Brand Comms in the Middle East are boring
The economic benefits incentivize a lack of creative innovation.
In 2018, having worked for a little over a decade in advertising in India, the lure of the Dirham combined with a lack of taxes took me to work for an ad agency in Dubai. I remember my first few weeks as I went around the town taking in the sights and sounds. My eyes naturally went to the advertising billboards as I took in the slew of familiar and unfamiliar brands.
At work, I was introduced to clients and spent time familiarizing myself with the brands. I spent time going through their social media channels to see their communication. What stood out the most was the stark difference in the work a brand did in the region and what they did in other global markets. The latter was distinctly more contemporary and fun than the former.
As I started working on campaigns, I realized that the clients didn’t really seem to want anything starkly different. They would rarely even consider an idea that would start a conversation online. They seemed quite content to create YouTube ads that looked like they belonged on 90s television and generic brand content on their channels.
It’s not that the clients were incompetent or that they didn’t know better. The marketing heads were almost all from markets (countries) that were doing great campaigns, had the requisite experience and were knowledgeable about world class campaigns. But when it came to their own brands, they rarely approved work that we thought had the potential to be nominations for the Effies or even slightly different in form and format.
About six months into the job, my boss noticed my frustration and dissatisfaction with the work, and said “Just think of the money.”
That did get me thinking… but not about the money; rather, about why so many highly qualified and highly paid professionals couldn’t manage to put out work of a higher quality. And I think I have the answer.
To understand why, one needs to understand the economic forces driving the white-collar workers living in the region. Consider the UAE, for example. Dubai is the preferred location for the MENA headquarters of most multi-nationals operating in the region and their employee-base is comprised almost entirely of foreign nationals attracted by the lure of tax-free living.
The potential size of the nest egg they can leave with at the end of their career is too good to pass up. It’s about wealth accumulation that translates into a better education for their children, access to the best of lifestyle brands, luxurious vacations, and later, a more comfortable retirement back home.
It’s this last that’s key here. Because in the UAE, one can only work till the age of 60. The government doesn’t allow work visa extensions beyond that. And getting citizenship is not an option. The laws simply don’t allow for it. So the expat lifestyle has a time limit. And the clock starts ticking the moment you land.
Now consider the senior management professional in a multi-national — like a Marketing Director. He would be in his late 40s and he knows that he’s got a bit over a decade left to work in the region. That’s a little over a decade left to ‘save’ or accumulate wealth till he has to head back home. His priorities are always going to be dictated by that clock.
When that happens, all his decisions will be directed by one objective viz. to maximize his time there. He doesn’t want to rock the boat and a new idea always has the inherent possibility of failure simply because it’s never been tried before. Why then would anyone take a chance on a campaign that might have the slightest chance of going south when he can maintain the status quo by just towing the line and sticking to the tried-and-tested.
In the end, while its a disaster for the standards of communications, it’s not a bad trade-off for one with a family.
