One night, I was waiting at Dubai International Airport for a relative who was expecting me to pick her up following her arrival from Lebanon. There, I saw two ad men, Tony Camp and Joe Saadeh, walking out amongst the passengers of the Gulf Air flight from Cyprus. Out of the corner of my eye I followed their path and saw, to my surprise, Philippe Skaff receiving them both with warm bear hugs and non-stop giggles. I did not wait until after the weekend to enquire with Raji whether he knew anything about this accidental encounter. Raji was even more concerned and began his own investigation.
Our anxiety was shortened when Philippe arrived at the agency on Monday morning and went straight into a long, closed-door meeting with Raji. When they walked out, they came straight to my office, where Philippe repeated his verbal resignation, saying he wanted to establish his own agency. When asked, he admitted that he wanted to do this in partnership with Tony Camp and Joe Saadeh. I then called our lawyer and asked him to draft a termination agreement that protected Intermarkets’ clients and staff from being poached. Camp, Saadeh & Skaff was launched almost two months after Philippe signed the termination agreement. However, before the end of that year the Aujan business moved to this new agency. Adel Aujan, with whom we had met to announce Philippe’s departure and to inform him of the terms of the termination agreement, had pre-empted the legal hurdle by rushing his own termination letter to Intermarkets, accompanied by the payment of all outstanding invoices.
Camp, Saadeh & Skaff moved much faster than Intermarkets in forging a tie-up with a global agency, namely Grey Advertising. Philippe moved his own base from Dubai to Lebanon, where he made his first introductory statement by establishing the group’s head office in a traditional two-storey stone villa with a huge satellite dish on the roof and a prominent Michel Basbous sculpture in the entrance. This conspicuous statement was made in the otherwise conventional surrounding of Beit Merry, a well-known Lebanese summer resort[1]. He quickly succeeded in becoming one of the most acclaimed creative personalities in Lebanon and was always on stage picking up awards and delivering controversial acceptance speeches. In an interview with the industry magazine Arab Ad, Philippe admitted being an egotistical creative who had no allegiance to anybody but himself. He was not satisfied with the creative reputation he had acquired but was also an ecologist who had single-handedly founded the Green Party in Lebanon.
Joe Saadeh left advertising and went into the wine manufacturing business, and Tony Camp pre-maturely passed away after a long fight with cancer. Camp, Saadeh & Skaff were finally dropped from the agency name. Grey Advertising left the Beit Merry villa and moved down to Sin El Fil.
I was left with the lesson that life is about who is real, behind your back.