”I remember hard days, I remember bad days. But the ones I really remember are the good days. If I had to do it all again, I wouldn’t want anything to change.”

Memac Ogilvy’s Edmond Moutran on being named ‘Advertising Person of the Year’ .

The first time Eddie Moutran and I met, he was sitting behind his desk in Beirut chain smoking. It was four days after the assassination of journalist and anti-Syrian legislator Gebran Tueni, and 10 months after the death of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a Valentine’s Day car bomb attack. Emotions were running high.

Almost nine years later, the chain smoking has stopped but the troubles facing Lebanon remain as formidable as ever. Emotions continue to run high. “Lebanon – to me and to us as a group – is a very small market,” says Moutran, whose regional HQ is based in Beirut. “It’s just two per cent of our turnover. But what is happening now affects us as people in a big way. Because we live here, we work here, we are Lebanese. We are affected emotionally.

“But we have to continue to work. As a group, last year we hit our budget. We had 9.8 per cent growth across the MENA region. Some markets did better than others and I think we had a depressed economy in most places except for the GCC, but when you tabulate it all out, it wasn’t a bad year. It was a good year as a matter of fact. This year we are hoping to repeat the performance, with 5 per cent growth in new business and 5 per cent via organic growth.”

Moutran is one of the region’s most recognisable and influential advertising figures. He has been in the industry for 41 years and was one of the first Lebanese admen to venture into the Gulf in the early 70s. Initially with Intermarkets, he decided to go solo in 1984 and formed Memac (Middle East Marketing and Communications) in Bahrain with just a secretary and an art director. A tie-up with Ogilvy & Mather in 1998 led to WPP owning 40 per cent of the company and the agency becoming Memac Ogilvy. This year marks Memac Ogilvy’s 30th anniversary.

It is no doubt partly due to the 30th anniversary celebrations that Moutran has been named this year’s ‘Advertising Person of the Year’ at the Dubai Lynx. As chairman and CEO of the Memac Ogilvy Group, he will receive the accolade at the awards ceremony on 12 March, where he will be recognised for his “significant contributions to advancing the reputation and profile of the communications industry in the MENA region”. He follows on from last year’s recipient, WPP director Roy Haddad, with whom Moutran went into partnership in 1999 to bring Mindshare to the region.

“I have an outstanding relationship with Ogilvy and WPP and this is what I consider to be my most important achievement,” says Moutran of his successes over the past 41 years. “I think I’m one of the oldest Ogilvy people in the world now. I’ve been working for the brand on and off for 41 years. If you take the best 15 creative offices in the world for Ogilvy, we have two of them. Dubai is number 10 and Tunis is number 14. If you add them up, we are the sixth most creative agency in the world for Ogilvy, which is something I’m extremely proud of. I’m proud of the fact that a lot of my people have been with me for more than 20 years, and that some of my clients have been with me for more than 20 years.”

Moutran has been planning to sell an additional 30 per cent of Memac Ogilvy to WPP for the past seven years or so, but negotiations have always fallen through or stalled. Is the sale any nearer completion? “You’ll be the first to know Iain,” replies Moutran. “I promised you that a long time ago.”

He adds: “I never dreamt of anything being impossible. We started so many things in this industry. When I hired Tanya Dernaika to do planning, nobody had a planner. Everyone thought I was crazy. We started the media buying business one year before anybody else even thought about it. We started OgilvyOne, which was the first one-to-one company in the region. We started OgilvyAction, which was the first activation agency in the region.

“I started from nothing and I built my own agency without acquisition. I always believed that the Middle East was capable of being exactly like anywhere else on earth. And I believe, as an agency, we are as good as anybody in the world.”

Do you think Memac Ogilvy can win agency of the year or network of the year at the Lynx?

“Honestly, I’m hoping for both,” he replies. “If you don’t dream, it will never happen. I’ve been telling everyone they deserve to be agency of the year; we deserve to be network of the year. Why not? Other agencies have done it. There is not one single reason why we can’t achieve it.”

With 15 offices in 13 countries and in excess of 1,000 staff spread across the group, Moutran may be confident and buoyed by success and recognition, but he is also a no-nonsense straight talker. He is aware that the group faces numerous challenges, that regional unrest could have an increasingly damaging affect on the industry, and that his regional offices are inconsistent in terms of quality.

“There are places where we have had less success than others, and here I’m talking about places such as Riyadh. Riyadh has not been a very hot office for the past couple of years, so we’ll be concentrating on turning that office around. Egypt has not been a hot office over the past three years either (for obvious reasons) and Algeria too. These are the three offices that I will be concentrating on, as well as Erbil. Erbil has not taken off the way it should have.

“On the offering side I will be concentrating mainly on digital media [going forward]. We need to strengthen our knowledge and our delivery, especially in the content area. Content is the name of the game. We have people who are very well versed in digital in each and every office – especially in Dubai – but going forward we’re going to have fully serviced digital units in each office. To me digi- tal is not a department, to me digital is a language and it’s got to be in everything we do.”

Moutran is distracted briefly by a call from his wife, Liliane, before adding: “You know, it hurts me deeply that we cannot get together as an industry. We have a lot of common problems that we can resolve if we’re talking to each other and if we’re working as a group. It hurts that we cannot do that. To me, having a body of agencies would’ve solved a lot of our problems.” Why isn’t there one? “Egos. My life changed completely when I put my ego on the shelf. When I started Mindshare with Roy Haddad of JWT, we both put our egos on the shelf and look what happened. Mindshare is one of the best agencies.”

Mindshare is going through a sticky patch though isn’t it? Two senior members of staff left the agency last August after ‘conflicts of interest’ were discovered by an internal audit, whilst one of its biggest accounts – Zain – is currently under review.

“The conflicts of interest was a particular issue, which was resolved,” replies Moutran. “We parted amicably. We had serious disagreements with them about the way the business is and the way the business is running. That has had no effect whatsoever on our business. We talked to all our clients. With regards to the Zain pitch, they have been with us for a long time and every client, as you know, calls a pitch every few years just to find out what’s going on and who’s around. It’s their right and we shall try very hard to retain it.”

What about Samir Ayoub, the CEO of Mindshare, who was in charge when the conflicts of interest were discovered? Will he remain as CEO?

“Of course. He started Mindshare and I’ve personally been working with him for more than 23 years. He has our full trust, our full support, and as long as he wants to stay there he’s got the job.”

After four decades in the industry, the question of succession planning at Memac Ogilvy is becoming more pertinent. Will one of his three sons, all of whom work for the group, take over?

“It’s quite simple. My sons have a birthright to keep shares in the company after I go,” he replies. “They do not have a birthright to run it. The people who will run the agency will be the best people that we can find on the day. I’ve told them all this. It’s up to them now to be good enough to be seen in my eyes and those of my partners at Ogilvy that they are the best people to run it.”

He adds: “When I think back, I remember hard days, I remember bad days. But the ones I really, really remember are the good days. If I had to do it again I wouldn’t want anything to change, because every single pitch we lost taught us a lesson, every client we lost taught us a lesson, every good staff member we lost taught us a lesson. We just kept learning.”