And so it came to pass. As The National revealed a few weeks ago, Dubai has decided to take professional advice to counter what it regards as “negativity” in the international media’s coverage of its economic situation, and appointed the London firm Finsbury to help it change that perception. It is an interesting appointment from several angles.
Finsbury was founded and is run by Roland Rudd, a former Financial Times journalist who quit hackery to make fuller use of his skills of personal interaction, which he had previously honed as president of the Oxford Union. His business was a great success – business journalists in London liked having somebody from their own background who could explain issues in a common language, rather than the “I’ll get back to you” brigade. The clients in turn appreciated the access and influence.
So successful was he that he was able to sell Finsbury to global communications WPP for £50 million (Dh270m) a few years later, retaining executive control of the company via a lucrative earn-out package. Since then, he has gone from strength to strength and Finsbury was recently voted “most influential PR firm” in London’s Square Mile.
In the past six months he has been trying to head off the PR damage to City institutions caused by the financial crisis, playing a prominent role in the controversial takeover by Lloyds TSB of HBOS. He recently won the demanding brief to repair the bombed-out reputation of Royal Bank of Scotland. He knows all about reputational risk.
But when Dubai first considered hiring a consultancy, it was something of a surprise that Rudd was on the short-list. His firm has little previous experience in the Gulf (apart from a minor role in the battle of the stock exchanges in 2007 that ended with Borse Dubai’s 20 per cent stake in the London Stock Exchange). Others – such as Bell Pottinger, which already has a big presence in the region, and M Communications, which recently won the account for Aldar in Abu Dhabi – looked better placed to win the Dubai brief by dint of experience in the UAE.
Two factors appear to have been crucial in Rudd’s winning the business. One was his personal commitment to the client. Senior PR executives always like to give the impression they will be handling the account single-handedly, but in practice day-to-day control is usually delegated to a subordinate.
Rudd made the promise that he would remain firmly hands-on – and backed this up with a whirlwind 24-hour trip to Dubai to meet the leaders of the emirate’s financial establishment who were deciding the appointment. This visit appears to have tipped the balance against M Communications, previously regarded as front-runner.
I had dinner with Rudd on the evening of that trip and can say, I hope without betraying any confidences, that he certainly exuded an assurance that the job was virtually in the bag, and an excitement about getting started on it.
The second factor in his favour was a conviction, on the part of Dubai, that it needed a fresh set of eyes on the problem. This was regarded primarily as a financial and business issue; the “negativity” that mattered was occurring in the international business media – the FT, The Wall Street Journal, the Dow Jones newswire and elsewhere. Rudd’s influence in the Square Mile – home to many of the financial institutions which were consumers of this coverage – was a critical factor.
Perhaps in the background there was another connection that impressed Dubai – Rudd’s long-standing friendship with Lord Mandelson, the British business minister who has had his own fair share of difficulties dealing with the media. Now regarded as the “Prince of Spin”, Mandelson’s ability to bounce back from regular media humiliations will not have been lost on the leaders of Dubai Inc. Coincidentally, he will be in the UAE next week – though without Rudd at his side.
Finsbury’s brief, according to reports from Dubai’s Department of Finance, is “a global mandate with a focus on the City of London”. The firm is charged with “explaining to stakeholders the new financial strategy of Dubai”.
Finsbury’s strategy document for tackling that task is still being formulated, but it is likely to focus on the way international opinion, as reflected in business press coverage, has shifted so dramatically in a relatively short space of time.
Rudd believes that the image of the emirate as a supreme powerhouse of economic growth was perhaps a little overdone in the boom town; but now the challenges facing it in recession are also being exaggerated. The fact that Dubai has achieved so much is being overlooked. In particular, the infrastructure of a modern financial and commercial hub is already in place, way ahead of its Gulf rivals outside the UAE, and even bearing favourable comparison with London or New York.
The Finsbury technique in the past has been to give selected media – those whom Rudd counts as real opinion formers – fairly free and unhindered access to the client, and it seems certain there will be a steady flow of senior business journalists from London or New York making the trip to Dubai in the coming months to see for themselves, and to meet the emirate’s top decision-makers.
In fact, Finsbury is already off the mark – last weekend a senior business journalist from London’s Daily Telegraph was entertained at the racing World Cup at Nad Al Sheba and treated to an exclusive interview with a top executive of Dubai Inc. It will be interesting to see what change of tone there might be in the paper’s imminent write-up of that interview.
But Rudd is experienced enough to know opinion cannot be changed simply by inviting a few writers on an all-expenses-paid holiday to Dubai.
That might also run the risk of alienating the local correspondents who have been grappling with the challenges of covering the Dubai story in recent months. To really influence world opinion, Finsbury will have to provide meaningful access to senior Dubai executives, and – crucially – gain the co-operation of those executives in what might sometimes be a painful and unfamiliar process of acknowledgment and transparency.
Communication is a two-way learning process. By appointing Finsbury, Dubai has shown it understands that. Now the task is to learn the lessons.
fkane@thenational.ae
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