Impact BBDO has been doing kick ass work. Work that grabs you first and sells you second. Work that’s utterly surprising. Work that works in 2017.

Fadi Yaish, regional executive creative director of Impact BBDO Dubai, admits that hasn’t always been so. It’s a long, slow and painful process. A process of gaining trust. Here’s an example of what happens when you go through that long slow and painful process:

And here, according to Yaish, is how you get there.

Fadi Yaish

Different ideas matter

The most obvious thing to me about the work that comes out of Impact BBDO is that it was born from diversity. Dubai is made up of 80% expats. We have 68 nationalities, at least. Our agency has 25 different nationalities – from every corner of the world. Each one of them comes with a bag of new things – their different background, culture, work experiences. They share these and influence each other.

Trust trumps everything

Then there’s something else. Trust. And trust comes from hard, hard work over a long, long period. As it does in life. And especially in the current state of the advertising industry with a lot of financial pressure and all agencies around the world having much fewer people than they should have.

Everything good needs a lot of hard work. If you want to be a good parent a good brother, athlete, actor…anything. If you want to be no.1, you have to work very, very hard. Relationships – whether they’re between people in life or in business, also require hard work. And to reach a level of trust where someone trusts you with their business means a lot. And imagine that in a client who doesn’t even know you as a person.

So we don’t take any of that for granted.

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The bad client is a myth

There’s this cliche that clients are not good, client don’t get it. I always feel like that at the beginning of a project. We think we have a piece of work that’s great. We present it, and then the only thing we come back with is frustration. Well, it can’t be that all clients are not good. It can’t be that all the clients around the world are not good.

This puzzled me. Then I realised that it was about asking the right questions rather than just trying to figure out an answer for theirs. I ask, “Why would any client reject any kind of work that is good for their business? Why would they say no if they do realise it’s good for their business – even if it’s risky?” I don’t think anyone would say no.

So there must be something wrong. Maybe it’s the work, maybe it’s me. Maybe they didn’t like the presentation. Maybe something else. But most probably, it’s the work. And realising that made me work harder. To simplify the brief – its 3,4,5,6 pages, research and 10,000 meetings. Right down to the one thing that defines the problem or the tension or the task

Only then do we apply the basics of originality and freshness. And then we package it in the best way possible. And if we do that, we get to another level.

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Trust is a journey

Trust is like a loop. If you do good for your client’s business, your client will say you’re capable. And then you get to do good work. But that process doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey with clients, even if you have a reputation for great work. That’s really only the door for you to walk in.

And every piece of work, every brief matters. I’ve been in lots of meetings and seminars and I see creatives and non-creatives say, “90% of the work is shit. And 10% is good.” So put your heart into the 10%. And keep pushing to improve that 90% because you can’t exist when you’re just waiting for one thing to work. You don’t have the will or determination.

And every brief counts. When the client feels that every brief counts, no matter how much they knock you down for whatever reason, you win trust. Some of the work we’re doing now we couldn’t do four years ago. I’ve been in BBDO Dubai for four years. For some of the clients I had four years back, I couldn’t do the work I do today. If I had even proposed the work we do today, they would have thought we were crazy, that we don’t understand their business. And either I’d have lost the client or the pitch. It’s like when you go to the gym if you haven’t been for a long time. If the trainer comes along and gives you 50kg weights, you can’t do it and you think he’s crazy. Maybe he wants to push you, but you think he’s trying to kill you. So either you quit on him or you tell him to take it down – and then he’ll think you’re crazy. That’s the relationship. But if you go to the gym and the trainer gives you 2kgs at the start, you feel a little more comfortable. And once you feel too comfortable, he gives you 4, 5…10. Then you reach the 50. This was our four-year journey with some of our clients.  Increasing the level of creativity a notch every time until we reached a point where the work we’re producing now, people ask, “How did you do this with that client?”

It’s because now this for him is not a wow. This for him is the next step.