The Monday meetings at Baroody Brothers & Company proved to be more stimulating than Professor Nimr Eid’s Marketing 201 course at AUB. In place of the text-book case histories about American companies, the brainstorming sessions at my client’s office were local market focused. Instead of the one-way lectures, our meetings were driven by two and three-way dialogue as I started to provide my point of view on plans and campaigns.
Added to this was the generous hospitality of coffee and cold Pepsi, which were always served as we settled in, even without the local habit of enquiring what the guest would like to drink. I was tipped off about this ritual being an integral part of these weekly meetings while walking with Philippe Hitti to my first meeting. Most meetings included a surprise, which consisted of our host producing different snacks of the brands the company distributed from his desk drawer. He would offer the two of us Baby Ruth or Butter Finger bars and honey-glazed Cracker Jack popcorn.
The venue had one advantage over the Humanities Building classrooms. After climbing the steep stairs from Avenue des Français, visitors were greeted by cardboard crates piled floor-to-ceiling with products distributed by Baroody Brothers & Company. The contents of these boxes gave the place the welcoming fragrance of American toiletries, which included the full range of Pond’s and Cutex products that the company distributed.
Every Monday, walking through this narrow corridor, we passed by the office of Raja Baroody, the son of Benjamin Baroody, the co-founder of Baroody Brothers & Company and the maternal uncle of Emile. Raja was always waiting to greet us, and so was Salwa Khalaf, the company’s life-long PA, who instantly signaled our arrival to her boss.
Emile Baroody’s smile greeted my boss as he walked into his office, which had an impressive brown desk, a big mahogany-colored Chesterfield three-seater, and two armchairs of the same design. Emile Baroody and Philippe Hitti seemed to come prepared with a few jokes to exchange at the beginning of each meeting. These were accompanied by their customary low volume giggling, especially from the side of the ad agency’s boss. The exchange of pleasantries gradually moved to a factual review of the past few weeks’ activities, which covered campaign results, along with sales figures by region and how these compared with previous campaigns. For a student of advertising like me, the most important aspect of these meetings was how my two professors used the learnings of past weeks to dynamically review, amend, fine-tune, and even replace plans with such punctuality.
Philippe Hitti’s added role in the weekly meetings was one of market intelligence. He always came armed with stories about other trading organizations, business in the various regions, as well as the latest on the media scene. It was Philippe’s advanced information about upcoming TV programs that led to the making of Adib Haddad (who became known as Abou Melhem, the Lebanese villager who, along with his wife, was at the center of more than 1,000 episodes of the soap opera “Yesaad Masakoum”, which aired on Channel 7 in the Seventies and Eighties) as the spokesman for Maxwell House coffee.
His information also led to the sponsorship of the American sitcom “The Danny Thomas Show”, which featured the adventures of a Lebanese immigrant to New York during the Fifties. Danny was frequently visited by his uncle Tannous, who came from his home village in Lebanon, which made this Arabic subtitled program very popular amongst television viewers in Lebanon.
However, there were two sticky topics which kept emerging during my first few weeks at these Monday meetings. The first related to when Publicite Universelle should expect Baroody Brothers & Company’s support with regards to General Foods’ advertising account moving from the globally aligned Grant’s Advertising & Associates to its own clients’ portfolios.
The second was personal, as Philippe Hitti was very keen to see Emile Baroody invest in his real-estate development project at Jouret Broumana.