Short Pencils helps CMOs, founders, boards, and agencies apply international marketing and communications standards to regional business challenges, across brand, reputation, market entry, and agency performance.
Short Pencils helps clients diagnose what is unclear, align stakeholders, and guide the decisions that shape how a business is positioned, understood, and trusted, grounded in business context and regional market knowledge.
The work is organised around the decisions clients most often need help making, from positioning and launch planning to agency governance, reputation, team effectiveness, and leadership counsel.
Positioning, strategy, and creative direction that strengthen how a business grows and is understood.
Brand & communications audit →Strategic communications, media relations, executive visibility, and reputation management led by Lorena Copty, Partner and Head of Practice, PR, Media & Communications.
Reputation & sensitive communications →Counsel for companies entering or expanding across the Levant and GCC, with local interpretation and stakeholder context.
Market entry advisory →Agency selection and governance, team effectiveness reviews, and sharper campaign and creative direction.
Agency selection & governance →Fractional CMO support, board counsel, and senior marketing leadership through transition and growth.
Fractional CMO support →In this region, sensitive communications moments require calm judgment, cultural understanding, stakeholder awareness, and disciplined decision-making.
Short Pencils supports leadership teams before, during, and after these moments: assessing risk, aligning messages, preparing spokespeople, and coordinating stakeholders, alongside media relations and executive positioning.
A sounding board when strategy, agency performance, reputation, or internal alignment needs an experienced outside view.
Marketing and communications counsel connected to business priorities, growth, market entry, and reputation.
An independent view on brand, communications, and reputation as sources of value, risk, and confidence.
Strategic support on complex, competitive, regional, or high-stakes work.
Clarity on scopes, agency models, operating structures, evaluation criteria, and decision processes.
Local interpretation, stakeholder context, launch guidance, and market-entry counsel across the Levant and GCC.
Some businesses do not need a large agency structure. They need experienced marketing and communications judgment at the right moments, whether building a brand, preparing for launch, or reviewing agency support with limited internal resources.
The work is practical and shaped around the business reality: a diagnostic conversation, a focused advisory scope, a short-term retainer, or senior support through key decisions.
Short Pencils also makes time for selected start-ups that need honest, experienced marketing and communications advice but may not yet be ready for a formal advisory engagement.
This is a way to give back and support young founders as they begin building. There is no fixed package. If a start-up is selected, the support structure is tailored around the business, the founders, the complexity of the challenge, and the level of guidance needed.
Founders should send a clear and compelling narrative covering:
Short Pencils will review submissions and decide, at its discretion, whether there is a meaningful fit and what form the support could take.
Submit your start-up narrative →Counsel for businesses from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia Pacific expanding into the Levant and the GCC. Real knowledge of the market: competition, governments, customers, and how decisions actually get made. Local interpretation, stakeholder context, and launch guidance. And the connections to open the right doors, because the right introduction often moves faster than any plan.
Three decades of marketing and communications experience across the Middle East and GCC, built through senior roles inside global agency networks including BBDO, Ogilvy, Omnicom, and WPP, and through direct advisory work with global, regional, and local brands, spanning agency growth, market expansion, and brand and communications programmes across complex regional markets.
A few examples of the type of work Short Pencils supports. Many assignments are confidential by nature, especially those involving market entry, agency review, and governance; others can be discussed in conversation.
Most assignments start with a short diagnostic conversation about the issue, the decision to be made, and the support required.
He wrote more than three hundred books, and saved the short, worn-down pencils in glass jars. Each one finished, nothing wasted.
The name is a small nod to that: careful work, said plainly, with no more than it needs.
Independent views, observations, and occasional opinions, shaped by experience and the freedom to say what I think.
A familiar client comment, and the unspoken psychology of risk, recognition, and boardroom protection behind it.
Why the final agency decision should never be left to numbers alone, and why judgment, chemistry, and leadership matter.
New notes are added over time, across opinion, frameworks, market notes, reputation, and agency effectiveness.
View all insights →Short Pencils is an independent marcom advisory practice founded by Habib Rihana, bringing together multinational agency discipline, regional market understanding, and practical business sense for moments when marketing and communications decisions need experienced counsel.
Brand, marketing, growth, market entry, agency governance, and senior leadership counsel.
PR, media relations, corporate communications, executive visibility, reputation management, broadcast media, podcasting, and public-facing communications.
Whether you are launching, repositioning, entering the region, or reviewing agency performance, start with a conversation.
