Exclusive interview with Alexander McNabb

An interview with Alexander McNabb, group account director at Spot On Public Relations (Dubai), founding member in the Middle East Public Relations Association (MEPRA), seasoned professional and all-round interesting fellow!

Q. Kindly give us a brief intro about yourself.
That’s the hardest question I’ve been asked in ages! Ummm… I’m 42, have all my own hair and I’m married to my best friend, am far too selfish to have kids and live in Sharjah near the sea. I work in Dubai but have a sneaky route into work that gets me there in an hour on clear roads and avoids the traffic. I’m the group account director at Spot On Public Relations, which is a relatively small agency that’s focused on delivering smarter, more responsive and deeper communications work working with clients that want that and not just a press release engine. I’ve got nothing against press release engines, by the way: it’s just that I don’t want to work in one.

Q. You have been a PR professional in the region since the early nineties, how has the industry evolved and has it ‘radically changed’?
Well, I’ve actually been both sides of the media/PR fence. I first came to the Middle East in 1986 working with a publishing company, which led to me moving out to the UAE in 1993 to start up a subsidiary operation. In 1997 I moved across to PR. Has public relations changed fundamentally over that period? There has been a large amount of positive change, for sure. The market’s bigger, client briefs are better and communications is getting taken more seriously as a ‘C’ level opportunity.

It’s not all rosy, though. Although there are some better, smarter people working in PR in the region, but there’s still a lot of dumb stuff going on. There are still people annoying media by sending the wrong types of release, calling journalists without anything to say beyond ‘Would you write about my client’ and that kind of thing. I’d love to tell you that this doesn’t happen any more, but it does.

I think the biggest change I’ve seen is the fact that there are more Arab nationals working in PR today, which is great to see. And there is more awareness of communications as a broader discipline than just media relations. Last, but by no means least, we also have MEPRA, the Middle East Public Relations Association, which is a hugely positive step forwards. There remains a lot to be done to raise the standard of the industry, without a doubt, but the industry recognizes that, which is a good sign.

Q. The level of competition in the PR industry is obviously higher, what do you think of the level of services offered in general? And are there enough professional PR companies to satisfy the needs of all clients?
There are different types of PR company which are geared up to provide services to different types of client, which is certainly something you could take as a sign of the growing maturity of the market. Different clients have different imperatives: some clients just want straight information dissemination: put out this release, talk to that journalist, some want strategic planning and consultancy; some clients are driven by the search for low cost options, others are driven by quality or experience. And there are agencies out there that can address those different needs of the market. The trouble with the ‘low end’ – the information dissemination stuff, incidentally, is that it’s slowly being commoditized and agencies that don’t understand that are going to get automated out of a job. Are you just writing and sending out press releases for your clients? Then fear PR Newswire…

Q. What are the main obstacles you face with clients? Do they truly appreciate the value of PR?
One way of looking at that one is that if someone doesn’t appreciate the value of something they’re buying, then it means that someone isn’t selling it to them very well. At the end of the day, it all boils down to objectives. If a company has clearly defined communications objectives then it becomes easier to define a value for the programme, to measure achievement and to evaluate the return on investment (ROI). I’m constantly surprised by people dropping catchphrases like ROI, ‘metrics’ and, my least favourite of the lot, ‘deliverables’ into conversations about communications who turn out to have no clear objective. If you have no objective, you have no purpose: those deliverables are just being delivered to show that you’re worth the money you’re paid and, in the circumstances, I’d really wonder whether that’s the case. Where an organisation has a clear purpose, an achievable aim for its communications, I have never had discussions that centre on cost. Sure, budgets are always an issue, but objective-led organisations don’t focus the conversation on how many deliverables they can have for $100: they talk about how to map smart ideas and approaches to the task. I do have the luxury of being allowed to have the second type of conversation and not the first and I do appreciate it.

Q. In your opinion, what is the value of online PR activities compared to offline? How critical is it for PR companies to adopt online monitoring strategies, particularly monitoring blogs and social networks?
Petacritical. It was Megacritical last year, but that’s Moore’s Law for you. It’ll be Yotacritical next year.
The ilike application for Facebook was adopted at a run rate of 10,000 adoptions per day. There was a Middle East Facebook group on the war in Lebanon that drew 8,000 members in less than a week: a rate of two members per second. Alanis Morissete’s irony attack on the Black Eyed Peas has drawn over 8 million views on YouTube. There are so many examples now of the growing effect that Web 2.0 thinking is having you can just keep on going – it’s an enormous, global conversation that is increasing in volume and reach every day. It’s changing the way that we look at communications and the way that we communicate. I was speaking at the Arab Advisors conference in Amman and we needed to do some research to test out a pet theory I had, so the guys here at Spot On used Facebook to carry out a flash survey – 100 results back within the day (incidentally, the theory was that Facebook users would be broadband users: 93% yes on that one). Client Vibe has a Facebook group for its Life Music Festival in Dubai, for instance, which is great for events.

You have to be so careful, though: sure there’s a new conversation out there, but it’s also speaking a different language. You have to make sure that you’re providing useful information to people who want it: it’s really easy to get this type of conversation horribly wrong and a number of companies have already found that out to their cost.

So online monitoring is critical and social networks are certainly worth considering as a tactic. But I’d also sound a note of caution, for all my own enthusiasm for it all: the worst failures are campaigns that have ‘gone online’ for the sake of appearing clever or trendy. It is a tactic at the end of the day and it needs to make sense, typically as an element in a broader campaign that uses other tactics.

Q. Do you feel that the image of Arab countries is under-PRed to the West? (example: the congress refusal of US Ports deal with a Dubai entity last year)?
Yes I do, very strongly. And I also think that it is getting better and that the Arab World is learning to communicate more responsively and in a tone of voice that is more resonant. I think that the Web has had a huge amount to do with that, as well as the growing number of communications professionals in the region. It’s ironic that the egalitarian nature of the Web is opening the eyes of more people in the West to the Arab World, at the same time as it is opening challenges for the direction of media in the Arab World. There are too many voices out there now: people can talk to each other without having their attitudes and viewpoints influenced by skewed media.

I did this interview with Alexander back when I used to work for mediame.com