Chapter 68\ Launching MENA’s first International PR Joint Venture

In 1975, we received a letter at Intermarkets from a gentleman named Robert Leaf, who introduced himself as the international president of a public relations consultancy called Burson-Marsteller. Leaf explained that his personal research made him conclude that PR consultancies – as known to the industrial world – did not seem to exist in the Middle East. But he added that he had also discovered that Intermarkets was an exception, being an Arab advertising agency that had successfully involved itself in the public relations business on behalf of its clients. Leaf was keen to hold initial discussions with our agency to find out if we were interested in expanding our PR services from simple media relations to more advanced, comprehensive corporate communications.

We instantly responded by welcoming Robert Leaf to Beirut, and, upon his arrival, we saw a tall, greying American dressed in a Savile Row suit, as he had made London his second home. Bob – as he wanted us to call him – oversaw BM’s world out of this European Center Point and continued to travel extensively in Europe and Asia. Bob introduced Burson-Marsteller as one of the top 10 global PR consultancies, founded in New York by Harold Burson and William Marsteller in 1953, and stressed that it was primarily known for its crisis management and political lobbying services. At Intermarkets, we felt that a tie-up with such an organization could be a door opener for new business to be acquired from the governments of the oil-rich countries of the Arabian Gulf. Knowing also that General Motors was one of Burson-Marsteller’s first retained clients made our dialogue with Bob Leaf a topic of great interest, to the extent that he called it a match made in heaven. Bob Leaf, Erwin Guerrovich and I jointly felt that there was so much that could be done for all types of potential clients that was not currently being done. This led to an agreement to set up a joint venture that would launch Burson-Marsteller in the Middle East, after Bob returned to London and drafted a document that would outline the terms.

The first major new business opportunity that came the way of this new consultancy was a referral from the Washington office of Burson-Marsteller, which had been invited by the Saudi American Oil Company (Aramco) to pitch for its global corporate affairs business. The invitation was sent to PR consultancies that had a presence in the region, and that is how Burson-Marsteller decided to lead the pitch from its Middle East office, which the agency was looking forward to seeing lift off. This made the preparation of the presentation deck a very informative lesson for many of the Intermarkets people, who were always eager to learn. A team from the energy practice at the Burson-Marsteller Washington office came to Dubai to help Bob Leaf who was there all the time, accompanied by his international CFO that was working on completing the fee proposal and the rest of the business terms required by the Saudi Tender Committee. As we were waiting for the result of the pitch, we thought of enhancing our chances of winning by taking our eventual account team closer to Aramco, which was headquartered in Dhahran. But we soon realized the difficulties of setting up a branch of Burson-Marsteller Middle East in the Kingdom. Also, we had found out that most of the people who had been interviewed to become members of the account team had hesitated to accept a job there, irrespective of its generous package. We opted to base our team in Bahrain, and we physically began the urgent preparation so we would be up and running when the result was announced.

It was so great to learn that we had been selected to partner Aramco, and when we rushed to introduce our team and participate in the first meeting, we were smacked with the very painful surprise of the client not wanting to be serviced by people based in Bahrain or Dubai. Aramco wanted the Burson-Marsteller service from Washington, and no other office. Not having dealt with Saudis before, Bob Leaf and his international entourage agreed on the spot to their new client’s wish, and Burson-Marsteller Middle East was compelled to return the favor to their Washington colleagues, right there and then.

Despite this shocking first experience, business came in relatively quickly to our new joint venture. Burson-Marsteller Middle East started working for Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Polaroid, Nissan, and TAG Heuer, for whom they helped sponsor a regional offshore powerboat racing competition which helped put Dubai’s Victory Team on the global map. This encouraged the management of the consultancy to broaden their horizons and start looking at new markets. The country that looked most attractive, with its promising future possibilities, was Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak appeared to have established a general calm, and the largest population base it offered – despite a clearly visible majority with limited disposable income – were loud messages for Burson-Marsteller to plant a flag in Cairo. Allan Biggar was hired for the task and was quick in expanding the Coca-Cola Gulf mandate to help reposition the brand that had bought the plant and operations of Pepsi’s regional bottler. Burson-Marsteller Egypt worked on behalf of the Agency for International Development, promoting the benefits of privatizing government-owned industries, which had dramatically increased in number after the 1952 revolution and the dominance of the Egyptian Armed Forces over most aspects of life in the country.

Unfortunately, the biggest assignment, and one of Burson-Marsteller’s greatest success stories, took place on 17 November 1997, when six gunmen disguised as members of the Egyptian Security Forces descended on the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor and killed the two-armed guards at the site with automatic firearms, trapping a large group of foreign tourists inside the pharaonic temple. The killing went on systematically for 45 minutes, resulting in the death of 58 foreign tourists, including 35 Swiss, 10 Japanese (eight of whom were honeymooners), four Egyptians, six Brits, including a five-year old child, four Germans, one French national and one Colombian. The attack was planned and executed by a fundamental Islamist group. The news of the massacre hit hard all around the world and tourists in droves began to cancel their Egyptian holiday plans and airlines began to cancel flights. The Egyptian economy, which was dependent on foreign tourism, suffered drastically.

Dr Mamdouh Al Beltagy, the Minister of Tourism, realized the vital need for an intelligent crisis management campaign, so he called on Burson-Marsteller, which had been hired earlier by the previous Minister of Tourism to handle a brief program on behalf of the Egyptian tourist industry. The first discovery as we took over the crisis management task was the realization that during the international media frenzy that followed the massacre, reporters had called the police station at Deir Al-Bahari (the site of the massacre), only to be answered by junior policemen. They seemed to enjoy talking to overseas reporters, so they dramatized the description of the scene, with ankle-high blood on the floor of the temple and wounded tourists moaning as they indefinitely waited for the single ambulance to return from the distant hospital. Our first action was to establish an international communications office in Cairo manned by Egyptian female tourist guides fluent in English, French, German and even Japanese, who responded using scripted, comforting, and assuring messages and updated health reports about each of the wounded. Through the Burson-Marsteller global network, we communicated the details of this center to media associations and press clubs in the six countries from where the targeted tourists came.

Then we quickly launched a comforting and assuring story with the aim of slightly reducing the impact of the terrible news that kept coming out of Egypt, as one after another the traumatized tourists shared their experience with the media. Singapore Airlines (SIA) was our client at Intermarkets, and the airline had a direct flight between Cairo and Singapore. This flight allowed a fast connection to Tokyo, and we cooperated with SIA’s country manager, the Japanese Embassy in Egypt and the local health and immigration authorities to urgently fly the injured Japanese tourists back home. Having suggested to SIA to equip their aircrafts out of Cairo with hospital beds, we pushed the news of those mercy flights to the Japanese and the rest of the international media, thus creating a wave of goodwill for the Egyptian Government, the Japanese Embassy and SIA.

In parallel, we began to train senior government officials, who were assigned the role of acting as spokespersons on behalf of the Egyptian Government (particularly the Ministry of Tourism), on crisis management and how to deal actively with the media. One of our toughest challenges was the ego of some of the seniors whose English language skills were very primitive. Despite their realization of this fact, they still insisted on talking to the media, as well as the tourist trade, during our launch of a roadshow to convince people to come back.