The four founders of TBWA had established their agency to be different, and the second wave of leadership turned out to be more committed to this goal. Jean-Marie Dru, Lee Clow, Reg Lascaris, John Hunt, and Keith Smith drove the Disruption philosophy into the center of TBWA’s DNA, and they all ensured that this was pushed to every single group agency around the world. The process followed was one of give and take.
When the worldwide group pitched for Standard Chartered Bank, it called on me to join the agency’s pitch team in London to present the Arab point of view. I joined Keith Smith, Philip Brett and Robin Nayak, the chief strategy officer of TBWA\Singapore and Southeast Asia, as well as John Merrifield, TBWA\Asia’s creative-at-large, and others. We won the pitch and continue to be involved with the Standard Chartered business in the region, winning grand prix for the bank at the 2010 MENA Effie Awards, plus a gold.
Another booster for our integration within the global group was Nissan, which was a major client of TBWA Worldwide and the first and main client at our young agency. The Nissan Motor Company, realizing the importance of the Arab markets for its business, had established a regional operation called Nissan Middle East at the Jebel Ali Free Zone in 1994. The fact that I had been next to this client’s regional headquarters from the moment the negotiations had begun with Abdel Wahid Al Rostamani, the owner of the Arabian Automobiles Company (AAC), Nissan’s national sales company in Dubai and the Northern Emirates, helped TBWA maintain a unique relationship that was much stronger than anything the group had in Japan or anywhere else. This relationship, which was established before TBWA\RAAD existed, continued, and survived the regular changes of management at Nissan Middle East, and even the unfair agency review of 2003, which was caused by corruption within the client’s operation. When TBWA Worldwide created G1 – an agency within the agency – exclusively to service the Nissan account, we did the same in Dubai.
Then, when TBWA created Nissan United, we became active leaders and our mandate extended outside of the MENA region to India and even Turkey. All the above brought me closer to my countryman, Nissan’s savior and new CEO, Carlos Ghosn. This timely friendship proved to be beneficial to TBWA Worldwide when Ghosn began to turn into a tough and very demanding client. In 2002, both Ghosn and TBWA’s CEO, Jean-Marie Dru, were invited to address the IAA World Congress in Beirut. When the two CEOs got together for a tête-à-tête meeting, Rita Ghosn, the wife of Carlos Ghosn – who was waiting with us for the meeting to end – turned to me and said: “Your boss seems to be giving my husband a difficult time, as he has already been to the toilet three times, which is his way of coming up with an answer when he is cornered.”
In late 1999, I joined Austen Zecha, president, and CEO of TBWA-ISC Malaysia, Ng Chiew Ping, the agency’s managing director, and their team during a presentation to Datuk Ahmad Shah Hussein Tambakau, chairman of the Malaysia Tourism Promotion Board, and other members of the board. They presented a new campaign proposal under the theme “Malaysia Truly Asia”. We took turns delivering an exhaustive situation analysis, a relevant strategy that was meant to celebrate Malaysia’s diversity and showed how the campaign would be visually and musically delivered via a global media plan. As we were concluding, the sound of drums was heard outside the meeting room. When we rushed to open the door, a Malaysian marching band paraded into the boardroom, followed by three women (Malay, Chinese and Indian in national dress) who were to be at the center of the advertising campaign.
In 2005, the Malaysia Tourism Promotion Board decided to participate in an international conference organized by the World Tourism Authority in Amman, Jordan. As TBWA-ISC Malaysia and its client were not able to make it to Jordan, I was asked to present the “Malaysia Truly Asia” campaign story at this global event.