International marketing and communications experience, applied to local business realities
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.
Independent counsel when marketing, communications, and agency decisions need more than execution.
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.
Advisory support across brand, communications, reputation, market entry, agencies, and leadership.
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.
Brand, Marketing & Growth
Positioning, strategy, and creative direction that strengthen how a business grows and is understood.
Brand & communications audit →Communications, PR & Reputation
Strategic communications, media relations, executive visibility, and reputation management led by Lorena Copty, Partner and Head of Practice, PR, Media & Communications.
Reputation & sensitive communications →Market Entry & Regional Advisory
Counsel for companies entering or expanding across the Levant and GCC, with local interpretation and stakeholder context.
Market entry advisory →Agency, Team & Campaign Advisory
Agency selection and governance, team effectiveness reviews, and sharper campaign and creative direction.
Agency selection & governance →Leadership, Board & Fractional CMO Support
Fractional CMO support, board counsel, and senior marketing leadership through transition and growth.
Fractional CMO support →Calm judgment when the stakes are reputation, not just message.
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.
Built for decision-makers who need experienced, independent counsel.
CMOs & marketing leaders
A sounding board when strategy, agency performance, reputation, or internal alignment needs an experienced outside view.
Founders & CEOs
Marketing and communications counsel connected to business priorities, growth, market entry, and reputation.
Boards & investors
An independent view on brand, communications, and reputation as sources of value, risk, and confidence.
Agencies
Strategic support on complex, competitive, regional, or high-stakes work.
Procurement & marketing operations
Clarity on scopes, agency models, operating structures, evaluation criteria, and decision processes.
International companies
Local interpretation, stakeholder context, launch guidance, and market-entry counsel across the Levant and GCC.
Senior judgment, applied at the right moments.
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.
A way to give back to serious young founders.
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 →A bridge for companies entering the region.
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 across the region's most demanding brands, agencies, and markets.
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 we support.
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.
A short conversation, then the right form of support.
Most assignments start with a short diagnostic conversation about the issue, the decision to be made, and the support required.
My father kept his pencils.
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.
Notes on brand, communications, reputation, and regional market decisions.
Independent views, observations, and occasional opinions, shaped by experience and the freedom to say what I think.
New notes are added over time, across opinion, frameworks, market notes, reputation, and agency effectiveness.
View all insights →Multinational discipline, applied with regional judgment.
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.
Habib Rihana
Brand, marketing, growth, market entry, agency governance, and senior leadership counsel.
Lorena Copty
PR, media relations, corporate communications, executive visibility, reputation management, broadcast media, podcasting, and public-facing communications.
Let's discuss where independent counsel can help.
Whether you are launching, repositioning, entering the region, or reviewing agency performance, start with a conversation.