Creativity counts

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AWARD WINNER: The Sony memory storage stick campaign that won an award both at Dubai Lynx 2008 and Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival this year.

Tamara Walid meets Fortune Promoseven founder Akram Miknas, to discover how a little bit of stress goes a long way in getting the creative campaign juices flowing.

It's been a while since Akram Miknas had a holiday. But he's not a beach and book sort of guy.

"I can't live without stress anymore. I have to stress someone or someone has to be stressing me," says the founder of the Fortune Promoseven advertising empire.

Since starting his advertising agency in Lebanon in 1968 at the age of 21 with just $2300, Miknas's life has been one wild and eventful journey, with more than a few stories to tell - as well as a sizeable chunk of the region's $8bn advertising industry.

The Promoseven group comprises of Fortune Promoseven (the flagship agency), Promoseven 360 and Promoseven WeberShandwick. Its portfolio of clients include brands such as Coca Cola, McDonald's, Sony, MasterCard, Etisalat, Carrefour, Nescafe, Lufthansa, Emarat, Kingdom Holdings, Ford, Kempinski, and Savola Group.

He has also picked up a few plaudits along the way - most significantly two Gold and two Silver ‘Lions' at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France - the Oscars of the global advertising industry.

Fortune Promoseven is riding high on the regional economic boom with sales topping $750m in the year to March 2008. "We're looking at around $1bn this year," he says. The network today comprises of 77 companies in 23 countries and a group of 1700 people - a huge leap from a company of seven formed in Beirut at a time when advertising was the least-favourable of all professions.

"‘Are you mad?'" Miknas remembers his father asking when he first mooted the idea of pursuing a career in the industry.

"At that time advertising and journalism were the last things you wanted to be doing. They were a ‘no go'," says Miknas whose father wanted him to pursue a safer career in medicine, engineering or even as a jeweller - his own business.

After graduating from the American University of Beirut, Miknas travelled to the US where he completed his master's degree in marketing, which was not on offer in Lebanon at the time. Miknas decided to train in an advertising agency "because of the girls", he says with characteristic humour.

"I could have chosen a client or a research but I found that boring. I thought, an agency with models and parties is the place to be. And it was indeed."

But returning to Lebanon wasn't exactly what Miknas had imagined in his dreams. Finding a job in advertising was impossible. He says he was either dismissed as being over-qualified or offered a very small salary. In the face of such rejection, he decided to form his own company with a group of friends.

"I was still thinking of the fun, girls, awards and glory," he reminisces. "I said ‘How about we start our own agency'. They said ‘Great!' As they say, in every human being there is the man, child and parent. At that time the child was very big in me. I thought if we could get an office I don't need anything else."

And so the seven friends cobbled together $2300 towards the business. "We had to go and borrow the money from our fathers except for me - I didn't get the money because he didn't want me to be in advertising," says Miknas.

The company started off by organising exhibitions, and worked well until one deal went sour and sent the fledgling venture back to square one.

It took Miknas three years to get Promoseven back on its feet. With a large campaign that took Lebanon by storm he was able to more than just redeem the damages. "We took a very big campaign... it made us big, made us famous, paid the bank, and paid the partners," he adds.

Promoseven's fame started with a chicken. "A person I met had a dream. He said ‘I want to make a chicken, label it and call it Le Poule. But I don't have a farm, distribution, anything, and a limited amount of money."

Miknas came up with the idea of presenting a ‘pampered chicken' dressed in bracelets - inspired in part by his father's jewellery business.

"We did a campaign, it caught on and everybody was talking about Marba Al Dalal. People actually went and looked for the bracelet. In less than four years that chicken became 60 percent of the Lebanese market," says Miknas.

At that time most campaigns were imported and simply translated into Arabic, but sometimes elements of the message were lost in translation.

That is what happened with the introduction of a men's cologne called ‘English Leather'. Miknas recalls meeting the man behind the business at a party. The US version of the advert featured an image of a woman with seven men standing behind her. "‘What does it make her in the Arab world?' I said. ‘Do you want your sister to have seven men behind her?

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