Matt Slater knows what makes a good story - and he knows how he would like his own to sound.

But as a former journalist and a co-founder of one of the largest independent public relations agencies in the region, he is also well aware that he has no control over how it will appear once he shares it with a reporter. And he is perfectly okay with that. It is, after all, all part of the job. 

“I don’t know where you are going to go with it,” he says nonchalantly at the end of this interview about his career history and Seven Media, which he cofounded with a former colleague.

It all started eight years ago, when Mr Slater – who had helped set up The National, where he worked for 18 months before the newspaper’s launch in 2008, and around a year after it – saw an opportunity and decided to take it.

“I didn’t think there was much journalism ethos in PR. I used to come across a lot of output media releases that were very staid, boring and safe. They didn’t really tell a story,” says Mr Slater, who was working as the UAE editor of The National at the time.

“I thought if we could write these as stories on behalf of clients, that would be the way forward. I didn’t know there were clients out there when we did it.”

But both Mr Slater and his colleague at The National, Gregg Fray, decided to go for it anyway.

They set up Seven in 2010 in Abu Dhabi with four employees – themselves and two Arabic speaking journalists.

It is considerably bigger now, with a staff of 64, which includes a production department that produces documentaries and social media videos.

And it has recently been named the PRCA Middle East Best Large Consultancy Award for the second year running, and won the digital campaign of the year for Barasti Beach Bar, which featured a missing gorilla.

“The campaign was called #BringGeorgeHome. It didn’t really get stolen. But we pretended it did and so we played it like a real-life story about a missing gorilla. And it was huge. It was all over the media,” he says.

The campaign, says Mr Slater, is an example of how Seven does PR differently, by telling – and selling – a story effectively.

“If someone says to you, 'I am opening a restaurant', for example. They think it’s enough to say that. And the media should flock there and everyone should write about it,” says Mr Slater, who is a father of two girls, aged six and four.