The Birth of MEPRA
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In about 1984 I was appointed PR Manager of the Abu Dhabi Intercontinental Hotel with the remit to, in addition to general PR for the hotel, organise the forthcoming AGCC Summit Conference scheduled for the Autumn of 1987. At that time I d not know any definition of PR so I invented my own: “I’m the person who is responsible for doing those things that everybody knows someone should do but it is not included in anyone’s job description.”
That definition served me well enough until the late 1990s when the Dubai Economic Department insisted that I had to have my own trade licence, rather than tag-on to an advertising agency, but their list of consultancy licences did not include PR. My degree was a Bachelor of Education so I opted for ‘Education Consultancy.’ However, this imprecision continued to bother me.
A few years later I read in a paper that a new Managing Director had been appointed to one of the largest agencies in Dubai. At that time I had a dining table and chairs for eight people so I invited the heads of all the other leading agencies to come to my house for dinner and to meet the newly appointed MD.
Towards the end of the evening I announced that I had a suggestion. Explaining the situation about the lack of a definition of what a PR agency does, I suggested we form an association to promote PR generally with the possibility that at some stage in the future we could get our definition of PR included in the list of categories of consultancies of the various Economic Departments of the GCC states. They all agreed.
Then something I hadn’t anticipated happened: someone suggested that I should be the first chairman. Shit! I hated committee meetings.
Thankfully someone suggested that, as we were based in the Arab world, wouldn’t it be better PR for the first chairman to at least be an Arab?
I wholeheartedly agreed, and so it was that Sadri Barrage, GM of Headline PR, became our first chairman.
Contributed by
Jack Pearce, MEPRA Chair 2003-2005, 2007 & 2008; Founder of Matrix Public Relations