authority to brief?”. When the outstanding payments for one year exceeded $5 million, we confronted the client and reminded beIN that we were its advertising agency and not its bankers. From that moment on, the relationship went into a downward spiral that brought our contract to a sad end.

At the Qatar Foundation, the client began tapping into its growing relationship with the American copywriter-turned-creative-director to channel assignments to TBWA\Chiat Day first, and later to other Omnicom Group companies without asking or approving quotes. When invoices for these jobs began arriving at TBWA\RAAD, the Qatar Foundation rejected payment, claiming that these were to be covered by our monthly retainer. As a result, Manaysay was replaced by Christian Meichsner, the CEO of TBWA\Hamburg, who would manage TBWA\RAAD Qatar and oversee the Qatar Foundation account.

One year after Meichsner took over, the client called for an account review on the pretext that the Qatar Foundation was a government organization and needed to be aligned with established procedures. The result of the review took a long time to be announced and the final decision was to stop the use of a retained advertising agency and to pitch on a project-by-project basis. Having delivered three successful global campaigns that had made the Qatar Foundation known throughout the world, just as Sheikha Moza had requested, we opted to extract ourselves. In doing so, we ensured that the TBWA brand remained respected and continued to be the top-of-mind advertising agency brand in Qatar.