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In conversation with Manoj Khimji and Luca Allam

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The World Media Group’s Chief Executive Belinda Barker chats with Manoj Khimji, Managing Director, The MediaVantage and Luca Allam, CEO, PHD, both based in the UAE, about how to navigate the complexities of advertising in the Middle East. Below is an extract of their conversation. You can watch the full video below or listen to the podcast here. [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/pkk8aDg_QLE?si=cWRzLe93eyPBPmoZ”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

You both began your career in London. What led you to the decision to focus on the Middle East?

Luca: I came here in 2010 so I’ve been in the region for 13 years. I worked in London for a few different companies, including one of the biggest media agencies, OMD, part of the Omnicom Media Group. I think the real driving force was the idea that digital back in 2010 was still in its relative infancy. I knew that I could excel relatively quickly in this part of the world. It was a career decision first and foremost, then it became a lifestyle decision thereafter. Manoj: I started working with Haymarket Media in London straight out of university in ad sales. I moved out here in 2004. The UK media scene is a very mature market. The lure of this kind of exponential growth in the region is what brought me over. I had a stint here with Motivate Publishing launching Hello Magazine, and with The Times newspaper when they launched the Middle East edition. The Times Middle East gave me an understanding of the entire business of international media representation, and how critical that is to aiding the growth of global communications for a lot of the Middle East entities. I came on board at The MediaVantage in 2010. The region is expanding; it used to be very much about Dubai and the UAE. Now, around 65 percent of global communications from this region is coming out of Saudi Arabia, which, pre-2020 was not the case at all. Luca is largely responsible for that, with Saudi tourism launching their brand in 2019. It’s exciting times and it’s been a fantastic 20 years.

With the current crisis in and around Israel, what does it feel like on the ground? Is it changing things in the region or not?

Luca: I’m not a political analyst, but what I can speak on is the general sentiment. It’s tense across the region, naturally. A lot of people who work in Dubai, are being directly or indirectly touched by this. They know people in the region, whether it’s in Palestine or in Lebanon, so they are being affected. From an advertising perspective, there are strong signs that it’s going to have an impact. A lot of our clients are already talking to us about how they can adapt; asking whether they are being insensitive to continue advertising. It’s still evolving so it’s difficult to predict exactly where it’s going. But we are seeing that impact on advertising already, and it probably will continue over the coming weeks and months. The fear is that this extends into a larger conflict, and that could impact 2024 plans and marketing plans around that. One of the things we should stress is that the Middle East is not one region. It’s a bunch of different countries built into a region with very different nuances, who all have their own different challenges – economic, political or social – regardless of what’s happening now in Palestine or in Israel. It’s a complex region and the sentiment in Dubai does not represent the entire region from an advertising perspective.

Can you expand on how different the individual countries are culturally, and has your own background helped with that?

Luca: I’m very proud that I came from the UK, but I’m equally proud that I have a parent who is Middle Eastern, who is Arab. In a business sense, typically the UAE and the Saudis love to have that combination – someone who speaks both languages, understands both cultures. Increasingly, they want to have a market strong for Saudis; they want to grow strong marketeers and advertisers at a grassroots level with lesser reliance on expats coming into the market. I look after Middle East and North Africa and I do a lot of traveling to Egypt and to Riyadh because that’s where the focus is when it comes to Saudi. I’m based here in Dubai, but I also travel to the Levant region. We have offshore offices there as well, so I get a bit of a flavour of what’s going on across the region. It’s not a one size fits all. The types of humour that the Egyptians have versus the Saudis are totally different, so you have to nuance your creative messages to the Egyptians. There are pockets of markets that are notoriously strong in certain things. For example, Jordan is well known for their technology development and their AI development. Egypt is known for their creativity and unorthodox thinking. Saudi and Dubai or UAE are very much focused on infrastructure, best practice work. I get access to local nuances, which gives me a much more enriched picture. Prior to what’s been happening in the last couple of weeks, MENA has really been thriving. Small and medium sized businesses have been taking off across the markets. But again, it’s being driven by Saudi. Saudi is the key focus for advertisers because of the purchasing power, because of the scale of the population of the market. It’s still a young country in terms of its demographic so the potential is only going to increase. And all of this has been backed by a very clear and powerful message from the crown prince about vision 2030 and how everything needs to be geared towards that.

For Middle East-based advertisers looking outwards, are there any kind of real cultural differences about the way they should be viewing the outside world?

Manoj: Yes, there are, and in light of things that have happened in the last few weeks, those have started changing as well. To give some context, Luca mentioned that Dubai is not the Middle East, it’s the melting pot. The UAE is about 10 million people in terms of population. Dubai is a little over half of that. The Middle East is 600 million. Based on that 600 million, it’s not more than maybe 15 percent of the global population. So, we’re talking about a really small sample size, but it’s important because it represents a lot of the different cultures and the people in the region. Our organisation works with a lot of Palestinian people, who have a high residential population in the UAE and that’s where we felt the immediate effect of empathy with those people that are working in our organisations and in the industry, and across the market, how that has related to a more global level in terms of the advertising message. The big Middle East entities – the sovereign wealth funds, the public investment fund, the big tourism boards, the airlines, the ones who really are dominating global communications from the region – they take very strong strategic advisement from consultancies and media agencies, such as PHD. But they also have a tendency to follow what a lot of the FMCG and the global brands are doing so we’ve had conversations in the last 10 days with clients and agencies talking about what Unilever are doing, what P&G are doing, what Mars are doing, and should we be potentially following suit? I think that’s a challenge. And a lot of those decisions are driven by fears around brand safety, of course. When a Middle East entity goes global, there’s an automatic brand safety concern anyway, because there’s a lot of negative perception. There are reputational issues, which we find these brands have to combat almost every single time they go out on a global level. They’ve proven themselves to be very adaptable in the creative messaging of those communications. But as Luca said, this is a really, fragmented region, much more than, for example, the counties infrastructure in the UK. We’re talking about different dialects, different languages, obviously different religions, and even within religions, different sects of those religions, different time zones, different working days of the week in some countries. It’s very much a region made by individual countries as opposed to a natural region based on geography.

What would your tips be for a European brand considering making its first step into the territory?

Luca: The first tip – prioritise your markets. Focus on the big markets – Saudi Arabia and UAE are the main two. The Qataris, the Kuwaits, the Omans of the world are secondary. As a third market, I would look at Egypt which has about 100 million in terms of population. It’s nearly three times the size of Saudi, but they have a much smaller purchasing power. The second tip: Make sure your media makes sense for each of the different markets. You can’t have the same one size fits all. For example, penetration of smartphones in Egypt is not particularly high. They rely on more traditional forms of communications, such as television and out of home. But even out of home and TV are not regulated – it’s a very difficult measurement system and technology system infrastructure, so you have to have local people in Egypt selecting your media.  And you need a very clear, creative message that’s going to create impact. Conversely, in Saudi, you have a much higher adoption of all technologies, mobiles, tablets, Smart TVs. You can be a little bit more creative with what you’re doing. But pan-Arab TV still remains a critical part of building reach and driving good coverage. It’s a TV-first plus video approach, and then they look at something like out of home as a second. Things like print and radio are much more neglected here. The third tip: The creative messaging needs to be on point. If you want to launch a campaign in the UAE, you’ve got to think about your approach with South Asians. What’s your approach with Arab expats? What’s your approach with Western expats? Then you break down the Western expats even further. It can get quite complex. When it comes to UAE specifically, you’ve got to try and find that unilateral creative comms approach. In Saudi, it has to speak to the Saudi pride tapping into 2030 vision and where they’re trying to go, harnessing the Saudi sentiments. If you’re going to launch in Egypt, make sure the creative message is very Egyptian in its humour. Creativity and humour go a long way in Egypt. The current economic climate is not good. There are no dollars in the market. There are a lot of problems with inflation, so advertisers are looking more and more to humour to build up some affinity towards brands. So, markets, media mix and then creative messages all need to be really thought about quite carefully.

Which industry sectors do you see at the biggest opportunity?

Luca: There’s a lot of growth in luxury. Chanel is one of our clients. They, and all the other big luxury clients, are benefiting from the exodus of people leaving coming to Dubai, High Net Worth Individuals. Luxury is booming. Sectors that were historically strong are not so strong anymore. FMCG and CPG have struggled in the last few years. The budgets are no longer the same as they once were, and we’re seeing other sectors overtake them – e-commerce, pure digital clients, tech players, and of course, travel. Travel tourism is becoming massive here in the region. The World Cup the Expo happened here. There’s so much investment that’s going into trying to raise the profile of nations, reposition countries in the eyes of the world’s audience. We’re seeing a bit of a tourism arms race where everyone is trying to compete to drive their own national brand to a global audience. That’s fascinating to be part of.

Where do you get your news from, and what media brands are your personal favourites

Manoj: I’m very much a podcast guy in the morning. Some of that is work related – daily catch-up podcasts with some of the major media brands; a lot of football podcasts, sport or golf related podcasts. I lean on a lot of business media: Reuters for factual reporting; Time; Insider; The Wall Street Journal. These are my main go-tos during the course of the day. Once I’m home and the kids are in bed It’s either Netflix or probably Tik Tok for the sheer entertainment value. Luca: The confidence in media outlets has probably never been lower than it is now, especially in light of the conflict that’s happening at the moment in the Middle East. People are starting to ask the tough questions – then the truth becomes, where can we get the real scoop, the real news, the real insights? We could see a world where in the future, things get even more fragmented. AI is becoming so important now with these stories being self-generated. Articles being written by AI, videos being created by AI – we’re coming into a very, very complex time for advertisers. Our job as agencies or as publishers, is to keep challenging, keep asking those tough questions because at the end of the day, you know, if we lose the end consumer, then advertising is not going to work. Manoj: We were asked to deliver a lecture last week at a university here in Dubai on media to a group of undergraduate students. One of the examples we used was in light of the conflict at the moment, there have been a lot of clips doing the rounds on social media. Some are from reputable sources, some are just being shared and, you have to be really careful how you’re interpreting and acknowledging some of those clips. One specific clip showed a group of young people at a concert, apparently running away because of attacks that were going on. It turns out, after it was factchecked by Reuters, one of your members, it was actually a group of people running towards a Bruno Mars concert to get into the door. As Luca said, we’re not political commentators or experts, but you’ve got to be very wary. And I think our role as people who work within the media is to spread that message – look guys, be aware, be careful. I think we’re heading into some interesting times with AI, as Luca mentioned, and there are conversations about whether platforms should be declaring that an article has been written by AI or that an algorithm has been influenced by the AI, for example. It’s going to be interesting. Luca: It goes back to trust. A lot of my information I rely on is from my own network. I trust my network and trust the people that I work with. I think if media partners, media publishers lose trust with the audience based on the information they’re sharing, we’re all going to be in trouble.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

In conversation with Kieley Taylor

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The World Media Group’s Chief Executive Belinda Barker chats to Kieley Taylor, Global Head of Partnerships at GroupM, about the organisation’s Funding News and Fighting Disinformation initiative, and why it’s particularly pertinent in the lead up to an election year.  Below is an extract of their conversation. You can watch the video below or listen to the full podcast here. [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/RoPRyO4uTIo”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

In conversation with Kieley Taylor – Funding News and Fighting Disinformation

The World Media Group’s Chief Executive Belinda Barker chats to Kieley Taylor, Global Head of Partnerships at GroupM, about the organisation’s Funding News and Fighting Disinformation initiative, and why it’s particularly pertinent in the lead up to an election year. Below is an extract of their conversation. You can watch the full video above or listen to the podcast here. Firstly, what does your role as Global Head of Partnerships at GroupM entail? GroupM places about one out of every three media dollars globally. We find appropriate context for advertising to appear. We look at audiences and we look at price point, so that brands can really deliver the outcomes that they want, whether it be salience, sales, etc. My role is looking after those most scaled partners or those that have the most points of differentiation, so that we can really help our brands to stand out, whether it be through data and technology access, valuable pricing, or more and more, through a lens of what are value-aligned places for advertisers to appear. It’s a global role – how do you work with the different parts of GroupM around the world? As I don’t get more than 24 hours in my day, it’s much more about approaches for each different investment leader and their respective market. This informs a tiering so we can have consistent codification around partner assessment. It’s a matter of having a consistent frame of reference, rather than me being on the phone all hours of the day and night. Tell us about your five key pillars and how responsible journalism fits in. The Five Pillars of our Responsible Investment Framework help us to keep a lens, both short- and long-term, around the types of strategic relationships that we wish to broker. Responsible Journalism; Brand Safety and Suitability; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Environmental Sustainability; and Data and AI Ethics are the five different pillars. There’s all kinds of intersectionality amongst publishers or platforms across many of these different themes, if not all. But it’s more a matter of helping brands who have specific ERG or CSR-types of value alignment to find best-fit partners. We also tend to find that DEI is fundamental to responsible journalistic enterprise. Those journalists, those reporters, understand their audiences – the communities they serve – better than anyone. As we get away from a cookie-based world sometime later next year, the value of those audiences and the authentic relationships that those journalists have built over years will really come to the fore. We’ll be able to see not only the integrity in the environment, but also that they are naturally supporting whatever look or affiliation that a community might have as its majority resident. A little bit different than the more opaque cookie worlds that we’re one foot in, one foot out of right now. Why, as an agency, do you feel supporting responsible journalism is important? The hard-nosed business answer is strong competition forces choice and helps to drive innovation and a plurality of opinions. It’s beholden upon us to make sure that different types of narratives are represented in a credible way. In this precipice that we’re on of post-truth being [accepted as] a societal value, it’s critically important that we’re reaching out and helping directly to invest in those that are telling authentic and true narratives. There are political cycles going on both sides of the pond and I think they’re going to be watched with a lot of interest, if not trepidation. Functioning democracies require for there to be the fourth estate. Given the privileged position that we have – to place as much media investment as we do – we really do find it to be imperative to continue to be a cornerstone in support of those that hold truth to power in democratic and functioning societies. How does it work in reality? How do you audit the amount the agency spends on supporting newsrooms? It’s certainly more straightforward with digital and programmatic. The post reporting is done on a 24-hour cycle, if not more frequently. So having a sense of how the dollars or pounds are stacking up is a little more straightforward. Dollars might be going to a publication that supports a newsroom, but also supports lifestyle or sports news content – all of these more suitable places for brands. We’re looking with that much wider lens of a publisher when they do support a newsroom versus hard-nosed investigative journalism exclusively. The other thing that we have to be really cognisant of, going back to the functioning of democracy, is how a population can have access to credible news information when there are paywalls and when they have to have access to broadband digital internet. When we did a lot of work around public health for Covid 19, we saw that going to radio broadcasters was a huge and powerful medium to mass distribute public safety messages, as were local press publications. Making sure that credible information is not tiered within society is super important – to impress the point about the intersectionality of those different pillars of responsible investing. Have some markets responded more positively to this than others? The short answer is yes. We’ve done a partnership with Internews, who is using a consistent rubric to set a floor, so ensuring that the organisation is not under any sanctions, ensuring that there are by-lines for the actual people who are doing the reporting; that they have retraction policies if something is found to be incorrectly stated. What we have found is that in some different marketplaces, there is a higher standard to journalistic enterprise, but we have found comfort that the floor is credible and consistent and allows us to have a breadth of local news sources for consideration in the markets that we’ve been able to partner with Internews to review. How can publishers play a role in reframing responsible journalism? I was recently at a panel discussion on the same topic, and there were two things that I implored publishers to think carefully about. One was for those that have programmatically accessed inventory, to look hard at all the different resellers or demand sources that you might have convened over the years. The fewer middle actors you have, the more favourably you will be looked upon, and the lesser your carbon footprint. Some hard decisions are being taken based upon rudimentary data and not looking at the broader context of the reputation of the journalistic enterprise. The other bit is to make sure that you use this time now as applicable to local laws (GDPR and the like) for getting consented first party data. You will become a beacon of authentic and consented identity, which is going to be more and more valuable to advertisers as cookies go away. Once we have a data match, then game on. We can deliver really personalised creative within that kind of context. Help us meet halfway with the business transformation. Through consortiums, coalitions, fractional support, there are ways with which we can get to a place that we can more easily integrate and operate in the cookieless world. Finally, on a personal note, what news brands do you consume? I tend to consume news brands like Bloomberg and Reuters to help me understand how my client’s business is operating and help me understand politics without such a sharp lead. I also really enjoy the longer form content, like Wired and Fast Company. I like to really understand the direction and the future of technology because it pairs so closely with what I do for a living – when I’m not chasing a two-year-old child around that is![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

In conversation with Navin Rammohan

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]This month the World Media Group’s Chief Executive Belinda Barker chats to the winner of the World Media Award for Content Leadership and Innovation, Navin Rammohan, in a special edition of The Media Navigators podcast. Navin is Vice President, Segment Head Marketing at Infosys. Below is an extract of their conversation. You can watch the video below or listen to the full podcast here. [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Congratulations Navin. Please can you start by telling our audience a little bit about who Infosys is and what you do as a business?

Infosys is a large global IT services and consulting organisation. We started off around 42 years back with a seed capital of around $250 with seven founders and today we are about $18 billion in revenue. We have 330,000 employees globally, and we are in 56 countries, managing our clients’ businesses around digital transformation. We look after the entire technology spectrum of large enterprise – the Global 2000, the Fortune 500 of the world, managing critical technology and different kinds of work related to their technology transformation. Just to give you an example, imagine an iconic automaker, which is looking at their cloud transformation, we look at how cloud can impact their car business for connected cars. Similarly, a government organisation that is looking to implement strategies for their SME businesses that want to use blockchain, we help them look at blockchain as a strategy for the small and medium industries within their constituencies. We look at AI to really help tennis players improve and manage their games and that’s some of the work that we do with sports organisations. In a sense we navigate the entire technology spectrum of medium to large enterprises around any kind of challenges they face, which technology can really solve. We define ourselves as an organisation which is there to help amplify human potential; to navigate the ‘next’ for people, businesses, and communities. The value systems that the founders put behind the organisation 42 years back still stand in terms of how we go about doing our business. We are proud of our ESG strategies. We became carbon neutral in 2019-2020, 30 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. In the social sustainability space, we’re implementing a strategy of re-skilling about 10 million people with digital skills. We are already at the halfway mark with 5 million people already on a platform that is provided free to enable people to learn digital skills. We are really proud of what we are doing ‘beyond business’ but I don’t think we can call it beyond business because now ESG is a core part of every organisation’s strategy. From a people perspective, learnability is one of the core strategies of Infosys. We have probably the world’s largest corporate university in Mysore, where we train close to 15,000 people simultaneously. Learning and constantly evolving ourselves to learn new technologies and bringing that to our clients’ business is core to Infosys. It’s about amplifying human potential to create the next opportunity for people, businesses, and communities. We are a people company that uses technology to really help better our clients.

What made you think that a content-led campaign was the right approach for Infosys and how did you get involved with the tennis partnership?

At Infosys we follow our content marketing approach with a theme called ‘UnMarketing’. It’s a very value-driven approach where we are not really marketing the technology, but we are creating marketing with the help of technology. Rather than creating TV commercials and campaigns, we want to create products and services and platforms using our technology, and that becomes our marketing. Tennis is a great example of what we are doing using the content marketing approach. We are building a digital platform for ATP, which helps players and coaches to understand statistics much better. It helps fans to engage with the game in a much more immersive way than if they had just watched it on TV. If you go to our platform that we have created on the website, the spectators can understand the game in a much more granular way, and that improves the fan engagement level. Infosys technology is the backbone of all these immersive experiences, and that becomes a marketable technology for us to showcase to our other clients. We go beyond the tennis audience and core stakeholders to our other business audiences to show them that what we can do with tennis data can easily be done with retail data or manufacturing data. That has been our philosophy in terms of an approach to marketing – the technology is used for creating products and services and platforms and digital experiences for any kind of business, and we use that to market ourselves. That has been the differentiating factor because it brings in authenticity and value. We’re talking from a place of complete knowledge; clients appreciate that, and it leads to meaningful engagement and conversations with them. We’ve taken this model to our other partnerships like The Economist Group. We have built their entire sustainability platform – it’s called The Sustainability Project. One of the problem statements that had come to us with was that their sustainability content was spread across the whole website and they wanted to bring it all together in a way that was personalised. They knew a lot about their audience and what they’re consuming, so how could they then target them better? We created a platform for them that is live on the Economist Impact website called The Sustainability Project, so every piece of content related to sustainability is in a single place. The Economist team is now able to target this audience in a much sharper way. They know what their audience is reading, how much they are liking it, how much time they are spending on the content, so it gives them insights into the new things they need to do in this space. It’s almost a Netflix kind of an experience that you’re bringing to sustainability content. Similarly, we are currently working on something called the Value Chain Navigator with them, which is a digital tool to look at how organisations around the world are looking at their Scope 3 emissions. While these are projects which are delivering business value to The Economist, it is also helping Infosys from a thought leadership perspective in the sustainability space. It helps us to build our credibility and, at the same time, we are building new technology solutions which are solving a real-world problem for our clients. Leading with content like this helps us to create a very differentiated kind of proposition, which is helping us in the market, both from a brand perspective as well as from a business impact perspective.

Content marketing has been a big trend over the last few years. Do you think that will continue and how will it morph in the future?

I think the definition of content has really changed. It’s no longer about text. It’s no longer about audio. It’s no longer about video. What we are seeing in the market is a lot about content being experiential and immersive. Every year, the number of digital channels and mediums are increasing. Whether it is Web3, GenAI now, whether it was the Metaverse, each of these trends have had a hype cycle. I’m not saying that as marketers, we should not ride some of these hype cycles. I think we should. But I think we should ride it in a way that is furthering the brand’s narrative. That’s the most important thing. How is it really adding to your brand story? How is it making it relevant to the audience that you’re trying to target? How is it relevant for the business you are in? For example, about two years back, the Financial Times, came to us with a business problem. They felt that the world of journalism was going to be very different in the next few years with people wanting to contribute to the content in some way, rather than just being passive listeners or audiences. They call this whole phenomenon ‘participative content’. We brainstormed with the visual journalism team at the Financial Times and came up with a gamification of the content. We created something called the FT Climate Game – a very immersive and scientifically based game with four personas that let you decide how you want to take decisions which will end up having a certain impact on the climate. The goal was to ensure that the temperature doesn’t rise above 1. 5 degrees. It was a fascinating way to reimagine content completely and give an understanding of the subject itself. Another example is something we created for the International Tennis Hall of Fame, based in Newport in Rhode Island. It’s where tennis started in the US and is the only grass court tournament there. All the legends of the game and every old artifact related to tennis are on display at the museum, but unless you go to Newport, you can’t see this fabulous museum. They came to us to ask how to take it global – they wanted every tennis fan globally to be able to experience the Hall of Fame in a way that is immersive and experiential, so we built a Metaverse. You can take your own avatar and move around this entire space, exploring the Hall of Fame and every artifact immersively, like you’re actually there. It was launched in July, and we’re seeing tremendous results. I think the content strategy is really evolving around creating content that is genuine, adds value, and builds in authenticity into every interaction that you do, which creates some kind of meaningful engagement with your target audience. I think that’s the direction where content is headed.

What is the one challenge or trend that you’ll be watching over the next 12 months?

With Gen AI now, there’s a huge amount of opportunity. We are experimenting with AI models to not just solve clients’ business problems, but also in marketing. We’re trying to see how we can push the narrative so that clients understand it in a much more immersive way. I think the Gen AI space is going to be very exciting in the next 12 to 24 months. We are keen to explore and create, but the principles for us will not change. We want to look at any of these new technologies with the same principles of making sure that it furthers the brand’s narrative, it adds value, and it really engages in a way that it is meaningful. I think the storytelling aspect of content is going to become much more important because it’s going to lead to a human-centric kind of content building. We are seeing that it has a much better resonance from our clients when we connect with them at a human level with our content. Thank you, Navin.   We look forward to presenting Navin with his award for Content Leader and Innovation at the World Media Awards ceremony of September 7th.  If you would like to join us in celebrating the very best in international content-driven marketing, tickets to the World Media Awards ceremony are available here. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]