Dubai: Public relations in the Gulf has moved a long way from its early days in the 1970s and 1980s when it was gravely misunderstood to mean no more than protocol and hospitality with assorted other services as add-ons. Today, the Gulf enjoys a modern PR industry working to global best practices and supported by professional associations and an extensive edition in the country’s colleges.
This dramatic history of the development of the Gulf’s PR industry is told by Dr. Badran Badran, a long standing member of Zayed University’s Department of Communications and Media Sciences, and leading scholar in the field, in a chapter in Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Other Voices’ series.
Given the miserable start public relations had from most Gulf government operations in the 1970s, one of the most telling points Badran makes is the way that the public sector shows a much better understanding of the role of PR in nation building, human development and global relations. And are active in using PR to make a better job of getting their message out to their wider public, which is all light years ahead of what their predecessors were doing only a few decades ago.
Much of the charm of Badran’s work is the way he uses published sources, but also has tracked down the early heroes of the industry and retells some of their stories and impressions of how the PR industry in the Gulf started. He notes how a few very early practitioners were active in the 1960s, such as Khamis Al Muqla in Bahrain who founded GPR in 1974, who told Badran how he managed his first job of raising health and safety issues in the workforce of Bahrain’s huge aluminium smelter, Aluminium Bahrain (Alba).
Ramzi Raad, founder of TBWA/RAAD, told Badran that PR in the Gulf in the 1970s was “very basic” and Kuwait was the most advanced market in which “multinationals treated as the test market for new product introductions in the region. The people of Kuwaiti were the first to show real signs of 20th century consumerism in the GCC”.
The turning point for the whole media industry in the Gulf was the tragic Lebanese civil war that led to the exodus of the Arab media houses, with many advertising agencies heading for the new markets of the Gulf. They in turn opened PR companies like Fortune Promoseven, Intermarkets, and Impact BBDO, which worked along with Hill and Knowlton and Ian Bain’s Dubai-based Bain PR, which Badran describes as one of the first independent PR companies in the region.
The 1980s and 1990s were transformative decades as the original companies developed into much larger companies, and slowly succeeded in breaking away from the close links with their advertising cousins.
Badran quotes Nigel Perry of Gulf Public Relations on how hard companies were to get off the ground in the 1980s partly due the immaturity of the markets and the misunderstanding that what was supplied was being sold. And that “there was not much incentive to communicate and there was censorship even on quite mild business issues”.
Sunil John of ASDAA Burson-Marsteller agrees that in the 1980s the PR industry’s scope was limited.
All agree that the PR industry has changed profoundly in the 1990s, which Badran quotes Perry as saying, “international companies came into the market, start-ups and in-house departments proliferated, and Arab nationals began to take control of the message”.
This led to the early 2000s when numerous new agencies were created, including Active PR, Performance PR, Dabo and Co, and at least 30 others. Large UK and US groups like Bell Pottinger and Edelman created significant operations aimed at working on government accounts such as the US government in Iraq and the government of Bahrain.
Badran also picks his way though the complicated set of regional and national professional PR associations, including the two regional bodies — the International Public Relations Association’s Gulf chapter (Ipra-GC) based in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East Public Relations Association (Mepra) based in Dubai; as well as national associations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.
He describes how the associations’ memberships have established industry codes of conduct and worked with educational institutions to develop training courses, as well as launch annual industry conferences and mentoring programmes, all of which points to the growing depth and professionalism of the industry.
One of the great values of Badran’s chapter on the Gulf PR industry is that he names a mass of sources, offering the opportunity for the interested industry professional or researcher to follow up. The industry has moved so fast in the six Gulf states that much has been forgotten. Badran’s work is thus a genuine service to an industry that has come so far.
One of the disappointments of Badran’s chapter in Palgrave Macmillan’s series is that it is not a complete book, since the tale of the Gulf’s PR industry could bear a much more detailed telling than the space allowed in this format. He should consider giving himself a wider canvas for a much larger story.
