PR agency Weber Shandwick has opened a fully branded office in Kuwait.
The agency had previously operated in the country via an independent internal division of its sister advertising agency, FP7 Kuwait, called Promoseven/Weber Shandwick. It is now a fully branded Weber Shandwick office operating and reporting to the agency’s Middle East and North Africa headquarters in Dubai, which are headed by CEO Ziad Hasbani.
The new office joins a Weber Shandwick network that covers Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Egypt, as well as a string of affiliate offices across the region.
The Kuwait operation will be led by general manager Rosie Muhanna, who has more than 10 years’ experience in the communications industry, including an earlier career as a creative in the US and then the Middle East.
“We are proud to announce that as part of our plans for expansion in the region we have brought our Kuwait operation into the core Weber Shandwick MENA network,” said Hasbani. “Over the past 24 months, the Kuwait office has gone from strength to strength and we have seen sustained growth across the region as a whole.”
Weber Shandwick is part of MCN in the region.
Is this news? WS have been operating under FP7 in Kuwait for years? Seems like a bit of PR spin to me.
it is a pr spin, the reason is they are entering into few pitches in kuwait to clients that historically had bad experience with FP7 as a client or the bad reputation for being associated to this brand. So its a move to show they are not joined at the hip.
so they basically proved to the client that they can sell their own mother to win a tender and be unethical by lying about opening an agency and naming a GM that has been there for years! its like releasing a press release that is backdated in years!
So rather than competing on product level and prove that FP7 could be a sister company and thats as far as it goes. so for a PR company to pull such a spin actually speaks a lot about their poor PR crisis skills in handling such a brand management issue