The Founder & President

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A communications maestro

The mid-80s and early 90s saw him begin a new era as a strategic communicator, becoming one of Asia's best. Even now, he continues to use the wealth of his experience, knowledge, creativity and skills to move people, change mindsets, influence the hearts of not just Malaysians but others around the world.

He built his campaigns on meaningful messages, strategically communicated and skillfully using the right media mix. Companies, governments and humanitarian causes found it useful to use his services. In one man they sourced a strategist, one who was highly creative and most able to put ideas into action.

He worked closely with the Malaysian Government delving into cause marketing and relationship building. He had a tough task in communicating to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual society to build cohesiveness and trust. He had the ability to orchestrate and influence people, shape opinions. The Malaysia Inc publication was an outstanding promotion of Malaysia's policies to the foreign world. It was a book that had the participation of industry captains and high-ranking bureaucrats who presented a scenario of public and private sector economic cooperation.

He helped to create the Rakan Muda movement aimed at youth development. The concept and philosophy of the movement were adopted by a number of countries. He pulled together a campaign to educate people on inflation with a common target to achieve Zero Inflation. He set out the communication parameters when Kuala Lumpur won the bid to host the 16th Commonwealth Games. When the currency crisis hit the region he put together a campaign to persuade people to show their support for the games to ensure its success. In the end the games was widely acknowledged as the best organised last century.

He was specially selected by the former Prime Minister to help South Africa as the country prepared for its first democratic election. His work to help Bosnia Herzegovina rebuild the war-torn country was widely acknowledged as a masterful execution involving a publication, exhibition and website to raise funds.

When the government grew alarmed over the increasing number of young Malaysians starting to smoke, it turned to him to increase the awareness of health hazards attached to tobacco abuse.

He set out to do what the earlier campaigns had failed to achieve. He created a vehicle for the government to build its anti-smoking messages. Tak Nak – a simple and catchy term in Malay that means Say No – was picked up by the general public becoming part of their daily language. He knew the response to the campaign would be encouraging as people wrote in to the papers, expressing their views, schools and social clubs called up asking for promotional materials to conduct anti-smoking lessons, editorials were written and even cartoonists got into the act giving Tak Nak a touch of humour. Tak Nak is today a brand that stands for no smoking.

In another situation when the government wanted to introduce a thermal treatment plant for disposal of waste there was a hue and cry from the public on the safety aspects as well as the costs involved in constructing this plant.

He was asked to do some damage control before it escalated into a bigger situation. His strategy was to take the focus away from the thermal treatment plant and instead bring public attention to the source of the problem as phase one of damage control. Phase 2 was to provide the solution which was the government's waste management recommendations that included sanitary landfills as well as thermal treatment plants. The whole campaign was presented as Malaysia Segar – Vision for a Clean and Green Nation. A series of print ads and a television message as well as an information booklet gave people the full story of how bad the trash problem was in Kuala Lumpur.