You know what your problem is...?

When I first got involved in AdNation, just over 18 months ago, I knew very little about the Middle East marketing and advertising sector.

At the start, then, when I did a bunch of interviews with the great and/or good of the industry, I was keen to try to understand what made the region’s industry tick, what it thought about itself – and where it was going.

Now, as I prepare to leave AdNation (although not the wonderful world of marketing), I’ve been thinking about all those big questions again, and have been trying to figure out some thoughts, some conclusions.

And do you know, I don’t have a bloody clue.

Actually, that’s a lie: I do have a clue, or at least a theory. Wanna hear it? Ready? Ok, here goes: it’s not me – it’s the Middle East marketing and advertising sector that doesn’t have a clue.

Now wait a minute. Hear me out.

This isn’t meant as a derogatory statement: I mean it more or less literally. Taken as a whole, the region’s marketing industry lacks a clear understanding of itself, its purpose, and any direction. There’s plenty of talent here, but much of it is either being misdirected, or is sitting unrecognised.

In short, it’s a bit of a basket-case. And why? Well I’ll tell you why, gosh darn it.

First, it’s my belief that, until recently, it has been extremely hard to measure the effectiveness of the majority of marketing campaigns (perhaps excepting the FMCG sector). Aside from the lack of hard data about who’s watching, reading or listening to what, up until last year, much of the Middle East has been in the grip of a continuous boom, with double-digit growth (at least) across the board.

Given that, unless its management is composed of the very worst types of blithering idiots, the average client would see very healthy growth quarter after quarter, what incentive was there to worry too much about how your message was going down?

Add in the predominance of monopolies in many industries, and the fact that the limiting factor for many firms was probably supply-side rather than demand-side, and you have – in my view – a bunch of clients that are at best mildly interested in honing and perfecting their marketing activities (and let’s not talk about the tendency for some multinationals to use the Middle East as a dumping ground for their, ahem... less able members of staff).

So, clients. But that’s not the big problem. (Indeed, now that times are harder, clients may start taking more of an interest in just what their ad dollars are achieving.)

Then you have the agencies. And for all you agency folks out there, I have one word: ego. You heard me right: EGO.

Ego, ego, ego – the agencies are full of it. As, of course, are they in the rest of the world. The difference is – again, this is a personal view – that in much of the rest of the world, the money-men are firmly in control.

In contrast, in the Middle East – still a backwater for most multinationals, despite whatever lip-service they may pay – agency bosses have more latitude, and so more scope for stamping their own personality on their operations, whether or not this is what’s best for the business.

“The Lebanese Mafia” they call it, and while that might incorrectly convey an impression of violence and criminality, it does accurately suggest the culture of rivalries and vendettas and prejudices and patronage that defines big-agency advertising in the Middle East.

Creative directors arrested for moving agencies. What the hell?

Agency staff told not to participate in a non-partisan project, because the Big Boss believes a rival agency is leading it. Seriously?

Oh, and the odd coded message sent via the media, intended to send signals regarding who’s out and who’s in. That was just the other week.

It’s like watching a particularly dull and implausible American daytime soap opera, with pantomime villains and cardboard characters battling out bizarre plots and schemes.

But that’s just the bosses. And, amazingly, they’re not the big problem either.

The creatives and planners are just as capable as suffering fits of rampant egotism. Look at last year’s Lynx: that wasn’t about creativity, or excellence, or even just promoting an agency. It was about ego, pure and simple.

I’m not singling out FP7 here, either: it was clear that a distressingly large proportion of the work entered had been created specifically for the Lynx (albeit less dishonestly than was the case in Doha).

But again, that’s not the heart of it. All these things are secondary, really, compared to the biggest, most fundamental problem of all.

It’s all run by a bunch of bloody foreigners.

Literally, aside from in Lebanon (and maybe Egypt), all the major advertising markets in the Middle East are full of agencies headed up and staffed by non-nationals. It should come as no surprise, then, that the most coherent, locally applicable stuff is coming out of – wait for it – Egypt and Lebanon.

The Gulf is really the big problem here. The heart of its advertising industry is the charmingly schizophrenic city of Dubai, and while it might be quite a pleasant place to live and work, it’s absolutely pants at providing any meaningful picture of life in the Gulf states in general.

While advertising is being written and created by Lebanese, Jordanians, Brits, Syrians, Indians, Filipinos, Germans and Pakistanis, but targeted at Gulf Arabs, it’s never going to get anywhere.

Using an example I can understand, I would imagine it’s rather like a British person watching ads made by Americans or Australians: it’s in the same language, and it sort of makes sense, but it all references attitudes and semiology that just... don’t quite... ring true.

Some of it gets through, of course – some things are universal. But that can only work some of the time, and all this talk of “appealing to the common factors of consumers everywhere” or whatever is frankly just a smoke-screen for ad guys (in clients as well as agencies) who don’t want to admit that they can’t think like a bloke in Saudi Arabia.

There’s no suggestion of racism here; it’s simply a question of people being people everywhere, and so being firmly embedded in their own particular variety of culture and world-view. Nothing you can do about that – particularly when you want to sell them a chocolate bar.

In my view, everything else – all the egotism and back-biting and feuds and patronage and disinterested clients – is just a symptom of the fact that, at heart, the Middle East’s marketing industry knows it doesn’t really know how to do its job, at least at that one, very fundamental, level.

All the rest of it is fine. The technical details, the planning and buying and photography and artwork and whatever – it’s all good, or at least getting better. But while it lacks reference to those innate, unspoken, indefinable aspects of life in a particular country, then it’s never going to make it all the way.

Sadly for the industry, there’s nothing it can really do about this in the way of retraining. On a large scale, the only way to understand the fine culture of a country is to BE from that country, or have lived there, immersed in its culture (and not sat on the sidelines, as much of Dubai does) for many, many years. Decades, even.

The solution is as obvious as it is currently unobtainable: hire Saudis and Emiratis and Kuwaitis and Qataris, and so on. But at the moment, most Saudis and Emiratis and Kuwaitis and Qataris are not much interested in a career in advertising, and those that are, are often not the most... motivated employees in the world.

So, we come to an impasse. The marketing industry needs locals, but locals don’t need the marketing industry – and in the meantime, while its target markets sit there disinterestedly, the marketing industry fritters away the time in petty schoolyard feuds and subterfuges.

Well, shit.

This is normally where the commentator waffles on about the need for more effective government and employer programmes, incentives, education, blah. I’m not going to do that – you all know the drill.

Change is going to come – it has to. How long that change will take is anyone’s guess. Miles Young, global head of Ogilvy, who passed through Dubai the other week, suggested that the Middle East was about 15 years behind China in advertising terms. He also said that, as in China, his agency’s aim was to build operations that are of the country they’re based in.

So, 15 years? Who knows – I don’t. I’d probably guess, barring massively disruptive events (wars, cataclysms, etc), more like 20 or 30, given the generational shift in attitudes that needs to happen first. Maybe we’ll get lucky and advertising will be the fashionable thing for nationals to get into.

Hey, it beats working for a living.

Until then, the industry will remain a schizophrenic, paranoid basket-case, lacking a true sense of direction or purpose. Well, as much as a sense of purpose as any industry that’s designed to sell more tubes of toothpaste and shiny new cars can ever have.

But in the meantime, it may be a paranoid basket-case, but at least it’s OUR paranoid basket-case. And there’s still a lot of other stuff we can try to get right. Let’s do that... but let’s keep on trying to figure out how to fix the big stuff, too.