Office space was not easy to find in Dubai in late 1999. Nor was it easy to establish an advertising agency via the many hurdles of the Ministry of Information and other government formalities. Luckily, my friends at the Dubai Press Club helped me complete the formalities in record time and arranged for TBWA\RAAD to rent office space on the sixth floor of Dubai’s Twin Towers building. I soon arranged for the Hong Kong Trade Center Office, for whom I was still acting as Middle East consultant, to move into the same building. I had jumped into this agency partnership thinking the very next day after announcing we were open for business; international advertising budgets would start to drop into our lap. The reality proved to be quite different.
Early in the partnership, I joined Christian Meichsner, the CEO of TBWA\Hamburg, on a visit to Beiersdorf, the owners, manufacturers, and marketers of Nivea, in Hamburg, Germany. Nivea was a TBWA global client and its agreement with the agency stipulated the use of TBWA in all markets where the agency operated. On arrival at the offices of Beiersdorf, we were made to wait for more than an hour until the export director returned to his office. Jokingly, he explained that he was house-hunting and had been delayed. Following an introduction by Christian, I presented TBWA\RAAD’s credentials, only to receive the client’s rude response saying: “I hope that you did not come here hoping to grab the Nivea advertising account and go back to the Middle East.” On the way back to TBWA\Hamburg, I asked Christian why he had accepted such a disrespectful response. He answered that he had never waved the contract in the face of this client.
It took us a couple of years to get the Nivea account as the client had been grossly spoilt by the expensive gifts from their previous agency.
At TBWA\RAAD, we agreed amongst ourselves that if corruption is the convention in our markets, we had to Disrupt that. We also agreed not to sit and wait only for network business, we launched an aggressive drive to identify, lock and grow our own business. And we wouldn’t stop at that; we would pass on business from our markets to our global network. We passed Emirates Airline, Etihad Airways, Al Jazeera TV, Abu Dhabi Formula One and the Qatar Foundation to the global network, thus making our relationship one of give and take. Not only that, but we also made sure to put the Middle East on the TBWA\Worldwide activity map on a permanent basis.
In 2003, we welcomed Jonathan Ramsden, the worldwide chief financial officer, and Giulio Cimato to Dubai. We also sent delegates from TBWA\RAAD’s agencies in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain to TBWA’s Leadership Training Program, which was held in South Africa under the theme “Good is the enemy of the Great”.
In 2004, we invited John McNeel, head of the Nissan business, and Christian Meichsner to lecture to our general managers at the regional network meeting we held in Lebanon. That year we launched G1 to service Nissan, and Gary Wenzel, the global head of G1, came to the opening in Dubai.
Then, in February of 2005, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of TBWA\RAAD in the presence of John Hunt, Reg Lascaris and Giulio Cimato. Later in the year, we organized a regional meeting in Beit Mery, Lebanon, where Hunt, Lascaris and Cimato participated as well. The TBWA\Worldwide operating group held its 2006 meeting in Dubai, which was attended by Jean-Marie Dru, Tom Carroll, Jonathan Ramsden, Keith Smith, Denis Streiff, Perry Valkenburg, John Hunt, Reg Lascaris, Laurie Coots, Giulio Cimato, Cem Topçuoğlu and others. The operating group had always met in New York, Paris, or London, and this was the first time they had met in Dubai due to the growing importance of the Middle East to the TBWA network.
In the same year, we launched Omnicom’s integrated agency brand Tequila in the presence of its founder and CEO, Tom Wass. Tequila soon spread from the UAE to Qatar as it thrived on banking accounts in that market.
After knocking on the doors of Omnicom’s Porter Novelli and Fleishman Hillard, I arranged a meeting with Ketchum. Reg Lascaris felt that my initiative could be useful to the other TBWA agencies of his region, so I invited them all to join me. We travelled to this July meeting in London as a TBWA group, including agencies from the Middle East, South Africa, Turkey, Greece and Austria. Personally, I returned with a decision to launch Ketchum Middle East. In this year as well, we organized a creative huddle for the TBWA Middle East and North Africa network at Edde Sands in Byblos, Lebanon, under the leadership of John Hunt. We also organized a training day for the entire agency in Dubai, which was conducted by Rod Wright, director of development at TBWA\Worldwide.
Keith Smith, Reg Lascaris, Giulio Cimato and Cem Topçuoğlu participated in our seventh anniversary regional meeting and celebration party in Dubai in 2007. Then, on 10 October, and like in all other TBWA agencies around the world, we took the staff of all the MENA offices out to special gatherings, during which we launched TBWA’s 10×10 global initiative.
John McNeel visited TBWA\RAAD and Nissan Middle East during the month of November 2008, and this was our opportunity to update the worldwide management about the many initiatives we had pioneered for this important global client in recent years.
In 2009, Jean-Marie Dru visited Lebanon accompanied by Myles Peacock, general manager of E-Graphics, the creative services arm of the TBWA Group. The visit was requested by Carlos Ghosn.