In 2022 we were hired for four months of market screening. We are still working the account.
859 meetings booked over four years, and the account is live as this is written. It is the longest relationship in our book and the one that taught us the most, because the product, the brand and the map all changed underneath it while the outreach carried on.
Advertising is a market where nobody needs to be told what the product does. Every media buyer in Dubai, Cairo, Karachi, Lagos and Bangkok already knows what a retargeting banner is. The job is to be the network they think of when a specific budget comes up, which means being in front of them regularly, in their language, with the right one of several products.
What we do
Four years across the Gulf, Egypt, Pakistan, South and South East Asia, and Africa. 859 meetings booked, 685 confirmed held, 618 companies introduced.
The agency networks first: OMD, PHD, Mindshare, Wavemaker, UM Worldwide, Havas, Ogilvy, Spark Foundry, Publicis and dozens of independents from Casablanca to Jakarta. Then the platforms that spend their own money: Noon, Namshi, Ounass, 6thStreet, Jumia, Talabat, Mumzworld, Floward, Jahez. Then the brands and the groups behind them: Landmark, Chalhoub, Al Futtaim, Alshaya, Azadea, Unilever, Henkel, Samsung, Xiaomi, LG, IKEA, Sephora. Banks, airlines, developers, hotel groups and game studios in the same sweep.
Selling a brand that was being renamed while we sold it
In January 2025 the client sent our team a note that reads, in hindsight, like the whole engagement in miniature: the deck we were using had been produced under the old brand, and we were to stop distributing it and work under the new name. A rep had used the old one in a calendar invite. The correction was polite and immediate.
Running outbound for a company mid-rebrand is a job most agencies never think about. Every first touch is a brand impression, and there are hundreds of them a month going out under someone else's name. Our reps carried the new brand into the market before most of the market had heard of it, out of a sales kit whose slides were swapped as the geography moved: Turkey and the UAE out, Asia in, all inside a quarter.
Two working habits came out of that stretch and stayed. We keep the client's stop list and we honour it, because in advertising the account you must not approach is often the one with the most obvious logo. And we pitch one product per audience rather than the catalogue, because a performance agency in Johannesburg and a publisher in Cairo want different halves of the same company.
What it shows
A long account is not one engagement repeated. It is a series of different jobs for the same client, and the agency that keeps it is the one that notices when the job has changed. Ours changed at least four times: market screening, then geography expansion, then a rebrand, then a product split. The meeting count is the least interesting thing about it.