AMONG the British expatriates who could almost be termed ‘over-stayers' is John V. White, the Group Marketing Services Manager for Yousuf M.A. Naghi & Sons Group. He arrived in Jeddah in 1984 and now, almost twenty-seven years later, he still has no plans to leave in the near future. The product of a British Army Officer and a Greek mother, White spent ten years of his childhood in Germany and then went back to the UK. He has also lived in Greece and various other places in the world until fate eventually brought him to Saudi Arabia. “I had worked for a couple of years as Production and Copy Director for a Pan-Arab agency in Greece, one of the old Lebanese agencies that had moved there in the time of the early 80s troubles in Lebanon,” he said about his first job. “I was then offered a job in Jeddah as the Marketing Manager with Tihama International on the media side. Tihama was the largest advertising and media group in the Middle East at that time. You couldn't operate here in Saudi unless you went through Tihama – they controlled about 90 percent of the media outlets and all the leading publications of the day – and at that time there was no TV advertising or video advertising. The job in essence was to sell the Kingdom to the outside world and say to people: ‘If you want to reach the people in the Kingdom, you can reach them by using our media'.” He later transferred to be the Group Creative Director and was then head-hunted from Tihama by D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, a large American advertising company. “They had just set up here and I started as their Assistant General Manager and Creative Director. Our major account was Mars (the confectionary group), which was run by Arabian Food Supplies, a company owned by Yousuf M.A. Naghi & Sons Group. The Naghi family were dealing almost entirely with me and I became close to Sheikh Yaser who was the second son. They found out that I wasn't happy at the agency and they weren't happy with the bills they were getting for the work that was done. It was principally ‘own brand' products that we in the agency were designing packaging for. I had a previous background in packaging design so Sheikh Yaser asked me to join them. That was 20 years ago,” he reminisced. The Naghi Group is one of the major trading groups within the Kingdom, dealing with a diverse range of products and brands from confectionary, to restaurants and catering, to cars and buses. White was asked to set up a Marketing Services Division in 1991. “In principal it was really an in-house agency servicing all parts of their extensive group,” he explained. “Although this is common in Europe and the USA in large groups of companies, it is not that common in the Middle East. It was one of the first in the Kingdom for a Saudi commercial group and is mainly aligned to ‘below the line' work. This includes design and artwork for everything from vehicle decals, packaging for new products, corporate identities, logos, and anything for a new company, and then point of sale work which could be in-store; it could be billboards, or display stands, or roll up stands – anything that is not directly media. We also do a limited amount of ‘above the line' media work and the department has a full production facility for large format printing employing the latest state of the art machines.” White has been involved first hand with the big changes that happened in his line of work with __
