We all were attracted in the old days by the largest market, which is Saudi Arabia, but none of us – agencies, media, etcetera – could really put our people there, because Saudi Arabia in those days was a market of difficulties. There were a lot of restrictions on visas, on getting labor permits and things like that.
So people settled for a close place – there was a great focus on Bahrain. Even the multinational companies, the Procters and the Unilevers, who could not place their people in Saudi Arabia, placed them in Bahrain. This was in the mid-1970s.
But you want to be in a dynamic place, and people discovered that Dubai was a better option. This was before the causeway days, so you had to travel anyway. You could travel from Bahrain and you could travel from Dubai, so people came to Dubai because of the ease of doing business in the mid-1980s.
Dubai started to snowball as a place, because it provided all the facilities and, even before Dubai Media City was established, most of the regional agencies came to run their regional operations from Dubai because it was a good place to live. There were very efficient airport and airline services, you could set up with the minimum red tape, and though the market itself was not that big, we were here to look after our businesses in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and the rest of the region.
Dubai developed and developed and became real in many respects. We started complementing each other, so it was no longer just the agencies that were here; the media came here, the international media had representatives here, the support services came here, the production companies came here too. So you stopped having to travel to London every time you wanted to do a post-production job on a commercial.
Now, over the last year or two, Abu Dhabi – which has been evolving as the political capital – started realizing there is a business potential which it hadn’t been tapping. Abu Dhabi started building a lot of basic requirements for a trading and tourist hub. It has never had this because it’s always been available next door in Dubai.
Then came last year’s developments in Dubai: the over-zealousness, over-investment and so on, and pop, Abu Dhabi has come to the forefront. When business was suffering in Dubai, as of December 2008, suddenly we all realized there is potential in Abu Dhabi, and we all ran to Abu Dhabi to tap this potential.
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