'Advertising requires the flair of art and science'

This time last year, Leo Burnett spent a lot of money on business cards.

As part of a global push to embrace cross-media planning, about 200 staff in the Middle East were handed new job titles.

People that used to be an account executive or account director, for example, became communication executive and communication director. Words like 'holistic' and 'media neutral' became part of the agency's vernacular.

Kamal Dimachkie was one of the key drivers of the move.

The managing director of Leo Burnett Dubai and Kuwait says a change of vocabulary is just the starting point.

"The days of talking in advertising terms only are over," he says. "It's like experiencing a health problem and going to a clinic where there are only dentists. The only recommendation that comes out is to look at your teeth."

Leo Burnett works for some of the biggest brands in the region, including Emirates Airline, Dubai Holdings and General Motors, and Dimachkie says the decision was taken with them in mind.

"The vocabulary, the thinking and the skillset we need is expanding at a very fast rate. Unless we expand at the same rate, we are going to fall behind and our clients will suffer.

"We started forcing ourselves to think of holistic communications solutions. This is a language everyone must speak or brands will suffer. We started driving the change, rather than waiting to have that change imposed on us."

The Dubai Media City office of Dimachkie (surname pronounced Dimash-key-yeh) is compact compared to your average MD's boudoir. An eye-catching painting featuring a grey cat wearing lipstick hangs opposite his desk. He doesn't know where it came from. A solitary beanbag slouches in the corner.

Ever the account man, he is impeccably turned out in a suit and shiny shoes. We have relocated to his office following lunch at the Radisson SAS hotel next door, during which he revealed his multi-national upbringing.

Born in Jeddah, he grew up in Lebanon and has Canadian citizenship. Unusually for an ad man, he boasts a degree in chemistry.

"I can never claim to be one of those people who had a passion for advertising as a child," he admits.

Following an MBA and a spell working for Procter & Gamble's distributor, Dimachkie joined Leo Burnett in 1985 to work on the P&G business.

"When I joined, I understood very little about the industry," he recalls. "But I soon realised I had found my vocation and groove. I love communication, I truly do. I find that you learn a lot about yourself and life working in this industry."

Following spells running Leo Burnett's Bahrain and Kuwait offices, he was assigned to run the regional P&G business out of Saudi Arabia. Five years later, he transferred to Chicago, where he worked on new product development for cereal manufacturer Kelloggs.

He left Leo Burnett for two-and-a-half years in the late nineties, working with a marketing consultancy in Canada and, latterly Euro RSCG in Dubai. On his return to the Leo fold in 2000 he was made regional new business director. Twelve months later he was given his current assignment to run the UAE and Kuwait offices.

Dimachkie likens the changes that he has witnessed in Middle East advertising over the past two decades to the switch from black and white to colour TV.

"Today it is like an incredibly rich meal. The choices are phenomenally bigger. Every single touchpoint counts," he says. "Forget about TV and print only. Sometimes you need to invent your own media channel. And I don't think we have seen the end of it. I feel envious of people who are joining the industry now."

Leo Burnett agencies around the world have quite a reputation to live up to. Their founder is credited with creating such advertising legends as the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro man, and Frosties' Tony the Tiger.

Dimachkie is aware of the importance of agency reputation, and deliberately sets the bar high for his employees.

"We are intolerant of anything that is compromising in terms of attitude or behaviour," he says. "We are extremely intolerant of bad apples. That affects our recruiting process and how we evaluate people. Should someone slip through the cracks, they will soon realise that they don't belong here."

Dimachkie also has an interesting take on competition.

For him, Leo Burnett is not competing with the likes of TBWARaad and Impact BBDO. Rather, the agency is competing with its clients' rival brands.

He explains: "The time that is spent talking about competition is never spent talking about other agencies. The agency's focus is on providing an unfair economic advantage to our client's brands against their competitors, rather than focusing on our own business. We are a weapon in our clients' hands, not the other way around."

For him, effective advertising is a mixture of art and science. And this is where the degree in chemistry must come in useful.

"There are areas that require the flair of science and others that require the flair of art," he says.

"I am not suggesting that you need a PHD in astrophysics, but you need to be curious, intellectually flexible and supple, you need to have phenomenal curiosity and energy, you need to be very disciplined and tough on yourself in order to make sure that you don't accept the first layer of an idea that you could polish and craft.

"It would be a terrible shame if you possess everything but you are unable to engage, you are a bore."

One aspect of this discipline is to challenge clients to run braver campaigns, to convince them to agree to ideas that, on first impression, may make them feel uncomfortable. This is a trust issue, according to Dimachkie.

"Our clients expect it of us. A lot of them demand it of us. Sometimes we are given a hard time because we haven't done it enough," he says. "But, at the same time, we are also asked to respect the fact that they are clients.

"It is a very fine line to walk. It is never a black and white thing. It requires a relationship cultivated on trust and hard market results before your client can feel secure, and they are prepared to let you take the lead."

The next few years are likely to see communications in the Middle East continue to rapidly transform. You get the sense that Dimachkie is ready.

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