Author Archives: alexofarabia

About alexofarabia

I'm am obsessive compulsive communicator who has lived in the Gulf for almost a decade. Enjoying the challenge of working in a region where you've got to be innovative, patient and determined to make things happen. Miss being a full-time journalist! Miss family even more! Sometimes I mouth off, but more often I grit my teeth and try to encourage change through a smile (not as easy as you think). Despite now living in Dubai Bahrain is home for me.

In Tribute: Brunswick’s Alex Blake-Milton and his support for PR in the Gulf

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Alex Blake-Milton is retiring after a memorable career in communications

This is a simple post, an opportunity to show my gratitude for one person who has quietly gone about his business in the Gulf over the past 16 years following his time at Standard Chartered and Occidental Petroleum. During that time Alex Blake-Milton has led Brunswick to one of the largest advisory agencies across the region, with over 80 people consulting for a host of big-name clients.

I want to focus on another side of Alex, the one which has always been there to support the industry. For several years, Alex was on the Zayed University industry advisory board for what was then the College of Communications and Media Sciences. Alex turned up at every meeting and every event, despite his schedule and work demands.

More than that, Alex would always volunteer to help both students and faculty to understand what communications work looked like in practice and offer them the opportunity to get their hands stuck in. No matter the suggestion, he would find a way to support the university and its hundreds of students who were studying communications.

As one of the canniest operators around, Alex was always looking out for talent and smarts to join Brunswick (I do wish other agency heads would focus the same amount of energy and time on our universities and young people). But he was also a charming person, and felt a duty to help others enter the industry.

It was always a pleasure to sit down with Alex, talk over the industry and get his take on what would be next. Alex will be retiring this month from his role at Brunswick. I very much hope that you’ll still be there, offering a guiding hand to the next generation of communicators.

Thank you Alex for all you’ve done for the industry in the region, both in terms of the quality of work undertaken by Brunswick (disclaimer, I’ve sadly never been a client), but more so for your community work. If we had more people such as yourself, we’d have a lot more talent coming into the industry. As it is, we were lucky to have you in the Gulf.

Memories of Francis Ingham

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The cheeky grin was an Ingham trademark

The news is now known. After a short illness, Francis Ingham, the Director General of the PRCA, and Chief Executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), has passed away.

Knowing Francis, he would be delighted by all of the praise that he’s been receiving online. And he’s always loved making headlines, be it now or with the expulsion of Bell Pottinger or his comments on Ukraine and Russia.

Francis would be the first to admit he was no saint. In many ways, he was a polarising figure. You either loved him or didn’t, but you wouldn’t not have an opinion of him.

What Francis did have in bucketloads was energy and a belief in his mission. He wanted to make the PRCA the foremost communications association in the world. He expanded the PRCA into the Middle East, Southeast Asia and South America. He’d never shy away from speaking with anyone or turning foe into friend.

This is how we met. I’d criticised the PRCA for how they’d entered the Gulf. Francis could have done what his regional chairman did and complained to my then chair at MEPRA. Instead, Francis reached out, called me, and asked how we could collaborate.

His ability to get people to buy into what he was doing set Francis apart (especially over lunch or dinner with a bottle of red). But he could also be scathing. I knew of many who, in my view incorrectly, blamed him for the fall of Bell Pottinger when he expelled them from the PRCA for the scandal of their work in South Africa.

Francis found himself undone by his own comments on Ukraine and Russia. In speaking his views about the industry and its dealings with Russia, he set into motion a process that would put him under investigation by the PRCA board.

The last time I spoke to Francis was a typical Ingham experience. He called me up about an issue I had with one award nomination, and turned it into a conversation about how I could support him with his own issues.

For everything that has been said about him, one fact is undeniable. For 15 years he has grown the PRCA into a global movement. That will be his legacy, much more than the headlines and the social media praise of the past couple of days. I for one am grateful to Francis for the attention he focused on our profession and the work he did to train and develop countless communicators.

Here’s raising a glass to you Francis.

Are We Aware of the Biases Behind AI?

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Have a look at the picture above. What do you notice? Obviously, they’re not real – these images are generated by artificial intelligence (AI). What else do you see? Apologies to anyone who isn’t the CEO. The more discerning among you may see that there’s no women in the images above (the possible exception may be the intern).

This is one of many issues we are going to face with AI. To put it in the simplest possible terms, AI tools are created by people. They also use inputs and data from other people. And every person out there has biases, regardless of whether they are conscious or unconscious. This issue is being amplified by those who are developing and overseeing AI; if your team aren’t diverse and inclusive enough, then you are going to find that AI replicates the views of its creators (for a simple write-up on the subject, have a look at this piece on the International Women’s Day website).

The same can be said for countries, cultures and religions. Rather than challenging them, AI tools can reflect open biases. At a recent conference in Riyadh one speaker suggested that Saudi Arabia should invest in AI, to effective counter false narratives (the story is here, though the headline is a little off). For any non-technical user of such tools, it’s very hard to discern how an AI tool works – you effectively have to look at the algorithm being used and the sources that the tool is scraping from. Conversely, countries can look to manipulate such tools to design more favorable narratives. Everything is a possibility when it comes to technology.

The other major issue I see, apart from the issue of languages (AI tools are predominantly English-language based) is the lack of information. Let me explain further. In a part of the world such as where I am, it can be a real struggle to discern a full understanding. There’ll be lots of press releases being pushed out, but the PR – surprise, surprise – doesn’t always reflect the reality.

I’ll give you a simple example. If I want to install a charger for an electric car in Abu Dhabi, there’s no way I’d know from looking online at company websites or news portals that I’d have to pay several thousand dollars for permission to do so. I’d have to make calls, follow up on emails, and maybe even visit an office. I can ask a tool such as ChatGPT to write an article on the subject, but it’d never be able to pull this information as it isn’t available online.

AI tools are the talk of the town (whatever happened to the Metaverse, I hear you ask). And these tools can be incredibly useful to generate content. However, we must always be mindful that these tools are only a first draft that we must review for bias and incorrect data. Let’s ensure that we don’t overhype a technology that still has a long way to go before it becomes mature.

On that note, I’d love to hear from you on your experiences with using AI tools, be it for designing images or written content. What concerns do you have? Share them in the comments below.

The Need for Diverse Role Models in the Marcomms Industry

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Who are the role models for the Middle East’s marketing industry?

It’s the end of the year, and that means awards. There’s one which is always steeped in mystery, that of the individual award. Be it a fellowship or an individual merit award, the process to decide who gets what isn’t often clear. Most are nominated by a group who then choose the final name. It’s also often unclear as to what these people are being chosen for, and little information is published after the purpose. There’s little in the way of openness, transparency or understanding of why these people represent the best in the industry. What you do see is those deciding who is awarded often choosing people they know personally, or people who reflect them, or (as is often the case) there’s a financial reason for the decision.

This year’s awards were no different, with little reasoning as to why anyone was chosen. There’s also an over reliance on people based in the UAE. While I understand that the country is home to much of the region’s multinationals and regional agency HQs, it’s not representative of the wider region. Just look at what is happening in terms of development in Saudi Arabia, global events such as the Qatar World Cup, or regional media powerhouses like Egypt and Lebanon. This is but a sample or what is happening through the Middle East’s marcomms sector.

Given the diversity of the region, those behind such awards need to do much more to reach beyond the UAE’s borders and find those from the Middle East who have both achievements to their name and who can represent role models to the next generation of marketers and communicators.

I’d hope that the media and the groups behind such awards consciously consider the need to honor professionals from across the region, especially those who have major achievements to their name and who have supported the growth of their colleagues. It also needs to be clear to the audience why these people are being called out, with a transparent process.

Of course, there’s also the issue of those being awarded having upstanding values (with a focus on ethics and morality). But that’s a separate blog post…

Based on the above, who is your role model? Who would you nominate for an individual achievement award? I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

Bye Bye Twitter?

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This is the last thing that I wanted to say, or do…

For me, there’s no place like Twitter. There’s the engagement and the ability to follow trends. The platform also offers the simplest way to interact with others. It’s not as showy as Instagram, or a place for the folks like Facebook. While my wife will love me saying this, but I think I’ve had enough of the bird. The reasoning is simple. I don’t like where the company is headed under its new owner, Elon Musk. From how he’s treated Twitter’s staff, to an out-in-the-open bias for views and social media accounts that I find abhorrent (from antisemitism to transphobia, fascism and xenophobia), my head tells me to get the heck off of Twitter. I want to be on social media for discussion and debate, but also for civility and a purpose that goes beyond hating another group of people. The last straw for me was targeting/banning public servants and journalists who don’t share the Twitter CEO’s worldview (I only wish I could give my Model Y car back).

My family will be happy to read this (less social media scrolling), but I’ll be sticking to LinkedIn for now and exploring new online places that don’t require me to put on a headset and lose my legs. I’ll be leaving my Twitter account dormant, in the naïve hope that Twitter takes a different, more inclusive direction. Otherwise, I’ll be staying off the site. I don’t want to see that level of toxicity, and I feel that we’ve given Elon Musk enough of our attention and time (I certainly don’t want him to make money off of my presence and activity on Twitter, given what he’s doing to the platform). Right, enough of this post and here’s to less social media and more real world stuff. I’m off to do some gardening with the wife!

Elon Musk and Twitter: A case study on self-made crisis

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While Elon Musk may joke about Twitter’s potential demise, many of the company’s crises are being caused by its new owner

Mass firings and resignations, the loss of millions in advertising revenues, and arguments between employees and the new owner playing out in public; Elon Musk only bought Twitter less than a month ago, but both have been living in a constant state of crisis since then.

From the beginning the signs were not good. Elon Musk disbanded Tesla’s communications function in 2020. And yet, despite the need to clearly spell out his vision to the workforce, the new CEO canned Twitter’s communications function shortly after taking over.

What was left was a vacuum of information. Employees were left waiting to listen to Elon Musk (introductory town halls were both arranged and cancelled at short notice), and had to turn to Twitter or the media to know what was the vision of their new CEO and learn about what actions he was taking.

Rather than listening to his employees, Musk would often make grand statements on what was or wasn’t working at Twitter via his own Twitter account. Rather than taking in feedback from Twitter’s engineers who would try to correct him, Elon fired those who disagreed with him (both in public and on the company’s internal communication channels).

Elon Musk clearly believes that he can transform Twitter’s famously open culture to one that resembles Tesla or SpaceX. His Twitter employees clearly disagree. For those that remained after the first couple of firing rounds, the last straw seems to have been his Twitter 2.0 message, in which he told the remaining employees they had to work harder and longer hours.

The message has spurred mass resignations, including of key functions such as payroll and product safety. Media reports claim that Twitter’s remaining management are desperate to keep those engineers who are vital to maintaining the site at the company.

In many ways, the damage to morale is arguably irreversible. To quote one Twitter employee who spoke to the BBC, “I didn’t want to work for someone who threatened us over email multiple times about only ‘exceptional tweeps should work here’ when I was already working 60-70 hours weekly.”

For Musk, the question remains. Will he change how he manages Twitter and its people, before the platform collapses? Or will we continue to watch this crisis play out in real time, on the site?

What we have seen over the past couple of weeks is a clash of cultures (and communication styles). Twitter’s employees are passionate about what they do, they are committed to the platform, and they’ve always been open about their views. Take away the company culture, and you have little left. The company’s headcount is down from over seven thousand to about two thousand. We may be reaching a point where there’s not enough people to maintain the platform. And none of this was inevitable (well, at least not in the space of a month).

Whether Musk can turn this around is still up for debate. But the past couple of weeks will become a case study in self-inflicted crises. Elon Musk couldn’t or wouldn’t listen to staff, he didn’t communicate internally, he limited much of his interactions to a small group of people, and he wasn’t able to understand Twitter’s culture. His decisions and communication style grated with employees, meaning he effectively lost their support from the get-go. And the less said about his product decisions, the better. My thoughts are very much with the employees who kept Twitter going. They deserved better than this.

Erasing the UK’s Soft Power – The Closure of BBC Arabic Radio

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According to the BBC, the World Service currently reaches 148m people in an average week

Much of said of soft power, this notion of being able to influence and persuade others through concepts such as culture and entertainment. There is no better example of this than the British Broadcasting Corporation, better known as the BBC. For decades, the BBC has been the go-to place for information throughout much of the world. This was due to the BBC’s range of platforms, most especially its radio service.

This week, the BBC announced the closure of ten different language services on its radio network and the firing of 382 people. These languages include Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Hindi, Tamil and Bengali. While the BBC argues that many people will be able to listen online (and online numbers have been growing according to data released by the Corporation), BBC’s overall global reach in 2020 was 468 million people a week.

One has to wonder what this decision will mean, not just for the BBC (the service will still be running its Arabic-language television service and website), but for the United Kingdom in general. Many people in the world know the UK through the BBC, and primarily the radio service. Radio is easier and cheaper to obtain (especially on short wave), and it can be harder to block than a website.

The last time the BBC had to scrap an Arabic-language initiative was when it cancelled the planned-for news service at short notice. Qatar came in, snapped up the team and formed AlJazeera, which is arguably the most impactful television and online news service the region has.

Given that the UK government seems to be short-sighted enough to lose one of its most powerful soft power assets abroad (the total cost of radio for those ten languages is just under 30 million pounds a year), you do wonder who will come along and do another AlJazeera by setting up their own radio service with some of the most experience journalists and engineers in the radio industry.

Remembering Firdaus Shariff

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Firdaus was an exemplary marketing professional, one of the best I’d worked with

Last Friday morning, I received several messages about my former boss. And I still am struggling to believe them. I keep expecting Firdaus Shariff to post something insightful on social media, or share a message about what the marketing team was up to. Firdaus was my former boss and the Vice President Middle East and Africa for Marketing, Communications and Digital Customer Experience at Schneider Electric. I’d known her from her days at Cisco , when she’d worked with my wife. My wife is a woman who is hard to impress, and yet she always had kind words to say about Firdaus and her capabilities. 

Firdaus had worked in the industry for two decades, first at Cisco, then at SAP and finally at Schneider Electric. She was driven to excel, and she always pushed the team to do more. At the same time, she believed that marketing should be both creative and fun; she wanted us to enjoy what we were doing and let loose our imagination. Firdaus didn’t settle for the average or mundane, and many of the campaigns she led were not just impactful but also some of the most engaging work I’d seen (and all of this in a B2B setting).

She also had an eye on the future, and invested heavily in technology to improve both how marketing operated and how she could measure the function. Always one to support and encourage, Firdaus was in many ways a dream to work with. She’d work with you to set the goals, give you what you needed (well, I’ll admit some of what I’d ask for), and then let you loose. Firdaus had an uncanny and rare ability to understand the different functions within her remit, including communications. While she had worked in a pure communications role, she had a sense of what could be done, including with paid media. And she also had a sense for where the industry was headed, joining SAP when the software sector was taking off and then taking the leap to Schneider Electric, a firm that is dedicated to sustainability.  

It’s easy to understate how unique Firdaus was. She was a marketing professional in her prime, who could have done anything she wanted and would succeed with anything she turned her hand to. She was able to combine creativity with technology, and manage her team in a way that would quite literally make the impossible possible. And she was devoted to her family – we’d often share stories about our girls who were both the same age. 

Firdaus is an exemplar of what the industry in our region so desperately needs. For me, that’s her legacy, an example of what we should be looking to become as both individuals and as an industry. Here’s to you Firdaus, to everything that you have achieved and all that you stood for. 

Firdaus with the team earlier on in the year

The Six-Day Working Week, Russian and HK PR people in the UAE

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I feel for anyone who works in the service industry. Ever since the UAE moved from a Sunday-Thursday week to Monday-Friday, the sense I’ve gotten is that those working in the service industry have had to work out how to cater to both local/global and regional clients. For many, the answer has been simple – agencies are having to work out rosters of people working over the six days, from Sunday to Friday.

I don’t know how sustainable this is. Dubai is the hub for the region’s creative agencies, many of whom don’t have offices outside of the Emirate. Will clients across the Middle East accommodate the change in the working week? Or will agencies look to open offices (or move/hire people) in countries which still follow the Sunday-Thursday routine?

For those working with clients across the region, I’m curious to know how you are managing. Is there anything that can be done to make the workload easier, and/or redress the work-life balance? Or has the change in the UAE’s working week not had an impact?

Another observation over the past couple of months is the number of Russians and Hong Kongers moving to the UAE, particularly in the communications industry. More talent is always a good thing; let’s hope our new arrivals find their feet in the region and get acquainted with its cultures and languages.

Am always happy to hear your views. Please do share them in the comments section below.

A Tale of Two Brand Reputations – MNCs in Russia and P&O’s Sacking of 800 UK Workers

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What will the impact of the past couple of weeks be on global brands in Russia? And will P&O Ferries and its parent company DP World come to regret the overnight firing of 800 UK employees? Image by vectorpouch

Reputations are funny things. They take years to build, and can be lost in a moment. In many ways, the past month will become a period of intense research for those wanting to know more about corporate actions and their impact on reputations.

First up, we have the tragedy of the war in the Ukraine. Responding to both public and political pressure, over 400 global brands have pledged to suspend, pull back or stop operations in Russia, according to the Financial Times. For multinationals to move at this speed is unprecedented. What is most striking is the decisions many have come to, namely to risk not being able to do business in what is a sizable market (Russia’s population is over 144 million) for the short to medium term. While sanctions have pushed them in a certain direction, many are also weighing up public sentiment in the West regarding how they respond (some such as McDonalds aren’t just closing stores, but they’re continuing to pay their Russian staff).

Second, we have another crisis. This time the crisis seems to be more of the company’s own doing. P&O Ferries laid off 800 crew from its ships last week. The news was delivered via a pre-recorded video message, and guards were hired to escort staff off the ships. The firm claimed it had to replace British staff with cheaper labor to save the company and make it viable. All this despite the parent company DP World making record revenues of US$10.8 billion in 2021. The saga, which includes political intrigue (Ministers were told the night before about the mass firings and the government did not vote for a bill to protect workers from mass layoffs the previous year) and the inevitable debate about the legacy of Brexit, has seen both P&O Ferries and DP World being hammered in the UK media (there’s no mention I have seen of this story in the UAE’s press).

Both scenarios highlight the challenges facing businesses. The former is forcing firms to take a stance on a conflict, in what could be a precedent for future wars. And the latter is a self-inflicted reputational crisis that P&O Ferries and DP World could have arguably avoided with better judgement (other ferry companies employ foreign labor at a fraction of the cost of UK nationals, the difference is the number of layoffs and how they were conducted). Either way, firms must think about the reputational impact of their actions, especially in a digital world where anyone and everyone can comment in an instant. Just ask DP World’s Chairman and Group CEO about the response to his tweet about speaking with Emirati youth as P&O Ferries security staff were escorting fired workers off the ships… (the responses have been hidden; you can still see quote tweets).