It took me many weeks to forget the expression on the face of Ben Baldwin, Uncle Ben’s export director, when I had told him what my boss and local client had insisted, I say when asked about Alf Laila Wa Laila (Lebanon’s Playboy magazine). The seasoned American export director had a look of disbelief on his face, but he stopped short of challenging me, Philippe Hitti and Charles Geadah out of respect. In fact, no one in their right mind could have ever believed that Lebanese housewives were the prime readers of a nude magazine, when the newsstands were loaded with wholesome female periodicals.
I, the AUB student who had spent my childhood and youth listening to sermons and lectures about the need to be honest and truthful, presented such a flagrant lie to an American who had been raised in the Bible Belt and had never missed Sunday School during his entire childhood. The lie was made worse by the fact that he had entrusted us with thousands of dollars to spend on his behalf. Those were the long hours during which I felt a desperate need for any source that helped me quote facts and figures to confirm what Arabs read and watch.
A few months later, our agency was invited to “The Kangaroo Seminar” organized by Les Editions Orientales at the Phoenicia Hotel. A young general manager from that publishing group named Nahi Ghorayeb kicked off the gathering by explaining why they had named the event, which brought together Lebanon’s main advertisers and all the advertising agencies, the way they had. They wanted to announce that the two main weekly magazines within their group – Al Ousbou Al Arabi and Magazine – had been leaping forward like kangaroos. They had overtaken all other weekly Arabic and French language magazines, according to a readership survey that had just been completed by Associated Business Consultants (ABC). Ghorayeb then invited a director of this company, Victor Khoury, to introduce ABC, which had been established by himself and his brothers, Emile, and Maurice, in 1962. He explained the types of research they conducted and who their clients were (at that time they were mainly FMCG marketing companies). Khoury explained that media research was new to the Lebanese market, stressing that Les Editions Orientales was amongst the first publishers to call on ABC to confirm the profile of Al Ousbou Al Arabi and Magazine readers.
I was completely absorbed as he explained the direct interview methodology they used, including the random sampling technique they had to resort to secure non-biased results. When he reached this part of his presentation, Khoury flagged the problems they faced due to the lack of an updated population census and the social taboos that made it difficult to interview women in conservative population clusters. The timing of the field work, the coding and the computer analysis were finally explained, before getting to the main objective of the seminar, which was sharing the results of the survey with advertisers.
At that stage, Nahi Ghorayeb joined Victor Khoury to translate the numbers and percentages and to put the profile of readers, their purchasing power, and their consumption habits into focus. By doing so, the publisher wanted us to leave the seminar convinced of the need to challenge our inherited media planning habits, which concentrated on La Revue du Liban to reach the well-to-do Lebanese families of Achrafieh, or Assayad and Al Chabakah to reach readers of Arab magazines.
I went back to Publicite Universelle keen to find out more about any entity involved in market and media research. However, the situation gradually improved when I moved to HIMA, where I discovered an ongoing relationship with Market Research Organization (MRO), a research company based in Lebanon and Jordan that was owned and managed by Michael Farsoun, a friend from secondary school. After the merger and my move to Intermarkets, three more research organizations were added to my repertoire of research suppliers: the Pan Arab Research Centre (PARC), based in Kuwait and active in Lebanon and all across the GCC; the Amman-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), owned and managed by Tony Sabbagh, another secondary school acquaintance; and the Cyprus-headquartered Middle East Market Research Bureau (MEMRB), led by George Vasiliou, who often visited Beirut and dropped in to meet his friends – the management team at Intermarkets. This was the time when I was jumping on every opportunity to enrich my academic knowledge with practical experience and I joined the teams of every research assignment Intermarkets was commissioned to handle for clients such as Gillette, Unilever, Rothmans, Sopexa and others.
When I moved to Dubai and began operating on my own, I realized how vulnerable I had become after losing my group’s permanent and instant support. I quickly felt threatened when my main local competitor, Publi-Graphics, were offered – by their international affiliate McCann Erickson – the results of a global survey that extended to the Middle East, detailing changing consumer trends. Not before long, I persuaded my group management to start planning our own research project to collect facts and figures for justifying our campaign planning decisions, which were previously made based on past practices and what the competition was doing. We decided on PARC as our partner for this project and its Kuwait office would manage it. The PARC Kuwait operation was very close to Intermarkets Kuwait as its CEO, Fouad Sahyoun, and our Youssef Habbab were business and family friends. The national partners of our Kuwait agency, M.H. Alshaya Co., happened to be the national partners of PARC as well. All these factors, as well as our introduction to the dynamic Sami Raffoul, who was assigned to lead our research project, ensured the assignment got off to a flying start. Sami and I quickly partnered during the planning stage and sooner than expected I found myself applying for a visa – on behalf of Sami – to visit the UAE to finalize the preparation of the survey.
A few days after Sami’s arrival, I received a call from the UAE’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in Abu Dhabi, summoning the two of us to its headquarters in the capital.
The thought of an interrogation session at the CID HQ scared me, so I called the office of Intermarkets’ national partner, Juma Al Majid, seeking his advice on what needed to be done. Abou Khaled was blunt in his response. He had no experience with the CID and did not know of any way to help us cancel our summons. He encouraged us to go and to not be afraid. To tell the facts as they are, and not to attempt to outsmart the police for any reason.
Sami and I drove to Abu Dhabi practically in silence, as both of us were completely taken up by our inner thoughts of what we were about to undergo. On arrival in Abu Dhabi – and after taking time to find the location – we were met by a young plainclothes national officer who was extremely polite in his welcome. After waiting in a room that had an old-fashioned coat hanger with a large mirror as its central piece, Sami and I began to whisper to each other, enquiring what could be the reason for their delay in talking to us. Sami stopped halfway through a sentence, and when I turned to look at him to see why the sudden silence, I saw him pointing with his eyes towards the top of the mirror. I traced his line of vision, only to notice a microphone hidden at the edge of the frame.
Finally, the officer re-appeared and escorted us to two adjacent rooms. The moment I sat down, a second officer – who was very similar to his colleague – sat across the desk and bombarded me with questions about what part of Lebanon I was from. Where had I studied and had I done any military service? He then suddenly asked me if I had fought with any militia before leaving Lebanon? Then he moved to the survey and asked who was financing it. He asked why we wanted to know which newspapers people read and what TV stations they watched? He also asked me about Sami and when I first met him. What do I know about him? Are we members of the same Lebanese political party?
After almost two hours, the two officers exchanged rooms and the one who was interviewing Sami came in to say: “Sami said this, and said that; what can you add?” On the drive back to Dubai, I learned from Sami that my interrogator asked him the same questions. It took five days for the green light to be given, and then Sami and his PARC team delivered a survey that added real value to the professional reputation of Intermarkets.
In the absence of reliable government statistics, during the late Eighties (1987-1988) advertisers, such as Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Gillette, P&G, Nestlé, and their global agencies got together in London to agree on the need for one common source of demographic and economic data for the region. This led to the establishment of a Middle East Research Forum (MERF), which met annually to exchange experiences and agree on next steps. In 1989, during a visit to London at the invitation of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry to deliver a paper on marketing in the GCC, I met with MERF leaders and managed to convince them to move the management of their research initiative from London to Dubai, so it could be operated with the close involvement of the IAA UAE Chapter. PARC was appointed to conduct annual media surveys for the GCC, and these became the reliable source for all.
In the UAE – and due to the large Asian population – English language newspapers had more readers than the Arab press. Traditionally, Khaleej Times – published by the Galadari family out of Dubai – enjoyed more readers than Emirates News from Abu Dhabi. Until Obaid Al Tayer, Juma Al Majid and Abdallah Al Rostamani joined forces and launched Gulf News. This new daily was well managed and edited, so it quickly picked up circulation, which was confirmed by one of PARC’s media updates. To celebrate its achievement, Gulf News carried a full-page advertisement announcing it had won the readership race.
This led Mohammed Galadari, chairman and editor-in-chief of Khaleej Times, to file a court case claiming millions of dirhams in damages from Gulf News and PARC. I rushed with the IAA UAE Chapter board to meet with Mr. Galadari and try to convince him to withdraw his court case, since it could set a precedent and hinder all media research in future. We failed to convince him, but we did not give up. As the date of the court hearing drew closer, we intensified the lobbying at the level of the elders of both families. On the last day before the hearing, we succeeded in getting Mohammed Galadari and Obaid Al Tayer to agree to a face-to-face meeting at my office which resulted in the two gentlemen shaking hands and an agreement to withdraw the court case.