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Roy Haddad likes to think big. But he wasn’t expecting something that big. His JWT MENA agency grabbed a total of 23 MENA Cristals, including two Grands Cristal and one Special Jury mention, at the awards festival held in Lebanon in January. The performance surprised even the chairman and CEO.
“We had a pretty substantial shortlist, but such dominance was unexpected,” Haddad says. Notable wins included the Grand Cyber Cristal for HSBC’s “What type are you” campaign (a joint operation with Firefly), and the Marketing Grand Cristal for Hép Attitude Positive’s “Hepatitis Box.”
The regional arm of JWT, the world’s most awarded agency in 2008, Haddad’s team is making its presence felt. In part by ensuring that branches across the Middle East and North Africa had submissions in play, the agency doubled its number of MENA Cristals wins over last year.
“Some said that JWT oversubmitted,” says Haddad. “But we have 12 offices in total and we wanted them all to participate, as we see this as a way to measure offices’ performance. Besides, it would have been unfair not to allow every office to participate. And we actually got awards from almost all markets. It’s also very significant that we’ve been awarded network of the year. It proves that there’s a JWT brand and a JWT culture.”
Creative chief Ramsey Naja adds, “It’s the best award-to-submission conversion rate. And the consistency of our performance since 2005 – or rather the number of awards – is proof that hard work pays off. ”

PLANNING AHEAD. Hard work, yes. But also tight organization, training and cooperation. “Around 60 percent of our staff is trained on some subject yearly,” says Haddad “It creates cohesion among the people, on top of a systemic architecture of all our agencies, whereby we all operate with the same tools, we’re all subjected to heavy training and we therefore have a large planning ability.”
Naja likes to say that JWT is not really a network, but rather one office with extremely long corridors.
The bosses say the agency’s focus on training is part of a drive for innovation best expressed by its dominance of the digital categories. Six of the 11 Cyber Cristals awarded this year went to JWT.
“The work on digital services is what we’re most proud of. I’m very happy that we have dominance in this arena,” says Haddad. “It expresses how our eyes see the future. Being ready for a new world is key to our clients. We saw the writing on the wall in the late ’90s, so we pushed all non-traditional aspects.”
For Haddad, constantly questioning the status quo – and always being on the prowl for more effective channels to reach consumers – is a way to expand opportunities for clients. JWT is now pushing hardest in the digital realm, and anything labeled “new media.”

WHO NEEDS EXPERTS? “We keep using words such as ‘engaging,’ ‘interaction,’ and so on,” says Naja. “Within the communication business, it’s all about the brand/consumer relationship. But the sender/receiver model is gone. There is much more dialogue, which happens better in one-to-one communication.”
It may come as a surprise that the agency sees little need to hire experts in digital media to bring about such dialogue. “We need whatever is required to build a relationship,” says Haddad. “We must keep recruiting people who know how to dialogue and who bring a fresh point of view, as opposed to specialists who, by definition, have automatically a narrow, limited view of things. The rest is just tools.”
No need, either, to come up with trendy concepts designed to go viral. “An idea will always be an idea and will always be bigger than the media,” says Naja. “In fact, the idea dictates the media. Integration is into life, not into media.”
Haddad pushes the point further: “Is word of mouth a form of media? The point is, the idea anchors the relation between the client and the people. It’s a promise on which a relationship is built. It must be multidimensional, a virtual world where the brand and the consumer meet. That’s what we call the ‘brandscape.’”

LOSING CONTROL. In times of crisis, ideas – at least good ones – are key to convincing clients to keep communicating. “The bigger the idea, the lesser the investment,” says Haddad. “The sender/receiver model relied on frequency, hence the big budgets. But people’s attention is changing, and that leads to less frequency. Effectively, there is no better time for big ideas than during a recession.”
Similarly, Naja considers the current slump as a challenge for creativity. “The most magnetic ideas will prevail,” he says. “We need ideas that propagate, that are attractive enough. Why try to go viral if the idea doesn’t have appeal? Today, it’s all about how you share it.”
Indeed, whether clients are willing to surrender part of their control of their brand’s image, which is bound to happen if a campaign goes viral, remains to be seen. But according to Haddad, “Clients don’t have any other choice but to lose control. It’s an illusion. Today, everything’s out of control. It’s a paradigm shift that we need to learn to live with.”
It’s a given that clients will appreciate more measurable return on investment – or “return on idea,” if you’re down with the lingo – offered by digital media. But they can look forward to other advantages as well. Once clients accept that they no longer have full control, for instance, they can allow space for diverse interpretations of a brand message, which could turn into a net benefit.
“Accepting that people manipulate your idea allows us to learn,” says Naja. “A good, consumer-focused corporation will learn to listen to its customers, whatever the messages they’re sending. Why do companies do research if not to know what consumers think? The digital arena should be seen as an open forum for consumers, and brands could even become moderators of these forums.”
Research in the future may soon be as simple as reading comments on sites like YouTube, a media outlet that offers no creative control whatsoever once content has been posted. “Trends appear on these Web sites that allow us to get something completely different than what research shows,” Naja says.
“We moved from an age of deference to an age of reference,” says Haddad. “Consumers can get any info they want. The whole pyramid shifted. Companies are running to comply with the demands of the base. In the UK, Internet advertising comes second to TV, and within two years it will pass TV. Since May 2007, more people have spent time on the Internet than in front of the TV in the UK. This has gone unnoticed, but leaders articulate change. It will take two to three years to cascade to our region.”
This is an uncertain time for marketers, to be sure. But if its performance at the MENA Cristals is any indicator, it’s a safe bet that JWT MENA will be among the agencies capitalizing on change as it happens.

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