On his first day at Electronic Arts in the 1990s, Munir Haddad was told he’d be meeting Muhammad Ali. That was simply how the company operated, he says — “like working in a SportsCenter commercial.”
The night before, Ali had stepped onto a sidewalk near San Francisco’s Pier 47 and shadowboxed until he stopped traffic. The next morning, during a meet and greet, when Haddad got to the front of the line, he reached out his hand and said, “Hey, champ, nice to meet you.” Ali leaned in, then quietly asked: “Did you say champ or chump?”
Then Haddad’s voice climbed ten octaves. “I said champ, champ.” Ali smiled broadly, knowing he had him hook, line, and sinker, then pivoted to his levitation trick — standing sideways, raising his back foot behind the front one so he appeared to float. “He had an external warmth that filled the room,” Haddad remembers.
Haddad has met a lot of remarkable people, and by his own admission he doesn’t overawe easily. But Ali was different, and decades later he can still articulate exactly why. “He took principled stances,” Haddad says. “And he didn’t do it with malice. He did it with principle.” A man who could defy the system that wanted to bring him down and still operate within it, still shine — a craftsman who used his platform to make his community better, “and then all of us, frankly, better for his being.”
Haddad’s appreciation might hint at autobiography. He was born in London to a Lebanese father and English mother. The family came to America in the 1970s, to Queens, then Westchester. But every summer, young Munir went back, straight into a civil war that ran roughly from 1977 to 1983. He saw teenagers carrying AK-47s. He remembers, more than anything, the feeling of his mother, who was not from that region, never quite at ease. Ask him where his life’s work began, though, and he doesn’t point to the war. He points to what the war forced into the room.
“Because of war there were blackouts and no electricity, so you had to come up with ways to entertain yourself that were creative and that also dealt with other people. There was a lot of card playing by candlelight. And those aspects are stronger than the backdrop.”
Three generations gathered in one room — his grandfather and his friends, his parents and theirs, the kids underfoot. When the lights went out, the family told stories. “When you’re in the dark,” Haddad says, “you’re talking to each other. And usually the way they communicate is by telling a story.” Bored at the edge of a card game he wasn’t invited into, he’d pick up a book. The imagination that grew in those candlelit hours, he says, “expresses itself in the choices I made later.”
The choices traced a clean line. A cousin who’d landed in advertising told him it was the best job in the world — “I get to play darts and come up with ideas all day.” Corporate recruiting carried Haddad to Leo Burnett, then the largest advertising agency under one roof, where he worked on Procter & Gamble, Nintendo, and Reebok. Games and sports, for a kid from a games family. In 2004 he co-founded Kiosk, the digital agency he still leads, with offices in California, Toronto, and — fittingly for a lifelong Liverpool supporter — Liverpool, England.
What hasn’t changed is his definition of the work. Strip away the media buys and the analytics, he says, and advertising comes down to a single act: deciding what story to tell, and who to tell it to. “That’s the magic.”
The thing that stops most people, in his view, isn’t talent. It’s nerve. “Some people are embarrassed to tell stories,” he says. He calls it will versus skill — the courage to risk a story that might not land, that someone might dislike. Companies that dampen their own story, he warns, never get the best out of themselves, “and your audience will also feel like something’s not quite right.”
“You choose to take the risk, you choose to tell the story, you choose to put it out into the universe. And that’s when magic happens.”
These days, that craft keeps returning to higher education, a field that was foundational in his family — “the arc kind of found its way home at the end.” For Haddad, the work is almost civic: telling prospective students that knowledge is within reach, and giving the people who create that knowledge a platform to share it. Put a piece of what you know into the world, he argues, and someone may push back, may say I don’t believe you — and that friction is the point. “That helps us collectively be better and find truth.”
It’s the same act, really, that he watched his family perform every summer night the power went out — the grandfather, the parents, the kids, filling a dark room with stories because there was nothing else to do, and discovering the stories were the thing worth doing. The blackouts gave him his craft; the craft gave him his career. Now he spends his days coaxing brands and universities to do what that candlelit room taught him: take the risk, say the thing out loud, put it into the universe.
“You take something that was a thought, an idea, and it becomes an expression — a thing by the telling,” he says. “You take something from nothing and make it a thing. And I do that every day.”
A man who learned to make light in the dark — still convinced the story is worth telling.