FP7/ Finds Streets More ‘Interesting’ Following Truth About Street Initiative

As part of McCann Worldgroup, FP7/MENA has concluded the agency’s day-on-the-street, hunting for truth. On October 10, 2017, McCann Worldgroup conducted its Truth About Street research in over 100 countries with nearly 20,000 employees. In the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region, over 300 employees hit the streets across 10 countries. Meeting people on the streets, and through face-to-face conversations, they collected truths about culture, shopping behavior and topical sentiments.

“As the voice of the MENA region, we’re constantly focused on knowing our part of the world better than others. And we take pride in our global network for doing the exact same thing across the world. Knowing our region and its people, better than others, enables us to remain at the forefront of our industry when it comes to work that makes a meaningful difference for our brands,” said Tarek Miknas, CEO, FP7/MENA.

The entire employee base from across countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Lebanon, Turkey and Bahrain, participated in this initiative.

“Truth About Street is enabling every employee to understand behaviors, anxieties and trends on the streets, in the real world, and it’s helping them apply these insights to impact our client’s brands and businesses, along with contributing to a very switched-on and curious agency culture,” added Mr Miknas.

The agency has heard its staff talk about how when they observe the city like a tourist, the city and its people are much more interesting. One of the teams in Dubai met a tourist from Saudi Arabia, whom they hesitated contacting, but upon approaching him, uncovered their most favorite and most insightful conversation; he even treated them to coffee and refreshments.

Beyond being a proprietary study, Truth About Street is an intelligence program involving employees across disciplines (strategy, business management, creative, technology, finance, admin, HR), in mining all that embodies the essence of each city and its people.

“With Truth About Street, we are engineering ourselves to do what all of us should always do by default – consciously and constantly hear people. Uncovering their unbridled hopes, joys, perspectives, aspirations, needs and anxieties. And developing creative products, content and experiences around them; instead of simply pushing content and campaigns, based on generic insights in our briefs, that we’ve conjured up sitting at our desks, looking at just desktop research,” said Tahaab Rais, Regional Head of Strategic Planning and MENA Director – Truth Central, FP7/MENA.

“To learn the truth about street, I went off for a couple of hours, taking eight Abra rides in Dubai and having more insightful conversations in those two hours than I’ve had over days with focus groups,” added Mr Rais.

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