Youssef El Deeb: On Storytelling, Exits, and Love of Film

Youssef El Deeb has always been drawn to the arts. His journey, which can be traced from filmmaking to advertising and content creation for networks and back to filmmaking once again, revolves around one central theme: Storytelling as a means of connecting with people.

“I’ve always felt a need for self-expression,” says El Deeb, who spent 10 years directing food commercials for Americana Group and four years as head of production and programming at MBC before launching the region’s first cooking channel, Fatafeat TV, in 2006.

“All my colleagues thought I was crazy, people didn’t care about cooking shows,” says El Deeb. But he believed the network had the potential to revolutionize culinary programming in the region.

Driven by his belief that the region needed a native cooking network, El Deeb got backing from Kuwaiti investor Nasser Al-Kharafi. “Nasser Al-Kharafi was my investor, but he was also my partner. He believed in me,” he says.

Together, the duo launched what became a hugely successful homegrown food network. The secret sauce, El Deeb tells us, was storytelling.

“Fatafeat became very successful very quickly for a small niche channel. The secret of Fatafeat’s success was all about storytelling. It wasn’t about the food, it was about the mood. Our slogan was ‘life is beautiful,’ and that was the mood of the network. We invited people to cook in the kitchen with us,” he says.

“At the time, events in Iraq dominated the news, and I thought the media needed an oasis of normalcy,” he adds.

Even though Fatafeat was driven by passion, El Deeb ran it like a business from day one, filming and broadcasting in high-definition. In spite of that, the numbers didn’t add up.

“A year and a half after we launched, Al-Kharafi called me and said ‘We’ve invested a lot but I don’t see any revenues, so let’s shut it down and do something else together.’ That night, I sent him a fax and said ‘Let’s try something different,’” El Deeb tells us.

What followed next likely allowed Fatafeat to become the name that it is today.

Youssef El Deeb. Filmmaker and founder of Picture Pond Media and Maison Deeb. Courtesy of Youssef El Deeb.

For the next 15 days, El Deeb ran an ad on the channel saying they were looking for a buyer. He gathered the requests and sent them to Al-Kharafi, which was enough to change the industrialist’s mind. They kept the network, although they remained unsure how to monetize it.

“At the time, we were too small for media representatives. Also, the media executives were men, so they didn’t get it, because our primary audience was women. One day, Pepsi-Cola came knocking at our door with Quaker Oats and said they wanted to make content on our channel. And soon we ended up with a model where products subsidized us,” he tells us.

The deal marked the beginning of a shift for the network, which monetized by using products and ingredients from some of the biggest FMCGs in the region to cook up a storm.

In 2012, El Deeb sold Fatafeat to Discovery Communications. Since then, he has directed a film and worked as a full-time consultant with various media networks to develop their programming strategies and digital presence, before circling back to his original passion for story-telling.

Telling stories

In March of this year, he launched Maison Deeb, an arthouse content arm as a sub-division of his creative content house Picture Pond Media. Maison Deeb includes an online art gallery and curated store of luxury items and artwork from his favorite artists.

The content house aims to design stories that explore the far reaches of the imagination. The aim, he tells us, is to be “story architects.”

“We need stories to define our world. We tell stories to escape from our world but also to make sense of our world. Storytelling is eternal, it’s probably the longest-living thing we’ve passed from generation to generation,” he says.

El Deeb, who has seen the region’s media evolve from privately owned cable networks to streaming on-demand, believes that MENA is primed for a new age of entertainment. And despite the proliferation of commercial content revolving around A-list stars, he believes that new formats and increased exposure are cultivating more diverse palates.

“Streaming on demand has liberated TV writers from the 12-minute format with a cliffhanger. Episodes are much more fluid in terms of time and format. That said, the structure of the industry is still under-developed because of the focus on big stars,” he tells us.

He credits Saudi Arabia’s recent policies to open up and Vision 2030--particularly cinema screens coming to Saudi--with saving the industry in many ways.

“Saudi has a huge population and the way I see them investing in young people and inviting people to come and film and giving them rebates lays a good foundation for the future,” he says.

“We will see different kinds of stories emerging. We’re seeing mega Hollywood projects, we’re seeing fast-food Egyptian films, and soon, we’ll see more casual dining--rich, well-thought-out films,” he adds.

This article first appeared in the September issue of Inc. Arabia magazine. To read the full issue, click here.