Chapter 35\ The first major advertising merger in the Middle East

At a time when I was becoming busier and busier with Shell and Ceylon Tea, I sensed that my two bosses, Raymond Hanna, and Nahi Ghorayeb, were fully engaged elsewhere. I tried to find out if the two were working on a new business project, as all of us at HIMA were hopeful that the agency would grow further. However, my eagerness to know came to a quick conclusion.

When the two owners called all the agency’s staff for a general meeting in our board room, we walked in wondering what to expect, but Raymond Hanna quickly announced that he and Nahi had great news to share with all of us. After a brief recap of HIMA’s history, the two partners shared the various scenarios they had considered to speed up the development of their agency and make it more dynamic. But with the same speed they had framed the growth scenarios, they killed each one of these suggestions on the basis that their aspirations were much bolder.

Firstly, they dwelt on the option of organic growth and hammered home the point that they had dropped this thought, since none of HIMA’s current clients, including Shell, Ceylon Tea, Parker, Faberge, Westinghouse, Fred Perry, Clip or Halim Hanna & Company, had such potential. Nahi then touched on the option of acquisition but said that at present there were no agencies in Lebanon that were interesting options – not in terms of their billings, client list, or even talent.

Their joint conclusion was that a Merger was the best solution, and their explanations revealed that each of the partners had a different perception of what they wanted to announce to their staff, and what they wanted to achieve from potentially going to bed with another agency. They discussed a list of active Lebanese agencies, with a particular focus on Pharaon Advertising, although in conclusion both Raymond and Nahi hinted that this pioneering agency had aged and was ailing.

The other agency of focus was the one they kept referring to as MEMAS. Since not everyone at HIMA was familiar with this strange name, Nahi Ghorayeb explained that it was known to have been born out of the house agency of Khalil Fattal & Fils (KFF), the leaders of Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) marketing in Lebanon. MEMAS was described as the largest in terms of headcount, with the most spacious ad agency office in Beirut’s town center, close to Martyrs’ Square. More important was the fact that MEMAS was the agency handling an array of major active accounts, namely Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Beecham, Rothmans, Swiss Air, Pan Am, Dewar’s, Cadbury, Gillette, and many others.

Then came the official announcement that on 1January 1970, HIMA would be merging with Pharaon Advertising and MEMAS to form a new agency called Intermarkets, whose offices would be at the current offices of MEMAS on the second and third floors of the Homsi building on Damascus Street.

A week later, I accompanied Nahi Ghorayeb on an introductory and exploratory visit to our new office. Nahi introduced me to our new colleagues and, as a spontaneous first impression, I felt MEMAS to be cold and stiff in comparison with my earlier environments, both at Publicite Universelle and the current familial atmosphere at HIMA.

Throughout the drive from Hamra, I kept repeating the name of Erwin Guerrovich, the big boss of MEMAS, which had been communicated to me by Nahi, hoping to memorize it. On arrival at the second floor of the Homsi building, we were received by Raymonde Attar, Guerrovich’s personal assistant, who offered us coffee while we waited to be shown into her boss’s office, which was located directly to the left of the reception. Guerrovich looked to be European, as he was of Slav origin, but he spoke fluent Arabic, although the everyday language at MEMAS seemed to be French.

I noticed that Erwin was a sharp and bold leader. His straight-to-the-point brief on why we were all merging was crystal clear and extremely convincing, without any of the beating around the bush I had first heard from Raymond Hanna. His introduction made me, and Nahi get up immediately, eager to make the merger and the vision of Intermarkets a reality. In fact, we got up because one of Guerrovich’s generals stormed into the room and began reciting what seemed to be a client’s complaint, before Erwin stopped him by pointing to Nahi, who Darwish Massoud had already met, and introducing me to this high-pitched visitor. Massoud eyed me from top to bottom, as if saying, “ours is an agency of seasoned advertising people and not young men”.

Later, Nahi told me that Erwin had studied in England and trained at few companies that were represented by KFF in Lebanon. His father was the managing director at KFF, and this facilitated matters for the only son, who upon his return in1960, joined the company’s pharmaceutical department. Then, in the following year, he was promoted to the head of their advertising department, which he spun out into MEMAS. By doing so, he became a partner with KFF, Darwish Massoud and Gaston Chikhani. Erwin was known to walk the entire length of the long corridor at MEMAS with a stiff expression on his face, never returning a greeting to any of the employees who saluted him.

Darwish Massoud, on the other hand, was the mister fix it of MEMAS. The firefighter who rushed to the scene of any complaining client, the door opener for large government advertising tenders, and the person who could get you prime seats at the Baalbek International Festival or on any overbooked flight out of Beirut. In parallel, Massoud had his own clients, such as Pan Am and KFF corporate, which he looked after. In later days, I was told that Darwish had been the perfect student of his first boss, Jean Fattal, the founder of KFF, who believed that every human being has a price, and all that an aspiring manager needed to control situations was to have a person skilled in discreetly negotiating the price of people next to him.

We left Erwin’s room escorted by Raymonde Attar, who took us on a tour of the office. Darwish Massoud’s own room was located at the other end of the reception area, next to the wing of Elie Jouneh, the financial manager of MEMAS, and his team. This reception and management area led to a long corridor that spread from one end of the second floor to the other, with offices scattered along both sides.

The first office we entered housed two senior account directors, both of whom introduced themselves with a distinct Egyptian dialect. Raymond Accad was in his late 50s and had left Egypt during the Six-Day War, hoping to stay with close relatives in Lebanon, and had been there ever since. The second, Salim Sednaoui, was the son of Sednaoui Pacha, the owner of Sednaoui Department Stores, which had been nationalized together with the totality of the Sednaoui estate following the 1952 military coup that overthrew King Farouk. Salim and his mother had fled Egypt and come to Beirut, where they settled in two separate Verdun Street apartments. Salim, an avid piano player, had to live on his own as no one seemed to like him playing the piano day and night. At the agency, Salim was the typical old bachelor, with his entrenched habits that clients and office colleagues had to accept.

In the next office, which was linked to its own reception lounge, sat a newcomer who had moved in just as the merger was announced. Samir Fares, the larger-than-life third pillar of the merger, represented Pharaon Advertising and was the late Fouad Pharaon’s nephew. Samir came to Intermarkets with his portfolio of mainly PR clients, including the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC), which was the partner of Aérospatiale on the development of the supersonic passenger transporter, Concorde.

The second room of this office wing had been allocated to Nahi Ghorayeb, and across the corridor was a long room with a balcony overlooking the gardens of Monot Street, which was introduced as my room and that of Melhem Moussallem.

Next, our tour led us to another wing with a reception area, where our Hilda Jabbour was going to sit, and which led to an executive office that was being prepared for Raymond Hanna. The corridor ended with a spiral staircase leading to the third floor. The agency staff referred to it as the 747 staircase. It resembled the one on Pan Am’s jumbo jets, which they had seen in documentaries and international magazines.

Under the spiral staircase was a larger wing that housed the agency’s media department, which was under the leadership of Sami Chlala, the dynamic executive who soon afterwards was elected to the presidency of the Lebanese Ad Agencies’ Employees Syndicate. That space also housed the traffic department, with its own entrance towards the Homsi building’s service elevator and staircase. The traffic head was an old-time Assyrian called Issa Antar. Here there was an independent wing accessible from the Intermarkets side, but which had its own independent entrance. This housed the sister agency SOLIP, managed by Rene Trad and assisted by Fadia Kattar. SOLIP used the media, creative and traffic services of Intermarkets to service its clients.

On the way back to Ras Beirut, Nahi and I couldn’t stop thinking about how our tomorrow was going to be. Intermarkets was blending three strong Lebanese agencies to form the strongest communications powerhouse, not only in Lebanon, but in all the Arab world. Personally, I knew that my regional experience was much more up to date than any of the founders, while Nahi saw the real opportunity in his super salesmanship skills, which were unmatched by anyone in the new agency. Both of us saw the very promising potential, so we drove back to base wanting and waiting for D-Day.