The account management team at Intermarkets used to handle the out-of-Lebanon campaigns on behalf of their international clients by remote control, and in a very simple manner. This was not only the case at Intermarkets, but at most regional agencies at the time.
Media plans were mostly a repeat of what was done in previous years, while all planning and buying was left to the agencies’ media departments to handle. The role of the account handler was reduced to submitting these media plans to his client and securing their approval. Slight changes were starting to be noticed in the markets where our agency had established branches, namely Kuwait and Bahrain, where different types of activations were being conducted in close cooperation with the distributors of our clients.
The de facto announcement of the Intermarkets head office transfer turned into a game-changer for my account handling colleagues in Beirut. Their international clients began asking them to meet their marketing and sales executives, who were travelling frequently in the region. Clients thought that all Intermarkets staff had moved to Bahrain.
The first of the Lebanon agency executives to realize the importance of the opportunity that had been opened to Intermarkets outside of Beirut was Samir Fares. Samir left the Phoenicia, which was being surrounded by opposing militias preparing for what would eventually develop into the Battle of the Hotels and moved to Bahrain.
Salim Sednaoui was being chased by Gillette, whose executives I had to look after in Jeddah during the pilgrimage period, as they had started visiting the GCC markets more than ever before and wanted their account director to be available to accompany them. This brought Salim to Bahrain, leaving behind his bachelor pad in Verdun Street and the Nubian butler who had been looking after him since childhood.
Then one day, Johnson & Johnson needed urgent support in Egypt, and we did not have any presence in that market. Eddie and I, who were still managing the show in Bahrain, contacted Erwin Guerrovich, who, in a matter of one day, reverted with a solution. He asked me to leave for Cairo the next day and to go to the offices of Impact BBDO in Zamalek, where the agency team had been instructed to provide me with all the assistance I needed. Luckily, and because of my Ceylon Tea trips, I had an Egyptian visa available on my passport, so I travelled to Cairo the next morning. After checking in at Le Méridien, I crossed the Garden City roundabout to a building with a garden, like all the other old colonial buildings in that section of the Egyptian capital.
As I entered the garden gate, I read a small, dark olive-green sign – in the shape of an arrow – that carried the name Impact BBDO. The agency office was in a stand-alone structure at the back of the garden. What struck me as I walked into the reception was the feeling of being expected, which I sensed from the warm reception of the agency team. I was also much impressed by the furniture of the reception, which was covered with an Egyptian cotton fabric of light beige color, on which the Impact BBDO logo was printed. The team that had been assigned to help me was efficient and this made me realize that the perception of Intermarkets’ superiority, which we had been living with since the merger, was untrue, as here was another agency that seemed to speak the same language.
The Johnson & Johnson resident manager in Egypt, Dr. Georges Salib, was a wonderful client who had done all the preparatory work for a maternity hospital sampling operation with his own team. He had called on Intermarkets for support because his head office in Slough, west of central London, had asked him to seek our assistance. In fact, a young British export assistant was in Egypt for the first time to supervise this pilot operation, with a plan to gradually spread it to become a national activation.
Impact BBDO helped me recruit young Zamalek students who could get together with the Johnson & Johnson staff on weekends to prepare gifts that were to be presented to mothers with newborn babies. The gift included Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo, baby oil, baby cream, cotton buds and booklets entitled “Caring for your baby”, in light blue or pink linen bags with a fancy design that could be converted into laundry bags. We also recruited and trained young educated ladies who did regular tours of the maternity wards of Cairo, distributing these gift bags and recording names and the contact details of mothers.
Although news travelled extremely slowly during the Seventies, the very excited reception of the Johnson & Johnson gift bags during the first few days of sampling seemed to reach Slough fast, as the messages of congratulations demonstrated. The export assistant announced that he was getting ready to leave, so Dr. Salib invited the two of us for dinner at his house. Mrs. Salib, a cordon bleu cook, had prepared a feast for 20 people when there were only four of us around her dinner table. My British dinner companion was very happy to discover that Dr. Salib was an expert barman and a master mixer of gin and tonic. Before we were invited to the dinner table, my friend guzzled three large drinks in a matter of minutes. As he was in the process of requesting his fourth drink, Mrs. Salib walked into the sitting room to announce that dinner was being served. The Salib’s dining table was meant to seat 12 guests and Mrs. Salib used the entire tabletop to spread every imaginable dish for her two guests.
She had prepared a choice of soups and salads, but more important were the touamiya, tahina (Lebanese hummus), green beans cooked in olive oil and tomato paste, batarekh, boiled quail eggs in mayonnaise and black olives, fried eggplants, squash, and cauliflower. All of these being just the starters. Then she went into the kitchen and every time she came back, we saw her carrying large serving dishes of grilled baby pigeons, mulukhiyah served with rabbit meat and white rice, a gigantic leg of lamb served with mashed potato, green peas and carrots, squid cooked in its black ink, and grilled jumbo shrimps which Dr. Salib had ordered to be brought in from Alexandria that same morning. Then with a special ceremonial entry, the large stuffed chicken was served. My British friend kept filling one plate after the other of everything that Mrs. Salib was describing to him, while I started noticing that his face was turning red in color, and its intensity was increasing with every course. By the time he finished the last grain of the stuffed chicken rice, roasted almonds, cashews, and pine seeds, he turned to me enquiring about the location of the toilet. Dr. Salib escorted him – in a hurry – and we all sat waiting while Mrs. Salib kept reciting all the desserts that she had prepared, expressing concern that these could stay untouched if the other guest stayed longer in their toilet. The Salibs’ royal dinner ended on this dramatic note, and the next day both the young Johnson & Johnson export assistant and I flew back home.
I returned to Bahrain, where more colleagues from the Lebanon head office had already moved in, including Melhem Moussallem, Raymond Attar, and Raymond Nader. Although Eddie, with the support of Samir Fares, had arranged the move from our small office to the modern Jashanmal building on Al Khalifa Street, I personally felt that this office space was fast getting crowded, and our presence in Bahrain was making us concentrate on this market only at the expense of other GCC markets. The civil war in Lebanon forced us to switch to “fast track” decision making. Following a chat with Samir Fares, which was followed by a lengthy telephone call with Erwin Guerrovich in London, I packed my bags and travelled to Dubai, tasked with the assignment of opening the UAE branch for Intermarkets. As the presence of Intermarkets in Bahrain became almost a duplicate of the agency that we had in Beirut prior 1975, Erwin Guerrovich joined the rest of the team in Bahrain, which became the new head office for the group.