Our visits to Geneva became routine, as we had to go for briefings, submissions, and regular P&G reviews. We soon got to know and befriend most of the members of the Middle East marketing team, as well as Bill Bowld’s communication troops. We had great fun waiting to accompany Bill in his Rolls-Royce or rushing to conclude our Thursday meetings with him, since he was sensitive about not missing his weekly facial clinics. In fact, one-day Bill was unusually delayed at a planned meeting with the Intermarkets team, which had arrived from the Middle East the previous evening. When he finally walked into his office, he was very apologetic. He made sure that we had all settled in with espresso cups in our hands, when he explained – to our great surprise – that he had been delayed by the management of Geneva Zoo, as they were extremely slow in completing the paperwork necessary to allow him to take delivery of a caged lion cub, which he had bought and was to deliver as a birthday present to a friend.
On another visit, Bill introduced us to a fellow countryman named Najib Fayyad, who had joined the Middle East marketing team that same week. As we stood chatting with Najib, he told us that on his first day at P&G he was introduced to Herbert Schmitz in the office lift. Schmitz shook Najib’s hand and said: “How many cases have you moved, Mr. Fayyad, since you have joined?” Not familiar with P&G’s company jargon yet, Najib could not wait for the lift to stop, to burst with a nervous reaction threatening that he wanted to immediately resign if, despite his HEC diploma, his job description included moving cases of Ariel, Tide, and Pampers.
P&G required its advertising agencies to compile showreels of all competitive brands that were active during the previous quarter and prepare presentations highlighting their advertising claims, levels of spend and the estimated success or failure. Obviously – and as always – concluding these presentations with learnings and recommendations. This exercise in the P&G bible was called “copy review”, and agencies were required to prepare a similar exercise called “media review”, which focused on reviewing the media investment of its main competitors. This being based on studying the comparisons of “shares of spend” versus “shares of voice”. In simpler terms, we were required to compare our investment behind a brand like Ariel, for example, with those of OMO and Persil. Then repeat the exercise to gauge how many minutes of advertising the money allowed us to buy in comparison to the time that OMO and Persil had available to tell their respective stories to Arab housewives.
Being new to all these requirements, P&G accepted that we skip the first quarter and report six months after our appointment. Accordingly, all our involved agencies spent a great deal of time in preparation. At the time, there were no monitoring companies from whom we could source the competitive spend figures and TV commercials. We had to do most of that in house at our own network agencies. Video-taping machines were not common, so we ended up borrowing films from friendly TV stations against a deposit. To help complete this mammoth task – while trying to avoid complete depletion of our goodwill with certain friendly media groups – we resorted to the intensive exchange of information to source the regional TV commercials from one market each, and in rotation. When we were all ready with our individual market reviews, the time had come to travel to Geneva to present our first copy review.
We planned the flights with MEA exactly like our first trip. Flights from Jeddah, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Dubai all connected in Beirut, and we spent the time on the flight to Geneva rehearsing our presentations. We were all dressed in casual jeans and sweatshirts, so when we got to the immigration kiosks the Swiss police officers raised their eyebrows at all these half-shaven young men exchanging loud-pitched conversations from one line of just arrived passengers to the other. They became surprised further to discover the different passports we were carrying and our scattered ports of embarkation. The pink code was pressed to alert the customs hall on what to expect. When the first of our suitcases was inspected, all the customs officers in the hall huddled to look at its contents. Its owner got questioned on the reason for bringing many rolls of film into Switzerland. By the time all our suitcases lay open on the inspection tables, the red alert button had been pushed by the different customs inspectors – more than once – and the tone of the usually polite and hospitable Swiss customs officers had completely changed. We were escorted into interrogation rooms and individually questioned. P&G had sent one of its young marketing assistants to meet us and from behind the glass partition he saw our luggage being searched. He also saw us being escorted into inspection rooms. He called P&G’s Government Affairs Department and reported in a concerned tone what he had witnessed. In the meantime, the senior customs inspector called us all together and announced that we should never bring this number of films into the country in one day any time in the future. He explained that films needed to be viewed by customs before they were cleared for entry. He concluded by saying they were keeping all our films for inspection, stressing that this process might take a couple of days. However, he wanted us to know that when ready, they would call us to come and collect them. We tried to explain that we were visiting Geneva only to screen these films to P&G and that this was an integral part of a meeting that had taken half a year to prepare. We also assured the officer that immediately after this meeting we were all booked to fly back to our respective countries of residence. If we did not have the films, the purpose of the review would fall apart. The dialogue with the senior Swiss officer was becoming louder in tone and sounded like it was heading down a risky path, since each member of the agency team was showing his frustration. At that crucial moment, a man suddenly walked into the room accompanied by another customs officer. The man turned out to be a P&G employee who was well known to the Geneva Airport customs police. The three people stepped aside and quickly engaged in a whispered conversation. As a result, the P&G executive asked us to accompany him outside, assuring us that he would have our films delivered before the planned copy review.
When we walked into P&G’s headquarters the next morning everyone in the building seemed to have heard the story of our previous day’s airport adventure. P&G employees stepped out of their cubicles to look at the Arab visitors with sheepish smiles. To our luck, the copy review ran smoothly, as the presence of Intermarkets agencies in all the key markets was seen as a quantum leap from the days when Shamli, Saffouri & Partners were handling all of P&G’s strategic brands from a one-office operation in Beirut. It became quickly obvious that the days of playing a safe media game were gone. The number of P&G spots on TV stations timidly carrying the regional media label was noticeably reduced, while the number of creative buys on Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar TV stations had significantly increased. This helped in achieving much better targeted frequency and higher recall, although this last conclusion was based on day after recall studies that P&G conducted for every launch. To our delight, Intermarkets passed the second P&G test with flying colors.