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 As the mess surrounding the 2009 Dubai Lynx draws to a close (we hope...), AdNation presents a closer look at the issues that have plagued the competition this year, focusing specifically on Fortune Promoseven Doha.
With FP7 prepping an announcement for the next few days which should see a final conclusion to its ill-fated involvement, we look at how the agency came to this point, and, crucially, what went wrong.
What follows is an account of the circumstances around Fortune Promoseven Doha’s Dubai Lynx entries this year, and the ensuing furore. This piece has been compiled through speaking to sources from across the industry, few of whom, given what they were saying, were able to speak on the record.
This being the case, we present this as a narrative – and as with all narratives, this is only one way of looking at reality. We have endeavoured to balance the various contradictory stories and accounts to make this as definitive a narrative as possible – but, inevitably, there will be points where it unintentionally deviates.
Nevertheless, we believe this is more or less what happened. Now read on...
Contents:
1. Medals of honor
2. Third time unlucky?
3. Inside the awards machine
4. Trouble brewing
5. Nuns shall pass
6. Systemic failure
Conclusion
 1. Medals of honor
On 2 April 2008, at the second annual Dubai Lynx awards, FP7 Doha walked away with a decent collection of awards, including a Grand Prix for a campaign apparently done for EA Games’ Medal Of Honor videogame. At Cannes that June, the campaign would go on to win two Golds in print and outdoor, marking, along with a couple of silvers, the best Cannes Lions performance for a regional agency to date.
Following the win, though, disturbing rumours started to circulate that EA Games was more than a little puzzled at the ads – as it had never seen or heard of them. When AdNation popped into existence in September last year, we looked into the claims and contacted EA Games, which confirmed the speculation: the relevant exec HADN’T approved the ads.
There was a certain amount of confusion over who the client was for the work – across different award shows, the client was variously down as EA Games and (in the case of Cannes) BD Group, a Qatar reseller. This would not be the last time that confusion over who had approved the ads would arise around FP7 Doha’s awards entries.
Cannes Lions subsequently investigated, and after several months, said it would not be withdrawing the awards. While we don’t know the details of the investigation, anecdotal reports suggest it helped that EA Games were not at all unhappy with the ads – which, it has to be said, are very good, and crucially, in no way offensive or controversial.
Cynics might also suggest that it would be a blow for Cannes to have pulled the Gold Lions, and that an outcome which avoided this course of action would be in the interests of all the parties. Cannes has, however, pulled awards, including Grand Prix and Golds, in the past, and will no doubt do so again in the future.
In short, though, FP7 Doha played at least a little bit fast and loose with approvals and submission guidelines – and got away with it. Or, rather, as it appeared to many, the agency’s creative director and enfant terrible Fadi Yaish got away with it. Even at this stage, it was Yaish’s name that was at the fore of the controversy, rightly or wrongly.
Looking back, though, we would suggest that this was the point at which trouble started brewing for the 2009 Dubai Lynx. Had FP7 Doha been stripped of its gongs, it seems much less likely that a chastened Yaish would have pushed the rules so far the next time – or that his agency would have let him.
As it was, the Golds and Grand Prix stayed in the trophy cabinet, and Fortune Promoseven started planning for the 2009 awards season.
 2. Third time unlucky?
In 2006-7, the UAE chapter of the International Advertising Association approached Cannes Lions and invited the company to start up a regional creative awards programmed, along the lines of its market-leading Cote d’Azur show – and thus was Dubai Lynx born.
The IAA had tried to run its own awards, but decided to bring in an international player to try and escape the chronic infighting and mutual distrust among regional agencies. But along with the international organiser, the IAA also wanted international judges, insisting on this for the first Lynx to ensure there would be no (serious) accusations of partiality about the juries.
But after the second Dubai Lynx in 2008, it started to look like there was a problem; entrants were stretching the submission requirements as far as they would go, and then a little further. Questions and grumblings about scam work surfaced then, and there were suggestions that Lynx should beef up the entry requirements – for example, demand more than one insertion to validate the work.
However there was no major scandal, and much of the grumbling was (probably rightly) put down to sour grapes on the part of losing agencies. The Lynx organisers made some small amendments to the entry requirements, but nothing substantial was changed.
This meant that the way was clear for agencies to enter so-called “proactive” work – or, more accurately but less pithily – “work created just to win awards”.
We’re not going to get into the rights and wrongs of this sort of work here, except to cite the perennial justification of agencies favouring proactive entries: that clients in the Middle East are not ready to embrace truly creative work, and that by demonstrating proactive pieces that win awards, they can be educated.
What we will distinguish between, however, is “proactive” and “scam” work. For the purposes of this article, “proactive” refers to work that is created off-brief by an agency, then submitted to a client (whether retained or not) and approved. “Scam” work, on the other hand, is work created by an agency, but not approved by an organisation authorised to approve use of the brand in question, be it a regional distributor, or the brand owner’s head office.
Under Lynx rules, ads are eligible if they have been signed off by an authorised party on the client side, and have run at least once in the media. Provided both of these requirements are met, any ad, however unlikely or improbable for the Middle East, can be entered and go before the international judges.
For creatives, this is where frustration can set in. Regional work that gets approved is generally perceived to be boring and unlikely to get anywhere – hence the desire to enter work designed to win awards.
Clients of course are as individual as people, but generally there often seems a willingness to approve work for awards if it’s not actually harmful to one’s brand – after all, the agency is paying, and the prospect of being associated with an award is generally pleasant. There seems little to lose.
The flipside is that, if a client says no, the agency with the work has a problem. If it’s for a fairly generic product or service, another brand or client can be substituted, but even that entails approaching another company, and risking another rejection. And if it’s for something specialised – forget it.
So much easier, then, to bypass the whole problem – and not ask. So much easier to ask a local player that isn’t really supposed to sign off on marketing stuff – but hey, who’s ever going to know? The temptation is clear.
And with more than 2,000 entries, Lynx is never going to be able to check them all – there has to exist some degree of trust. Unfortunately, if an agency is determined to abuse that trust, there’s not a lot that can be done until the work is seen in public, usually within a few days of the awards at most.
These are the rules, and the weaknesses – and thus the stage was set for this year’s scandal.
 3. Inside the awards machine
A few years ago, Fortune Promoseven was not known for winning awards. The perception in the market was that the agency produced a great deal of not very good work. To counteract this, FP7 went out and hired some top-notch creative types – and, it seems, told them to go forth and win stuff.
In 2007, FP7 Doha hired one Fadi Yaish, late of Saatchi & Saatchi in Dubai. Yaish, a very respected young creative whose talent seems to have been apparent to all who know him, then started the process of turning the agency’s Doha office into a high-end creative shop, designed to win awards, among other things.
The extent to which FP7 Doha is just an awards machine is debatable, and debated. Views range from the insistence of some that the agency does real work for real clients, not just in Qatar, but, as part of the global McCann Erickson network, for major international clients as well.
On the other side of the coin, some suggest that Yaish is (and always has been, even at his past agencies) only interested in awards, and not real work – others go further, and say he refuses to work on “real” accounts, thus causing a rift with the Doha management.
In an industry which practically runs on gossip and innuendo, and makes its living from making stuff up, it is impossible to say how much of this is true, and how much is speculating after the fact, building up the case against the agency, and the case against Fadi Yaish, to account for what happened next.
What is beyond dispute, though, is the amount of money FP7 allowed its Doha office to lavish on producing awards work: in total, the Doha agency spent well over a million dollars on its awards work this season, producing a total of around 230 entries for the 2009 Dubai Lynx.
For a small shop in Doha, that is a staggering sum of money – and should make it very clear how important awards are to it, and to FP7 as a whole (especially considering this sum does NOT include work done in any of its other offices).
This amount of money does not get authorised through an oversight, or signed off by a lowly bean counter: for a million bucks, approval comes from the top – and it’s reasonable to imagine that the top might ask for something in return.
In fact FP7’s upper management asked for several things. Aside from an obvious desire to make the money count, the agency’s top brass were also understandably keen to avoid any issues similar to the Medal Of Honor near-miss last year, presumably reasoning that this time any fall-out would be much more damaging.
As the man at the centre of the agency’s creative push, Fadi Yaish reportedly offered to swear on a number of holy books that this time there would be no problems – that client approval would be sought, that campaigns would actually run.
Yaish appears to have been sincere – certainly in a conversation with your correspondent just before Lynx, he was absolutely adamant that everything had been signed off by whoever was required, and that there would be no problems.
 4. Trouble brewing
As it happened, the clients were not the only people whose sign-off was required. Being a business, FP7 was not going to leave the integrity of the awards process at the word of one man – instead, it also set up a system of oversight, which would require FP7 Doha’s entries to be checked by a team based in Dubai, headed up by a senior member of management.
It would be their job to check that the work being put forward to Lynx had the necessary media schedules, and most importantly, the approval from the clients.
This would not, of course, preclude FP7 from employing the usual set of tricks in relation to clients, such as going through distributors or resellers, rather than the actual brand itself – and of course shelling out itself for the media, instead of the clients spending their own money.
These are not new, and are certainly not unique to FP7 – and in a region where many global brands still work exclusively through third parties on the ground, it’s perfectly legitimate in many cases. Well, some cases.
In the case of FP7 Doha’s Lynx work, it produced ads for Samsung, for example, and cited approvals from both Samsung itself, and a distributor/reseller in Saudi Arabia. For Aramex, the agency reportedly had an approval from someone in the courier company’s Egypt office.
There were still some cases where FP7 clearly played fast and loose, and appeared to know it; it pulled the bulk of its Nissan work hours before the Lynx awards show, after acknowledging it wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny in the approvals stakes, especially with TBWA\Raad breathing down its neck.
It was at this point, on the day of the awards, that the Lynx organisers offered Fadi Yaish the chance to pull any other work that might be “problematic”. After consultation with the senior management that had been tasked with overseeing his entries, Yaish declined to pull anything else.
 5. Nuns shall pass
We shall skip delicately over the next week, including as it did hangovers, recrimination, and a growing wave of finger-pointing.
Somewhere in that week, though, someone – Yaish? Another? – decided that FP7 needed to get a media insertion for some of its Samsung work – specifically its silver-winning Samsung camera ads, featuring Jesus and some nuns, a woman in racy stockings and some schoolboys, and an alien and some astronauts.
Through Universal Media in Lebanon, the agency booked half-page spots for the Jesus and Racy Woman ads in the Al-Mustaqbal paper, owned by the Hariri party.
What happened next is the matter of public record – but its effect was to put the final nail in the coffin of FP7 Doha’s awards effort for the year.
Quite how it happened remains obscure, but it seems to be the consequence of sloppiness all along the line, rather than any organised conspiracy to denigrate the Christian faith or public decency – or even, as the more paranoid painted it, to frame Al-Mustaqbal close to an important election.
It seems FP7 was anxious for a paper insertion, as it had entered the ads under the “newspaper” category in Lynx, but only had a magazine entry (the other story is the agency didn’t have ANY media to back up the win, and also wanted to take the work on to Cannes).
Working on the relatively reasonable basis that just about the only place in the region that these ads could run is Lebanon, it asked UM to get them into a paper. UM reportedly tried several papers, which all declined the ads after seeing the creative, before approaching Al-Mustaqbal.
Unfortunately, it seems that whoever accepted the booking at the paper either never looked at the creative, or else didn’t see the problem. People familiar with Lebanon have said that, at another time, these ads would probably not have aroused controversy.
Unfortunately, that time was not now. The list of mistakes is lamentable: first, FP7 Doha, for not running the damn ads BEFORE Lynx; then Universal Media, for running that ad in that paper, and finally Al-Mustaqbal, for accepting the ads.
And to top it all, the creative that ran was never approved, or even, it appears, seen, by Samsung or its agents. The closest the Korean firm got to it was seeing the “scribble” concept of the alien/astronaut ad (the one that never ran).
Samsung says this was done as part of a discussion with its Saudi office, and as far as it was concerned, never went further than a rough sketch. People close to FP7 insist the approval was firmer than this.
According to some sources close to FP7, Samsung was close to confirming the relevant approvals for the winning ads carrying its brand – and thus cementing FP7 Doha’s position – when the whole Lebanon thing exploded, at which point of course, the firm swiftly withdrew whatever co-operation it might have been giving.
Who to believe? We would guess Samsung.
Either way, though, whatever discussion or approval might have passed between Samsung and FP7, it seems certain the would-be client never approved the controversial ads – and thus certainly never authorised their being run in the Lebanese newspaper.
Clearly, running the “Samsung” ads was about the single most stupid thing FP7 could have done at that point, damaging the reputation of a “client”, at exactly the moment the agency needed said client’s help.
Unfortunately, however, it does not stand as the most stupid act in the affair – that award goes to a much longer series of (in)actions.
 6. Systemic failure
For an agency that has diced with awards controversy three years in a row now, Fortune Promoseven appears to have been remarkably inept at seeing this mess coming.
It shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that when you set out to win a lot of awards, and do it by creating work just designed to win rather than “real” work, there will be a lot of people looking very hard at what you do.
Of course, the agency – or rather its senior management – did indeed envision this very eventuality. This was why, as discussed above, it tasked a team headed up by a senior management figure to make sure FP7 Doha’s entries were up to scratch.
That the entries were not shouldn’t be a great surprise, perhaps – and a large proportion of this must rest with Fadi Yaish.
Speaking to him, it is clear that he regards his role as creative, and sees the details of client approval and media schedules and signoffs and admin as just that – administrative details. To an extent this is justifiable – Yaish is a creative, and not a manager – but, given what happened in the past, we would argue that it would be reasonable to take a greater interest in the nitty gritty of his awards entries.
But the far bigger question is, why did Fortune Promoseven – as a whole – allow this all to happen?
Fadi Yaish is an absolutely known quantity – a very talented creator, hungry for awards, and able to hunt them down for himself, given the chance. The flip-side of this means he is uninterested in how he gets said awards – the phrase “stop at nothing” is perhaps overstating things, but Yaish is clearly not going to let niggling little details get in his way.
In this case, any sensible company would put safeguards in place, to rein him in. Just as you don’t give the mad scientist free access to the company Amex and the nuclear reactor, you don’t put your top creative in charge of dotting the vital is and crossing the critical ts.
FP7 of course DID put such safeguards in place, and unfortunately, they didn’t work – the team in place failed utterly to detect or report the problems with the Lynx entries.
It is impossible to say from the outside by what means the safeguards failed, but what is certain is that the failure was catastrophic, and culpable. Even a few minutes spent examining the FP7 Doha entries would have revealed major problems very quickly – these are not subtle errors.
This suggests that whoever was tasked with looking at these entries was either deeply lazy, or deeply ignorant – and either way, deeply incompetent.
Ultimately, though, it is clear that the system within FP7 as a whole failed – Doha put out poorly-organised work, which failed to be picked up by Dubai, either through the normal channels, or the additional ones set up to deal with just this situation.
From there, the entries went to Lynx – which also failed to flag them as problematic. How responsible Lynx is for not spotting bogus entries is up for debate – we would suggest that, 2000-odd entries or not, FP7 Doha’s efforts should have been the subject of greater scrutiny; but we also accept that there has to be a large degree of trust in accepting award entries.
Conclusion
So who’s to blame? In short, everyone, at least in the management levels. Fadi Yaish should have taken more responsibility for the details of his entries, as should FP7 Doha’s management. FP7 as a whole failed to set up effective systems to check the entries, and Lynx failed to spot the scam ones.
At the time of writing, we understand Fortune Promoseven is preparing a statement about the situation, and any action it will take to try and draw a line under this mess.
It seems likely that Yaish may be parting company with the agency – either of his own volition, or by being sacked. This may be inevitable – there is a strong argument for suggesting that his position is now untenable.
But if FP7 suggests it is Yaish and only Yaish that is to blame – as it seemed to be hinting in its statement a couple of weeks ago – then it is being not merely disingenuous, but plain wrong. We will stop short of using the phrase “cover up”, but although Yaish shoulders some blame, it is the lesser part – and much less than the parties in FP7 tasked with making sure his work was up to scratch.
The mess has now spread throughout the industry – other agencies are now being accused of scam and copy-cat work – and throughout the world. Senior international figures are speaking out – one Lynx judge even described FP7 as “the devil” (which is perhaps a bit harsh) – and Advertising Age and Brand Republic are following the story.
What happens with other agencies remains, at this stage, unknown – Lynx to date have not announced details of the agencies or the work under investigation as part of its wider inquiry – but it seems likely that there’s other work out there that will not bear close scrutiny, either from the scam or copy-cat angles.
The tragedy, as others have pointed out, is that this whole mess has more or less wiped out most of the good, genuine work that won at Lynx – especially on the Media side (by definition, pretty hard to fake).
And on the creative side, where other FP7 agencies picked up two of the four Grand Prix, the words “Lynx 2009” and “FP7” are unlikely to have positive connotations for some time to come, however good the work is.
The regional advertising industry as a whole will have a lot of work to do to redeem itself for next year’s Lynx, and FP7 itself is going to have to live with the mess it has created for some time – it doesn’t seem likely the other agencies will let anyone forget what happened.
Let’s hope that the only way really is up – because we can’t afford to fall much further down.
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