View from the Top: Zaid Al-Qassab (1990)
In September 2019, Zaid was appointed as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Leader for Inclusion & Diversity for Channel 4, having previously spent time in the telecommunications and consumer goods industries. He tells us how many of the themes of his PPE degree and his passion for diversity are interwoven throughout his career, and reveals the surprising details of his first television appearance.
You studied PPE at Oxford. Did that prepare you for the world of work and, if so, how?
I never thought it at the time, but when I look back, studying PPE prepared me very well for my career.
I’m the Chief Marketing Officer of Channel 4, which is a public service broadcaster set up to make sure our media landscape is sufficiently diverse. All the elements of PPE play a part in this.
I’m also a council member of the Advertising Standards Authority, so I am contributing to rulings on what is legal, decent, honest and truthful in UK advertising. I look back at the time I spent on the Philosophy part of the course, researching and writing papers on feminism and civil rights, and realise that it all feeds into what I do now. The ASA has recently introduced guidance on harmful stereotypes, and the courses I chose prepared me well for that sort of challenge.
And I’m a trustee of the international development charity, Water Aid. So my tutorials in economics from Vijay Joshi have come in handy too, which would no doubt amuse him given how much I struggled at the time. It’s fascinating, really, how everything all ties up.
So if I post-rationalise, PPE set me up perfectly to do what I do now. Somehow the subject gave me the confidence that seemed to be needed at every step of my career.
But the most important thing that the College gave me was not my education but a wonderful family. It was where I met my wife, Claudia Drake (1991), who was also a PPEist.
Your first job after graduating was a marketing job with consumer goods company Procter & Gamble (P&G). Why did you choose to go into marketing?
I had no idea at the time what I wanted to do as a career. I chose to study PPE because I was really interested in it, but I didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do after university. I spent 20 years enjoyably at P&G, starting off as an intern and becoming managing director of a decent-sized company within the corporation. I got the job in the first place because my friends were applying to the milk round – mainly to management consultancies – and I thought I should submit some job applications too.
I applied to P&G because I thought it was a management consultancy – at least that’s what it sounded like. I went for a day of interviews in the Randolph, and by the time I left at the end of the day I had learned what sort of company P&G was – and I had accepted a job offer from them.
You were with P&G for 20 years, rising to become Managing Director of P&G’s health & beauty division with sales exceeding £1 billion. What kept you there for so long, and what lessons did you learn along the way?
The reason that P&G is heralded as a fantastic graduate experience is because it’s a wonderful grounding in how to be successful in business: leading people of all ages and with decades of skills, from the moment you arrive as a graduate trainee. So many successful business leaders have started their careers there, or with one of the other consumer goods companies, because they train you so well.
I stayed with P&G for so long because it was immense fun. I worked in three different places in the UK and in two foreign countries: Switzerland and Greece. My daughter was born in Geneva and my wife was able to further her career there, with the United Nations; my son was born in Athens. The opportunity to work and live in other countries was fantastic for me personally, and for my family.
I changed roles about every 18 months. I worked on many famous brands, including Gillette and Pringles, and had a very exciting career path that never slowed down. It was all very much about personal growth. P&G evaluates its staff 50% on business growth and 50% on personal and team development. I felt like I had gone from one seat of learning to another, and that kept me interested.
When I was an intern, my first project was to create promotional stickers – but the stickers I ordered had a backing that you couldn’t peel off. I wasted thousands of pounds of the company’s money, and was fully expecting to be fired. But instead my boss said that everyone makes mistakes – just don’t make the same one twice. It was an important lesson I learned that day: not being afraid to make mistakes enables you to improve in life. But I’m not sure many companies would have let me learn it.
After 20 years at P&G, you left and spent a year at HouseTrip. Why the move?
I moved to do an e-commerce start-up: HouseTrip, which was a holiday home rental website, similar to AirBnB, but before anyone had even heard of AirBnB. I had decided to move into a fully digital world, and it was a huge learning experience. Like many start-ups, it didn’t work out, and no one got rich, but we learnt a lot. It eventually became part of TripAdvisor.
I’m sure that’s why my career was able to take new directions, because I had a full-on year of immersion in the digital world.
Then you spent four years at BT Group, as Chief Brand & Marketing Officer.
Yes, I took the job at BT for two main reasons. First, because I knew it would be very challenging, because BT was buying the mobile operator EE at the time, and integrating two companies was something I had experience in. From my time at P&G, I was used to managing acquisitions, portfolios of brands, and developing multi-brand strategies. Secondly, the CEO of BT, Gavin Patterson, was one of my first managers at P&G, and I knew I would learn from him.
So I moved to BT. Like all the moves in my career, I was moving to a different industry. I’d started in consumer products, then an internet start-up in holiday home rental, and now telecommunications – I’ve never wanted to stay in just one industry because it’s more exciting and you learn more through change.
Unless you are a doctor or a lawyer, for example, and go down one chosen path, life is all about experiences and transferable skills. That’s the PPE background coming in again: with PPE, you choose breadth of learning, rather than ploughing one deep furrow.
You moved to Channel 4 as Chief Marketing Officer in September 2019. Can you tell us a little bit about the background to Channel 4?
Channel 4 plays an important role in the broadcast landscape. It was set up as a challenger of norms, and as a champion of voices that aren’t usually heard.
It’s entirely taxpayer-owned, but doesn’t cost the taxpayer a penny, and was set up by the government 38 years ago, with the specific remit to provide innovative and creative public service broadcasting on topics that weren’t covered by the mainstream broadcasters (which at the time were BBC1, BBC2 and ITV). Part of our remit is to make programmes for a culturally diverse audience.
Ofcom measures us on all these aspects, such as reaching BAME audiences, young audiences, and working with production companies that are more diverse.
So we have to make sure we support the diversity of UK society. Today, this means asking ourselves what we can do, for example in the summer of 2020, to make sure what we see on our screens reflects the Black Lives Matter movement or explores transgender issues. We’re not perfect, but I don’t think anyone does it better than Channel 4.
Going back over our history, we have always been ahead of the pack, diversity-wise. Channel 4 was the first broadcaster to air a black sitcom (Desmond’s, set in a barber shop in Peckham), the first broadcaster to screen a lesbian kiss (in Brookside), and of course we are the broadcaster of the Paralympics.
What is your ‘mission’ in being head of inclusion and diversity for Channel 4?
Diversity has been a strong thread running through my career. And that’s something that I can relate back to PPE. The course taught me not only how to analyse the facts and argue well, but also that there are no right answers, so you’d better listen to and appreciate diverse opinions. It’s hard to emerge from three years of PPE tutorials without a clear understanding of your own value system.
At Channel 4, I run a marketing department, an in-house creative agency, a digital content division, and I lead on inclusion and diversity. Then there are my Board roles at the Advertising Standards Authority, WaterAid and Creative Diversity Network. Diversity is probably the common thread running through all my career choices, although I didn’t think of it like that at the time I got involved with these organisations.
Societal and media interest in diversity topics is higher than it’s ever been. Our task is to illuminate those topics with both current affairs and entertainment in a way that’s accessible to everyone, and in a way that people want to engage with.
People love Gogglebox, which deliberately shows the views of a massively diverse range of British people, and shows them in their homes, which again are very diverse. By making this programme, we’re introducing people to topics of conversation, opinions and ways of life that they might not otherwise come across.
It’s all about the cohesion of society, achieved through opening people’s minds and attitudes – getting people to respect each other, and being accepting of others.
It’s been an unusual period since I started at Channel 4. A few weeks into lockdown, the government was made aware of research that showed that some people – mostly young men – were not obeying the lockdown rules. So they asked if Channel 4 could help with a campaign. This included making cheeky advertising (it was literally cheeky, as it was called ‘We need your butt’) to get young men to sit down at home rather than go out. It resonated with far more young men than the government campaign, and Channel 4 News topped the poll of the most trusted news source which shows the value of public service broadcasting at a time of crisis, and illustrates why Channel 4 has such a valuable part to play in society.
What do you do to switch off? Do you watch Channel 4 yourself? You were tennis club captain at Merton; do you still play?
Ironically, my day job doesn’t give me the time to watch much telly, so I do like to watch television in the evening. I watch Channel 4 News and, for total escapism, I enjoy Tattoo Fixers. And yes, I do still play tennis, twice a week, though just for fun.
You spent three years at Merton. Can you pick out one particular memory of your time in Oxford?
In my second year, in 1991, Parson’s Pleasure – the area for nude male bathing in the bend of the River Cherwell by University Parks – was officially closed down. BBC Newsnight wanted to run a news item about it, and wanted to film some live action in the form of students swimming there. I and two other Mertonians were paid £20 each to strip off naked and jump in the river. The trouble was, it was January and we had to break the ice before jumping in. We certainly earned our £20!
What advice would you give to any Mertonian wishing to follow in your footsteps?
When anyone ever asks me for career advice, I tell them two things. Firstly, be curious. My meandering career is a result of looking into different things. And secondly, say “Yes”. Just about everything I’ve done is as a result of someone asking me “Do you want to do this?”, and me saying “Yes”.