Unlimited Power Online (UPO) is back in Dubai for the second time. You read about Unlimited Power Online I on my blog when some of the world’s hottest internet marketing gurus arrived last year to share their success secrets in the UAE. The 2008 Unlimited Power Online event which I attended was packed to capacity [...]

So many businesses are ready to enter the blogging world. The first question is where to blog? Should it be Blogger (owned by Google) or WordPress (open source CMS as well as free blogging service)? What’s the difference? What’s good from a marketing and advertising person’s point of view? I blog on Blogger as well [...]

Update 20 June 2009: It was getting very time consuming tweaking the Copyblogger theme’s style sheet – the fonts were too big to enable two or three columns easily. Now I’m using Prosumer theme. It’s 3 columns by default – working better in Firefox than Internet Explorer. Almost everything does, anyway. Warning: Geeky post ahead. [...]

At a time when redundancies are rife in Dubai and around the world, it’s always a good feeling to let people know of job openings. Many friends have lost their jobs in advertising in Dubai in recent months. Abu Dhabi is less affected and I met a young and ambitious Abu Dhabi based agency currently [...]

Copywriting is not about stringing together fancy words. It’s about establishing and staying true to a brand’s personality that resonates with its target audience. It’s about persuading prospects with words. It’s ‘salesmanship in print’, not greeting-card poetry. Copywriting is hard work. Being a good communicator is a basic minimum skill a good copywriter must have. [...]

YouTube and Cannes Lions are offering young creative people under 28 a chance to win a trip to this year’s festival, and participate in the Cannes Young Lions film competition. YouTube will release the contest brief on 15 May to make a 60 second ad for a prominent charity and post it on the contest’s [...]

Dubai Lynx organisers have withdrawn Agency of the Year Award from FP7 Doha. The trophy will not be awarded this year. And you were wondering why the copywriter in uae hasn’t been so eager to post lists and pictures of Dubai Lynx winners this year. It just didn’t feel right. Now you know – there [...]

These are trying times for employed expats in Dubai. Because everything depends on a resident visa. Which depends on a job. And jobs in Dubai don’t seem to be very secure right now.  As world economies reel under the recession, the impact is being felt in the UAE too. In more than 10 years I’ve been in the advertising industry, I have never [...]

Sometimes, the best case studies for advertising, marketing and PR are in day to day events. In recent days, I noticed two excellent examples of the power of social media, Twitter in particular. Read on to see how one Twitter entry made a 23-year old famous around the world in minutes. And led to global embarrassment [...]

UPDATE – 12 October 2009: You are looking at the 2008 UPO event post. Click here to read about the upcoming 2009 Unlimited Power Online conference in Dubai and see the photos of the 2008 event too! First of all, apologies for not being able to post much in recent days. My father passed away [...]