During TBWA\Worldwide’s agency presidents meeting in New York in 2009, TBWA\RAAD was named a “top performer” amongst the global network’s agencies. Later the same year, I was acknowledged amongst the “100 Most Influential Arabs” by Arabian Business. Then in 2010, I was named “Advertising Man of the Year” at the Dubai Lynx and in 2011 was included amongst the MENA region’s “Top Ten Communicators’ power list”. All these accolades rubbed off positively on TBWA’s reputation in the Middle East, which had been suffering from an image deficit due to our late arrival on the scene.
In 2010, TBWA’s worldwide executive committee joined us at our 10th anniversary celebration – the first public function to be staged at the newly-opened Armani Hotel in Dubai. Tom Carrol, TBWA\Worldwide CEO, and world president, delivered a repetitively applauded speech in which he complimented the TBWA\RAAD network team, saying: “You should be proud of your achievements during the past 10 years.” On the anniversary, we published our first book, “A Decade of Disruption”, a copy of which was presented to every visitor.
Jean-Marie Dru had the habit of circulating a newsletter to the entire global network under the title “Thursday”, in reference to the day it was published. To this he gave the following explanation: “Why is Thursday the best day of the week? Because it’s close enough to start thinking about the weekend and just far enough from Monday to still smile.”
The MENA network was twice the topic of Jean-Marie Dru’s newsletter. On 7 November 2002, when it carried the title TBWA\RAAD, and on 14 January 2010, which appeared with the headline: “Our client, the Qatari First Lady”.
For our region, Reg Lascaris used to publish his own newsletter, “Tuesday”, and here, too, we were the main topic of conversation on 27 October, with “Flying high” referencing our work on Saudia, Emirates and Etihad. Then, on 1 March 2011, we owned the headline again with “Cleaning up in Cairo”, this being in reference to our Henkel activation to clean up Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring.
As an agency group, TBWA is a very committed to staff development. We capitalized on that and delegated many of our aspiring executives from the agencies in Oman, Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dubai to attend the Tiger Academy, where they participated in sessions that were held in Tokyo and New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, London, and Beijing. Then in 2013, we brought the Tiger Academy to Dubai, which allowed the opportunity for many of our people participate.
Ramzi Raad introducing TBWA\RAAD to the Tiger Academy, 2013 in Dubai
We’ve been lucky as well to have several our senior executives graduate from Omnicom University’s advanced management program (AMP), which is considered one of the pre-eminent management development programs in the industry, as it is led by professors from Harvard Business School at the Babson campus.
When Troy Ruhanen was appointed president and CEO of TBWA\Worldwide in July 2014, I was one of the first overseas agency leaders to visit New York and congratulate him. During the visit, my son Reda and I invited our new president to visit our region, which he gladly confirmed, promising to stopover in Dubai on one of his frequent visits to Australia.
But in early 2015, I sent a “save the date” note to our clients and to the TBWA network, alerting them to our 15-year anniversary celebration in February. To my surprise, I received a call from Troy asking if we could accommodate a meeting of the TBWA Management Group at the same time as our anniversary week. Troy was eager to meet many of TBWA’s agency managers from around the world for the first time. We welcomed the opportunity and the large group that descended on us, including present and past TBWA\Worldwide leadership and the heads of agencies from New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, China, Japan, the US, and all over Europe. In his brief speech, Tom Carrol said he had been hesitant to come to this meeting because he no longer worked at TBWA, but he had changed his mind and come mainly to thank me personally for being the only leader in the group to offer Christian Meichsner a job after the loss of the Nivea business and the closure of the Hamburg agency. Obviously, Troy and Jean-Marie were very complimentary of TBWA\RAAD’s achievements over the past 15 years. We had the farewell dinner at Music Hall Dubai on the Palm Jumeriah, where we all drank, danced, and sang, concluding the night to the tune of “We are the Champions”.
In March 2016, TBWA\Worldwide invited us to a network meeting in Cape Town that carried the tribal name Indaba. Indaba meant a meeting under the tree, which provides the most shade and offers the finest view. On the last day, each one of the more than 100 participants slept in their own tents on the hill of a vineyard on the outskirts of Cape Town. During the closing ceremony, Jean-Marie Dru and Troy Ruhanen awarded Reg Lascaris, John Hunt, Keith Smith, José Alberto Terán and me with the TBWA Founders Award.
This surprise recognition made me feel that my choice of TBWA – first to become my associate and later to form a joint venture with – had been worth every single minute of the past 34 years. I would never have been recognized as a founder of Ogilvy or JWT or even Saatchi & Saatchi had I stayed with any of them.
