On a damp, cold Monday in England, Terry Kane and his future wife, Eugenia, were standing before a map, deciding they wanted to be anywhere else in the world.
“We were just pointing at places we could go to and decided that whoever got offered the first job, that’s where we would move to. That was the deal,” he says.
It was Kane who scored a role heading up digital marketing strategy for one of Dubai’s most luxurious hotels, kick-starting the couple’s new life in the Emirates in the process.
From digital marketing director of the Jumeirah Group to becoming a director for Meta across the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, Kane’s readiness to take on new challenges is evident in his CV.
Yet Kane describes his earlier stint in a kettle factory in his native Co Down as one of the most difficult roles he has held.
“Factories can be grim at the best of times but in 1990s Northern Ireland they were super grim,” he says.
For Kane, who grew up Catholic on a Protestant estate in Bangor, sectarianism was inescapable and often insurmountable when trying to forge ahead in life.
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Having struggled at school, he described his return to education for a vocational degree as “his best decision”. It eventually took him to university and a career he loved, even if it did take him five attempts at GCSE maths to get in.
“I wanted to be a sports teacher rather than anything in business,” he says. “But the person in the office looked at my marks and said ‘I don’t think so’.”
His redirection to a hospitality and tourism management qualification was, he says, “one of the best refusals I ever got”.
Completing his studies at Bournemouth University with a large cohort of international students expanded his horizons and gave him the chance to meet his future wife, a student originally from Colombia.
After a stint in London as a travel agent, then in a head office in a marketing role for the now-defunct youth-geared STA travel, Kane began to feel burnt out by the city, where he was sleeping on friends’ couches to get by.
He was offered a role as a strategic director for New Forest, a region in southern England looking to drive tourism to its leafy surrounds.
Although being charged with putting an entire brand online at 25 was “brilliant”, it was also “an eye-opening experience coming in with a Belfast accent into a super-conservative place”.
He opened a web development enterprise on the side by teaching himself to build websites for small businesses. Kane says the skills he developed in this side hustle, rather than his experience in the day job, led to his break in Dubai.
“I’d never heard of the Jumeirah Group,” he says. “I applied for the job based off the self-taught stuff I had from the previous two years.”
To overcome nerves and potential knowledge gaps in those initial phone interviews, Kane devised a methodological system. He would print out everything he could find on the interviewer and highlight key parts before spreading the papers out on the floor.
“During the interview, I’d be walking around the house and every time they asked me a question, I would find something from their own history and quote it back at them and that would make them feel more confident,” he says.
Eventually he was flown out to Dubai to do an interview in person. Sitting in the chauffeured Rolls-Royce back to the airport, he made up his mind. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t care if you don’t pay me – I would do this for free.’ I didn’t want anything else,” he says.
The chief executive was pretty confident that nobody was going to want to book a hotel that luxurious on a mobile phone
In 2008, Kane moved to Dubai to take up the digital strategy director role at the Jumeirah Group to guide the UAE’s premier luxury hospitality brand into a new world where consumers were relying less on travel agents and more on booking sites.
Executives were concerned that putting the Burj Al Arab luxury resort on certain online platforms would cheapen the brand and the experience for guefffsts accustomed to five-star service, making some aspects of Kane’s role “a hard sell” – particularly convincing renowned Irish hotel boss and former Jumeirah chief executive Gerard Lawless about the benefits of mobile booking.
“He was pretty confident that nobody was going to want to book a hotel that luxurious on a mobile phone,” says Kane.
“These were the days before iPhones were widespread – these were the Blackberry days – and there was doubt over whether these people who would spend €5,000 on a single booking would get a great experience on a mobile phone.”
Kane developed the company’s digital offerings, keeping pace with the smartphone and app revolution by building software development and engineering, online content, marketing and security teams.
In 2014 Facebook came calling, and Kane found himself moving from being “the geek in the non-geek business” to being surrounded by techies.
Kane says an MBA at the London Business School in Dubai, completed before his Meta days, “helped me transition from a specialist into a generalist”.
My daughter goes to school with 20 kids in class and 20 nationalities. I hear her speaking Farsi to her best friend, then going to her friend’s Iftar dinner and then another Indian friend’s Holi celebration
During this period he also founded a start-up Tripronto which he described as “using a ChatGPT model of travel agent”. Eventually back-end frustrations would see it fold but Kane sees it as an invaluable learning experience.
After nine years at Meta, it became clear to Kane that if he wanted to grow within the company it would probably mean a relocation to one of its larger hubs and away from the city where Kane’s family – now including two children – had put down roots.
“Dubai is our home, we see our future here, so that was the trigger moment to start going out and pushing to find that next role,” he says.
After a long selection process, he was offered the role of managing director of The Trade Desk, a global digital media buying firm, where he started earlier this year.
The Kanes plan to stay in Dubai. They have found the city’s welcoming and multicultural expat community an ideal place to raise their children.
“My daughter goes to school with 20 kids in class and 20 nationalities. I hear her speaking Farsi to her best friend, then going to her friend’s Iftar dinner and then another Indian friend’s Holi celebration,” he says.
Slotting into an entirely different culture with its own rules and expectations has almost been easier for Kane than navigating a situation back home.
He has no regrets about where his career or life in the Emirates have taken him, but his factory days are another matter entirely.
“I hope no one ever bought the kettles I made,” he laughs.
