Every week a company somewhere in Lebanon or the Gulf hires a marketing agency the way it would hire a wedding photographer: it looks at the reel, likes the mood, agrees on a price, and hopes. Six months later there is a folder of beautiful videos, a follower count that went up, and a sales line that did not move. Nobody did anything wrong. They simply hired a producer and expected a partner.
This guide is for the person who signs the contract and has to defend the spend at the end of the year. It is not about creativity. Creativity is table stakes, and the market is full of it. It is about the questions that separate an agency that will make you things from an agency that will make you money.
The question that separates producers from partners
Ask a shortlisted agency one question: “What is the business problem you think we have?” A producer answers with formats: “You need more reels, a cleaner feed, a campaign for the season.” A partner answers with a diagnosis: “Your branch in that area is under-trading, your price perception is wrong for the neighbourhood, and your ads are being seen by people who will never drive there.”
The second answer is uncomfortable, because it is about your business, not their craft. It is also the only answer worth paying for. Claude Hopkins wrote the sentence a century ago and nobody has improved on it:
The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.
Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising (1923)
We run a small studio in Adma with that sentence on the wall, figuratively. It costs us some clients. The ones who want a fun video for the sake of a fun video go elsewhere, and they should. The ones who stay are running businesses, and they came to us because the fun videos had already been tried.
What a marketing agency in Lebanon should actually be accountable for
The Lebanese market has trained buyers to accept “engagement” as a result. It is not a result. It is a symptom, sometimes of good work and sometimes of a giveaway. A serious agency accepts accountability at three levels, and says so in writing.
- Business outcomes. Sales, leads, bookings, footfall, average basket, retention. Whatever the number is that keeps you awake, the agency should know it, track it with you, and design work backwards from it.
- Brand outcomes. Are more of the right people able to recall you, recognise you and prefer you? This is slower to move and it is the part that compounds. Ignore it and you will be buying every sale twice.
- Craft outcomes. Was the work good, on time, on brief, on brand? This is the minimum, not the achievement. An agency that celebrates craft as the finish line is a producer with a strategy deck.
When Hajj Nasr came to us, the brief was a branch that would not sell. Not “content”. Two months, a modest budget, in the middle of a war, we rebuilt how the branch was advertised, what it said, how it received customers and how the team handled the surge. The branch is still open two years later. The CEO’s words for what happened became the most quoted line on our homepage. That is the level of accountability we mean, and it is the level you should demand.
Seven questions to ask before you sign
- “Show me a case where sales moved, and show me what you did to move them.” Views and awards do not count. If they cannot name the number, they have never been held to one.
- “Who will actually run my account?” The people in the pitch are rarely the people in the work. Ask to meet them. Ask how many clients each of them carries.
- “How will you learn my business?” The right answer involves your sales team, your branches, your customer service log, your pricing, your margins. If the plan is a questionnaire and a mood board, keep looking.
- “What will you refuse to do?” Good agencies say no. To trends that do not fit, to discounts that train customers to wait, to campaigns that entertain without selling.
- “What does the first ninety days look like?” You want a diagnosis, a strategy and a first wave of work in that order. Anything that starts with production is guessing.
- “How do you report, and how often do we sit together to decide?” A monthly PDF of likes is not reporting. A monthly meeting where you look at revenue and decide what changes is.
- “What happens to the media money?” Ask who owns the ad accounts, what the agency’s margin on media is, and who can see the spend in real time. The answer should be: you own everything, you see everything.
Red flags we have learned to spot from the other side of the table
We have sat in enough pitches, ours and other people’s, to know how the weak ones look. A deck that leads with awards. A reel with no results attached. A strategy chapter that could be pasted into any competitor’s proposal. A team that talks about “the algorithm” more than it talks about your customer. A promise of virality. Virality is weather; you do not build a business on weather.
The most expensive red flag is the friendliest one: an agency that agrees with everything you say. You are not paying for agreement. You already have your own opinion for free.
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.
David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (1983)
What a serious engagement looks like: the first ninety days
Here is the shape of the work when it is done properly, whether the client is a restaurant chain in Beirut or a property developer in Riyadh.
Weeks one to three: diagnosis. We sit inside the business. Sales data, branch visits, mystery shopping, customer calls, the last two years of spend against the last two years of revenue. We find the leak before we buy the bucket.
Weeks three to six: strategy. Positioning, the one thing the brand will be known for, the audiences that actually pay, the offer, the channel plan and the numbers we will be judged on. This is a document you can hand to your board. It is written in business language.
Weeks six to twelve: the first wave. Creative built on the strategy, media bought against the numbers, sales and customer service aligned so that demand created is demand captured. Then the weekly loop begins: what worked, what did not, what changes.
Everything after that is compounding. The brands we have kept for four years, like Citifurniture, did not renew because the work was pretty. They renewed because every year the business was in a better place than the year before, and they could see our fingerprints on it.
A note on price: cheap content is the most expensive thing you can buy
An agency that charges you little for a lot of content is not saving you money. It is spending your money on things that will not sell, and spending your customers’ attention, which is harder to earn back. The honest comparison is not price per video. It is cost per result, over a year, including the cost of the results you did not get.
We are not the cheapest studio in Lebanon and we are not trying to be. We are small on purpose, we take a few brands a year, and each of them gets people who think about their P&L on a Sunday. If that is what you have been missing, start a conversation. If what you need is a producer, we will happily tell you so in the first meeting, and point you to good ones.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a marketing agency cost in Lebanon?
Anywhere from a freelancer’s monthly fee to a full retainer with media on top, which is why the question is the wrong one. Ask instead what a year of results is worth to you and what share of that you are willing to invest to get there. A serious agency will price against scope and outcomes, show you the plan before the invoice, and keep the media budget transparent and in your name.
Should I hire a freelancer or an agency?
Hire a freelancer when you know exactly what you need made and you have someone inside the company to direct it. Hire an agency when the problem is upstream of production: positioning, offer, channels, sales conversion, or a market you do not know yet. Producers are rented hands. Agencies, when they are good, are rented judgment.
My market is in the Gulf. Does an agency in Lebanon make sense?
It has for decades: the region’s advertising industry was built largely by Lebanese talent, and the time zone, the languages and the cost base still work in your favour. What matters is whether the agency knows the Gulf market’s calendar, regulation and platforms, and can produce on the ground when it needs to. Ask for specifics. We wrote about it in Building a brand in the Gulf from Lebanon.
How long before I see results?
Activation results, such as leads, calls and store visits, can move within weeks once the offer and the targeting are right. Brand results, such as recall, preference and pricing power, take quarters and then keep paying for years. An agency that promises the second in the time frame of the first is selling you the weather again.
