A question of pitch

Sophia Money-Coutts

• Last Updated: November 23. 2009 7:05PM UAE / November 23. 2009 3:05PM GMT

“Thursdays are relaxed,” says Uday Desai, an account director with Young & Rubicam. Nicole Hill / The National

Oh, for the old-school glamour of those Mad Men. The suits, the hats, the louche manner in which they smoke, the women and their cinched-in waists, those campaigns – for Lucky Strike cigarettes, for laxatives, for lipstick among many others. You name it, Don Draper and his office can sell it.

The cult American television series has notched up plenty of awards and millions of viewers around the world, seduced by the depiction of the advertising industry in the 1960s. That was its golden age, when TV and radio figures were rocketing along with disposable incomes and advertising heroes created towering brands such as Volkswagen, American Airlines and Marlboro.

Cut to today and the industry appears less buoyant. An October report disclosed that advertising spend in the UAE was down 30 per cent over the first nine months of the year, compared with the same period last year.

Sectors that have been hit particularly brutally are, unsurprisingly, property, financial services and the motor industry. Agency revenue has fallen as a result and, as in so many industries, jobs have gone. Even the sparky Mad Men of Sterling Cooper – the show’s fictional agency – might struggle in this environment.

And yet there are indications that not all is gloom with the advent of bolder, more meaningful campaigns in recent months. In September, Emirates Airline launched its most expensive advertising campaign yet. Called Meet Dubai, it is reported to have cost around US$10 million (Dh37m) to make and put out. We see a chirpy actor launch himself down the Leap of Faith in Atlantis, wander along the beach, head to Ski Dubai and shop down on Dubai Creek, among other happy wanderings in the city.

Then there’s the eye-catching campaign from Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, which has stamped its mark along several of the UAE’s highways with billboards telling us to “Get a Trophy Life”, “Carpe Dirham”, and “Prewrite History”. Aldar’s most recent campaign (modestly, “You said the word. We delivered.”) is supported by an engaging design and calligraphic swirls.

Motor between the strip of towers along the Sheikh Zayed Road and you will still note plenty of billboards, leaf through a magazine or newspaper, flick through Showtime channels or scan the radio waves and you will still be besieged by brands marketing their wares. Most recently, taxis in Abu Dhabi have started to grow rooftop and boot panels for advertising space.

Clearly, there is an industry still hard at work in the UAE, but who are the brains behind it? And can the country’s advertising executives still swan into the office late one morning, knock out an idea while lying smoking on their sofa before taking a long lunch and call that a day’s work, as we see on our screens?

To discuss the region’s industry, two of Dubai’s “Mad Men” agree to meet, for lunch of course. They are Daymonde Marks, group account director for Young & Rubicam, and Uday Desai, an account director with the same American agency, which has operated from Dubai for 15 years, though its headquarters are in New York and it is owned by the communications monolith WPP. Twenty-first century admen, Marks is in jeans and a T-shirt, Desai in suit trousers with an open-necked shirt. “Thursdays are our relaxed day,” smiles Desai.

Both have been working in the region for several years, with Marks having previously spent time in the industry in New York and London. They argue that the reason several campaigns have been more noticeable recently is the recession.

“Look at the main agencies,” begins Marks, who says that all the main international advertising firms now have a presence in the country. “I reckon nine out of 10 of them were built up on real-estate clients.”

Spending on the property sector, he says, dropped off dramatically – “face of a cliff, literally in one night”.

That left advertising agencies with a new headache, having to drum up other sources of revenue quickly from different brands. “But that’s why you notice other campaigns have come up, because you haven’t got this plethora of real estate taking up every billboard.”

The financial consequences have been hard, with clients knowing that competition is fiercer and they can bully the agencies. “The days of massive salaries and easy living are gone. People work weekends, which is unheard of in the West,” says Marks.

“There, it would be unusual to work on the weekends because if clients gave you such unreasonable time-frames you’d charge them double. Here, clients will give you a brief on Thursday, expect something on Sunday and say, ‘Well, you’ve got the weekend.’ We’ve been forced into a corner.”

“I am at my desk at eight every morning and never leave until 7pm,” agrees a young, Dubai-based account director for a well-known British firm. “It is not unusual to find half the agency still at their desks at 10pm. The management see it as a positive thing if they walk past your desk at 11pm and you’re still sitting there, like it’s some kind of competition.”

Not only is there renewed time pressure now, but in recent years competition in the UAE has been driven by the growth and the number of international brands appearing in the country – a trend that continues, albeit at a slower pace, despite worldwide financial turmoil.

“One of our clients is [the Dubai retail complex] Burjuman,” says Marks. “And from Discovery Gardens to there you now pass something like nine malls. When I first came here there was only Mall of the Emirates, so the brands didn’t have to worry. Now it’s ­different.”

Sudden, stiff competition makes things even more complicated for the agencies when it comes to the business ethos of clients here, with brands approaching many more agencies for pitches than would be the norm in Europe or America.

“Clients abuse the process,” says Marks. “A friend of mine has just resigned from an agency in Abu Dhabi, having done something like 25 pitches this year with not one answer back. Not even a no.”

The usual number of agencies that would pitch to a new client?

“If it was a very large, pan-European pitch, you might find six agencies. You’d never get 10 like you do here. They think you’re here to facilitate the client. In the West, they consider agencies as a partner to forward the brand.”

A recent conference in Dubai supports Marks’s assertion. At the Media and Marketing Show earlier this month, chief executives from six of the region’s top agencies warned against the breakdown of communication between agency and client as discounts were sought by the latter and bills went unpaid.

“The media houses earn two, three, four or five per cent, depending on their policy, while you are talking about clients asking for 30, 40 per cent discounts on huge amounts,” The National quoted Eddie Moutran, the chairman and chief executive of Memac Ogilvy in the Mena region, as saying.

Marks says he himself has spent 18 months chasing one client over invoices that go back four years, to no avail. “It’s a symptom of the ­region,” he adds.

So far, so unlike the glory days of Mad Men. But then the challenges of coming up with a new campaign here are many and various, compared with the advertising hubs of New York and London. The UAE is a country in which scores of nationalities live, so there are cultural sensitivities to think about and a vast spectrum of tastes to take into account.

“It can be difficult to communicate with the wide range of people here,” says a senior British source from another big American advertising company with an office in Dubai. “There is definitely a fear of doing things that are different and unusual. It’s a mixture of actual inability to do anything idiosyncratic and a fear of doing anything ­idiosyncratic.

“If you’re broadcasting to a UK audience,” he adds, “you could use the tune to a kids’ TV show from 30 years ago and you know the target audience would recognise it. You can’t do that here.”

Happily for the Emirates’ advertising gurus, online growth and greater internet penetration are helping to change this. “Look at the Star Wars kid,” says the source, referring to one of YouTube’s most popular videos in 2003, in which an unwitting French-Canadian teenager was filmed wielding a makeshift lightsabre. It became a viral hit, spawned dozens of spin-offs and has now been viewed nearly 15 million times.

“That would have been quite a narrow cultural reference, but now we in the Middle East can use things like that,” he says happily. “It’s helped everything become more universal.”

Language-wise, there are strict guidelines to follow for certain advertising spaces in the UAE. All outdoor campaigns, for example, are legally required to be 50 per cent Arabic and 50 per cent English. (This applies to public spaces, but does not include malls, airports or print media.) Young & Rubicam has dedicated language specialists to oversee the development of a pitch, but the language they lead in depends on the client. “It can be more problematic in layouts,” says Marks. “Look at ‘KFC’, for example – three letters in English but in Arabic it takes up a whole hoarding.”

The balance of billboard advertising versus that on television, radio and the internet also varies greatly from the West.

“Run a television campaign in Europe, and you’re talking 300 million people. In the US, 300-400 million,” says Marks. “Here, when you start breaking it down to your specific audience you might only be talking half a million people.”

Television’s loss, however, is the billboard’s gain. “Everything’s driven by the car,” says Marks, discussing why roadside hoarding is so omnipresent – on lamp posts in particular.

The agonising blatancy of radio advertising and promotions by DJs are also explained by the time we all spend driving. “You’ve just got so many people in their cars,” says Marks. “It’s your cheap and cheerful media.”

Brand and agency eyes are on the Dubai Metro at the moment, to work out what exactly to advertise on it. Given that the Roads and Traffic Authority announced earlier this month that passenger figures were 40 per cent above pre-launch estimates, is this good news for advertisers?

“They’ve all been waiting for the demographics,” says Marks. “The assumption was that it would be people on lower incomes but it’s wider than that. Westerners who are used to metro systems, to people who don’t want to use their cars to people who can’t afford cars.” Clients, though, are still waiting to see the make-up and for the system to be fully operational.

Copycat advertising, with certain campaigns here showing an eerie resemblance to campaigns elsewhere in the world, is another phenomenon that certain eagle-eyed observers might have noticed.

“It happens here a lot,” says the senior advertiser, “much more than in London or New York but they have a freer reign to do more interesting stuff. Problem is, it’s silly to say there are fewer great ideas because they’ve all been done, but that does have a slight truth to it.”

Marks agrees. “Well, you know the saying that there’s no such thing as a new idea?” he smiles. “Here there’s a certain element of it. But it comes down to the fact that people haven’t done enough research. When you first get the brief on a campaign, the first thing you should do is sit down and see what everyone else has done.” The difficulty, he explains, is that agencies are forced to work under such severe time restrictions.

It all seems about as far away from Mad Men as one could possibly get. There is, though, one jarring similarity that persists – the role of women. Although things have changed considerably over the past 30 or 40 years, much of the industry is still male-dominated.

“There tends to be an even mix of women and men in account-handling­ and creative roles, but only to designer and art director levels,” says a female account manager from the offices of another WPP-owned British advertising firm in Dubai. “In regards to top director positions, they are pretty much all men.”

Sexism, according to her, is consequently a problem that she sees “all the time”. This “dinosaur way of thinking” is, she says, mostly found between agency and client but within agency offices can often be seen in unfair promotions.

But what about the fun stuff? The post-work socialising and those long lunches?

They are mostly no more, say both Desai and Marks, shaking their heads ruefully. “The offices are still creative, and fun. We still play music. But there’s a massive divide between social lives and work,” adds Marks. “And I’ve never seen so many people make their own lunch. Honestly, 90 per cent of our office now.”

And yet the enthusiasm for his job has not waned. “What I love about advertising is that it instils a massive sense of pride. You open the paper and see what you’ve done, or walk down the street and see it. Or watch the TV and your commercial comes on. That’s what it’s about, and that’s what it delivers for us.”

Don Draper himself would ­probably agree.