Back in 1998, when I began my career in advertising as a client service executive (Yes, the copywriter was in client servicing at that time!)  women were scarce  in advertising agencies. Once in a while a sophomore doing her MBA will come for an academic project. She will be doing a safe project like “Customer satisfaction of Pepsi in rural area: A study by taking Gondawala district as an example” or “Market penetration of HSBC’s SME loans” or something like that. From my agency we will go for creative presentations, and only very rarely I have seen women sitting in as brand managers. But there were some good agencies run by very able women, and those agencies are still doing well. There were some good women in client servicing too, but the creative department was predominantly a male bastion. Creative directors, exceptionally good ones, are normally males. (Please don’t call me an MCP!).

I am against any stereotyping. I know talent only matters and sex does not play a role in it. But sometimes I do wonder about the influence genes have on us, which we cannot change even with best mentoring.

May be that is why we don’t have

1. A female musician that can be called truly great, great enough to be placed along with Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. Please note that I am not talking about singers, I am talking about great music composers or directors. Females somehow miss this composer gene.

2. A great physicist. Yes I know about Madam Curie, but she was more of an experimental physicist than a theoretical genius. Almost all great theoretical physicists are males.

3. Great female chefs are hard to find. Even though women outnumber men in the number of people that actually cook, excellent cooks are normally men. This confuses me to the core, but, just think for a while and you will see I have a point.

4. Have you heard of a female philosopher? A real philosopher who has created her own school of thoughts? I am still yet to come across one.

I am not being all negative about women. I am just pointing out the realities, and I am not judging why the reality is like this.

Advertising still remains as a male dominant territory. Gorgeous women client servicing executives will come and go, but patiently I am still waiting for a woman who will wow me, not with her looks, but with her brains.

And especially in this part of the world, how long shall I wait?

Are you lonely? Need a friend and a shoulder to cry? It’s very easy, just run a reality TV show searching for a new friend. Being a celebrity might help. Being Paris Hilton will indeed help. Or else why should Ms. Hilton visit Dubai looking for a BFF?

To become a celebrity is like making a successful box office film: everybody knows why a film is successful after it becomes successful, but nobody can predict it beforehand. Doing things that will make public interested will make you a celebrity, but that alone does not guarantee press coverage when you breakup with your boyfriend or your African parrot is sick. That needs some secret ingredient “X” and I think Ms. Hilton has it abundantly. You have to consistently do things that will make people amused, do weird and controversial things. And you have to make sure that you look, smile, breath and even sleep differently compared to common folks like you and me.

Yes, it’s all advertising. It’s public relation working at 10, 0000 rpm. It’s defining a pseudo reality that will make you or I seem weirdly different and using financial, advertising & PR muscles to create, sustain and reassure this weird image, consistently…

Public Relation Agencies love celebrities (& big corporations). Big corporations need PR as they have something to hide from the public, something to correct, something to be tamed and made appropriate. Celebrities need PR to do the opposite, something to be seen as weird, something to undomesticate and to do or say inappropriate. When things go wrong, companies hire PR to make public believe everything is alright. Conversely, when public see nothing wrong in a celebrity, he or she hires a PR to make something wrong so that he or she can be the center of attraction again.

Yes, this is what you have to do. Always do something that will make you stand apart, even if doing that will make you look like a jack ass.

Ms. Paris Hilton, hereby I heartily welcome you to Dubai and UAE. May you find the friend you are looking for in the first episode of the program itself!

Recession is an eye opener for many advertising agencies in Dubai in  numerous ways. The vanishing ad revenues from real estate giants itself can be very fatal to a large number of agencies. These realty bigwigs need their creatives to be “cooked” in  record time, so many agencies are compelled to have a large creative group supporting them 24×7. Often an entire team is dedicated to a particular client and it makes perfect financial sense as money is not a problem-you charge double of what you normally charge to non realty clients and still get paid effortlessly.

A normal day is like this:

11.29am: The client servicing guy gets a phone call from the property marketing/brand manager for an urgent brochure. His job brief will be so small and skimpy that it can be rightly called a job bikini.

2.45pm: The jpegs are emailed to the marketing manger

3.00pm: image corrections from client

3.11pm: more image corrections from client

3.14pm: Arabic copy corrections from client

3.16pm: revert back to the original Arabic copy

3.31pm: new logo by mail. But it is very small and is a jpeg file

3.45pm: corrections in employee pictures as some of them are not working in the company but for the competitors.

4.01pm: change the brochure size. Mr. Deep Pocket does not like the current size

4.11pm: make the logo very big. Minimum font size should be 16pts.

4.20pm: make the logo a bit MORE bigger

4.30pm: brochure is approved but interchange TYPICAL LAYOUT PLAN 6 with TYPICAL LAYOUT PLAN 17

4.45pm: agency driver takes the artwork CD to the press.

Now is the time to put pressure on the press to print it on the same day and deliver it by the next day.

That is the way the story goes. Until recently…

“Goliath” agencies have one obvious disadvantage-their super size. It is like a nation with a huge army-very good to attack large countries, but a burden to maintain when there are no wars to fight. As revenues come down exponentially, even the multinational agencies cannot find a way to sustain their people.

Small “David” agencies have less number of people and small overheads. Their creative people are paid less (many times very less- pun intended) and overheads are low. One good client is enough to make the agency survive and keep going.

Know that even a 25% drop in revenue is fatal to a company if situations don’t improve in 4 months. And if the “Cash Cow” realty sector takes 2-3 years to revive, imagine how  crucial it will  be for the Dubai based advertising agencies.

Somewhere, somebody will be fired for sure.

When Al Qasba was known as Qanat Al Qasba, before its repositioning, it was a secluded place where not many families visited. Even its existence was not that much known. As they drove past that big giant wheel while going to Rolla, people often wondered what sort of a place that it is. Even on Fridays its restaurants were almost vacant. I always wondered how they manage to pay salaries to these smiling faces.

Now time has changed. The new advertising campaign promoting the place “Al Qasba” as a family get together destination is showing results. This shift in positioning, balancing heritage and modernity is bringing people to the place. Al Qasba is slowly becoming a place families look forward to visit on weekends, and food festival acts as an event helping it ascertain this position.

For those who came in late, this is the festival activity schedule:

From 19th March to 28th March

Operating Hours
Weekdays    5.00pm to 12 midnight
Weekends    5.00pm to 1.00am

Cooking demonstration
Daily from 8.30pm to 9.15pm

Cooking competition
Daily from 9.30pm to 10.00pm

Cooking secrets and tips
Daily from 10.30pm

Seminars on healthy eating
21st of March, 25th of March, 20mins to 40mins duration

Ronald McDonald Show
19th and 20th March 5.00pm to 6.00pm

See it all to feel it all

Visitors are entertained by dancers and drum parades. Children will find it very exciting!

Various food items, all kinds of restaurants: Japanese, Indian, Thai, Lebanese, Arabian…

Come on, I cannot forget to mention the dancing fountain and the famous giant wheel. It’s great to see children play in these fountains…

Flower and plant display area: amazing flowers and plants at very good price. If you have a home/terrace/balcony garden, don’t miss this place.

Children/teenage fun area; Just look at the pictures to have a feel…

One good thing is that Al Qasba is near Sharjah Aquarium. So if you plan well, you can visit both the places in a single trip.

Copywriter Dubai: are you surviving?

The world (1): Dear copywriter, are you ok? (Felt like a soft voice asking into my ears)
Copywriter (2): Yes. Yes; and what makes you think differently?

(1) Come on, don’t act-you stupid. You are not a country to deny the effects of recession. We all know that advertising is hit hard by the economic downturn. Just look at the Gulf News newspaper, how lean it has become! No single real estate ad for the last one month and you act as if nothing has happened. Tell us, do you have food to eat at least once in a day?

(2) You paparazzi, why are you after me? You media people only spread negativism and pessimism. In fact today morning I had a profusion of pocari sweat mixed with 20% ginger ale and 30% Horlicks. I was enjoying my life all through the last month. My BP is 155/75, weight 78.987 kilograms and walk is brisk.  See…I am jittery as a June bug!

(1) But don’t tell us that the fall in advertisements have no effects on you….
(Don’t you see that newspapers fill the vacant spaces with their own or associate advertisements?)

(2) Yes they have effects. I can easily carry the newspaper around as it is not that heavy now. Imagine the number of trees that are saved because we are printing less number of pages these days. And you sensationalists should know that online advertising in UAE is growing exponentially. Big agencies – advertising agencies are affected, that is indeed a truth, but we all are not made redundant.

(1) But we the poor people, people in the main street are happy that your greed days are over…

(2) No…you people cannot write us off yet. We will still speak gibberish and act snobbish. We guys will dress up in low waist denim jeans and appear in formal occasions inappropriately dressed, often wearing worn out canvas shoes. Even if we die like this, our graves will be deep and wide enough to accommodate all these electronic gadgets and style accessories. We won’t die lonely.

Recession is nothing.
Advertising rules
(These two sentences are with echo, like speaking loud inside a church-to fade out)

With this I woke up to the realities of the world and advertising. It is 7.33 am. Another day; who will bite the dust today?

Markets are not improving as we thought. So, we advertising guys (content writer and other unimportant creative guys) have gathered again to decide on output cuts once again as recession deepened. The prevailing pessimistic mood directly hit Dow Jones Industrial Average and Worldwide Index of Creativity & Effective Deception (WICKED in short) and both indices were pulled down by heavyweight advertising agencies dumping the market with stupid creatives.

We were all saddened by the international barrel rate for stupidity. The rate as of today is $ 34 per barrel. We, advertising agencies were enjoying a high price for our stupidity for the last 5 years as world was blind with real estate growth and was busy making money. (As ad guys, we know that money makes people blind, not love). Now as we have lost almost 75% of our 2008 (Q1) price, we, stupid gurus are all very much worried.

“We cannot sustain this low price for stupidity for a long time”, quotes a creative director as he jumped out of the window to escape the huge loan payments due on his recently bought Maserati Quattroporte. “We have to consistently invest on fake creativity, otherwise when the world is selfish again and comes back to make more money there will be a shortage of stupidity and all the real estate companies will suffer then”, people heard him holler as he went down 9.8 meters per second square.

“See, you don’t really get it. If real estate companies and financial institutions don’t exist, for whom will we say big fat lies?”, a copywriter who sat next to me whispered into my ears. “Which other industry will ask us to release full page color newspaper advertisements all through the months and yet is satisfied with our substandard work? When they became rich we became rich riding on their shoulders. We were dumping the markets with real estate related promotional paraphernalia then. Actually, we were reusing & recycling creatives and nobody knew.”

So what all we can do to keep WICKED and Donjons up?

We will cut our stupidity output to 23 MMbpd worldwide. This is almost 53% low compared to our last year stupidity output.

We will ask governments to bail out stupidity as it is the only characteristic that makes us human. (For this reason you can always find a stupid person but never a stupid animal)

We will introduce Creativity Default Swaps (CDS) and trade it against hedge funds.

We can overcome limited liquidity of stupidity by making more stupid creatives that will make more asses. As a choice, those who are already an ass can either be a jack ass or a dump ass.

When I go to hotel parties in Dubai, I love to watch their DJs. I have learnt much about advertising, particularly about brand positioning by observing them. Like doctors, lawyers and politicians, jockeys think of themselves as special people. They think they are so unique that even a guy flying stealth might be scorned by them. They have acquired mannerisms and styles to make them and others feel like they are DJs. Like a well positioned brand in advertising, they position themselves to fit our perception very well.

Let us study these guys from an advertising professional’s perspective.

Let us see what makes them a Dubai Disc Jockey or a DJ anywhere else.

Name:

Your name should be something like DJ Nasha, DJ Sasha, DJ Doom, DJ Storm, DJ Ankit, DJ Acid, DJ Black Widow, DJ Orangutan etc. There will be no jockeys with names like DJ Mathew Kurian, DJ Subash S. Nair, DJ Thomas Joseph etc. If your parents have given you a normal name change that to something like I have mentioned above.

Hair Cut:

You can be bald, with sparse hair or very long hair. Bleached hair and hair locks are also largely accepted. Normal haircuts are big NO-NOs. The thumb rule is not to look like a guy whose mother has combed his hair.

Facial hair:

French beards, Goatees (like that of James Hetfield from the heavy metal band Metallica) are in.

Facial Expression:

Always look like a guy who hates humanity. Wear this expression even while you go for a pee. Never never smile at people and always be as unfriendly as possible. Remember that Un-cool is Cool.

Dressing:

You should be the missing link between a funky teenager and a 70yr old guy. They key is to shock people, either by simplicity or extravagance. Wear black. Wear chains around your neck. Have innumerable bracelets on both hands. Your fingers should adorn at least 20 junk metal rings.

Many people might say that I am stereotyping, indeed I am. As social beings we have a studied notion about what all things are or what all things should be. It has lot to do with our cultural background and exposure. In other words we cannot accept a DJ with a normal hair cut or a normal name. It is our perception about him that makes him a DJ. His success lies in tuning his position according to our perception.

Advertising agencies know these secrets. All they do is that they manipulate reality (not so that it becomes a lie) in such a way that people will perceive products as marketers want them to be perceived. But it can be said for sure that many successful brands became successful only because they found fresh positioning-that is not following a cliché route. Many times, this fresh route of differentiation consumes much resources and time. So a normal looking, 3 piece suit wearing DJ is possible, but it takes a while for people to accept the idea. But if it is well done, it’s worth all the effort.

So NORMALLY, as a rule,

Glue bottles will be blue,

Girls’ accessories will be in pink,

SLR cameras won’t be manufactured in white color, and

DJs will always look and act crazy.

Next time you see a Dubai DJ, know that it is not his fault that he acts strange. We people want him this way and he just acts and fits in for survival.

Assets
Things that have earning power or some other value to the agency only when they reach  municipality garbage collectors. These include rejected brochures and promotional paraphernalia (big ones, medium ones, small ones, spot laminated ones, saddle-stitched ones, press bound ones etc) Style Only-No Brain client service executives, unhygienic pseudo creative guys.

Fixed Assets (also known as long-term assets) are things that have a life of more than 35 yrs but have no use for the advertising agency at present, for example old graphic designers dreaming about spray cans and have no necessary software skills, 1995 Mac machines, creative briefing tables; there are also intangible fixed assets, like the bad reputation of the agency for taking any job and promising to finish it on a single day, from painting the highway to sending people to moon.

Acid Quick Assets
Assets that are all curves but no brains. High heeled, highly made up (false hair, false eyelashes, false everything!) things that appear like comets. Nobody knows when a new one joins and when one quits: quick in both appearing and disappearing. Largely seen on husband/father visas.

Bear Market
In a bear market, creativity hibernates and creative team, anticipating job losses, tends to act busy. This can create a self-sustaining downward spiral. Clients will dictate terms even to an inter-galactic ad agency and art directors, copywriters, graphic designers, client service directors all will peacefully coexist like brothers. They even assemble to yawn as a team every half an hour.

When the market is bearish, client servicing guys look and act like poor rabbits. They will appear so cute that you will feel like pampering them at your laps and say sweet nothings into their ears. They pawn or sell their Mustangs, Corvettes, Suzukis, Kawasakis and BMWs and opt to walk home- alone. This soul reflecting lone act of walking helps them to brood on their credit card problems. (Also refer the title, Credit Crunch)

Credit Crunch
The situation is created when copywriters, graphic designers and client servicing guys lose all their money buying very expensive lifestyle gadgets like Black berries, iPhones, Mac Books etc. and look around for more money as  banks stop lending them. Suddenly they realize that when hungry they cannot eat these things and feels like a mermaid gifted with a pair of expensive shoes.

As they approach banks, they use a special mathematical formula to evaluate their potential repayment strength. This equation is as given below,

LRPc = [{[We x NCC] + 2 x HL +Nc} x Pseudo lifestyle index

LRPc is the loan Repayment capacity
We is the weight of one’s purse.[As the number of existing credit card increases, weight of the purse increases, hence reduced repayment capacity. Weight can also increase due to the presence of large number of coins, which in turn indicates the possibility that he is already a beggar. Thus lower repayment strength.]

NCC is the number of existing credit cards
HL is their greedy home loan which is also called Monkey business.
Nc is the number of sports cars.
Pseudo Lifestyle Index varies between 0 and 1. A normal advertising agency professional has this index between 0.5 and 1.

kerala real estate will find prices correcting

Last night, I had a crisis call from a real estate agent based in Kerala. It was not a regular call to an NRI inducing him to invest in a property, but rather a distress call to resell an existing house plot. He told me that this is the right time to buy as he thinks apartments and land plots are coming under great resale stress and prices are falling down in Kerala. Like anywhere else in the world, Kerala real estate is feeling the market pressures of limited liquidity. 3-4 years back, the rising land prices made it impossible for any resident Indian to purchase property in Ernakulum, Kakkanad, Trivandrum, Alleppey or any other place where real estate was booming. And then the money hungry banks and property agents turned to gulf residents and other NRI Indians, making the land prices to skyrocket. The nonresident Indians took loans from banks in their residing countries and stuffed these greedy speculators. This business model was very successful, until now. Today NRIs find it hard to raise cash sources to pay their installments. Very soon huge payment defaults will occur as they find it very hard to even sustain their normal life in their respective residing countries. Inflated prices will face the harsh market realities and tumble down; in the process hurting many speculators.

Real estate crisis and copywriter

It’s good news at last for copywriters and creative people. We advertising guys (there is no such term as “advertising gals” and high fashion lipstick wearing-high heel tom boys are ignored for time being) are going to inherit the world when sub-prime mortgage crisis, PUT-CALL future options, real estate bubbles and bank runs make the newspaper headlines. Copywriters, Graphic designers and art directors from advertising agencies in Moscow, Trinidad, Dubai, Sharjah, Lower Manhattan, Uzbekistan, Minnesota, Calcutta, Kerala and Algeria will benefit from this global financial real estate meltdown. This is how we are going to do it. This strategy has been discussed and finalized in a big 7 star hotel located at Eldorado by Copywriters & Ad Guys Inc. (registered in Cayman Island, Reg. No: 0909878976/NB/435/12). Creative guys (sorry, no women again!) secretly discussed this with all their financial wisdom and IQs above 134.9 to decide on three strategies.

1.    We have decided to trade all our skills as real estate copywriters and brochure designers to raise 7689 credit default swaps (CDS). As a regulatory measure to guard against excessive risk-taking in the financial system we will thereby sub-prime all our assets in the main financial markets. This will indeed followed by three regulatory marathon races by amateur orangutans aged more than 53 yrs to have sufficient assets to meet our contractual obligations, through reserve requirements, capital requirements, and other limits on leverage. Possible Financial contagion effects will be nullified by introducing 29 new advertising agencies issuing IPOs throughout the coming year.

2.    As Bank Runs (BRs) can be avoided by cash injection, the possible cash crunch in the market is coordinated with excess liquidity. All copywriters registered with Copywriters & Ad Guys Inc. will persuade printing presses around the world to print Hedge-Bonds in 6 colors (Alizarin Crimson as the special color to induce liquidity leverage). This will reduce recession by quarter 3(Q3) and bring the asset-liability mismatch to alarming rates, enabling trans border wealth creation. All financial instruments will be proportionately linked with EXIM policies and directly pegged with dollar(USD).

3.    Stock Markets around the world will be induced into a PUSH strategy by PULL strategies. But if the market adopts PULL strategy first (due to Butterfly effect) they will be induced by PUSH strategies.

We creative guys are going to save the world. We are going to give back the real estate its lost glory. We copywriters and graphic designers are going to bring liquidity into the world. “Ha! you Mr. Liquidity, you can’t escape our clutches. We may not have the brain power of those Wall Street guys or the cunning nature of those four piece suit real estate guys. But here we come, BEWARE!”