At AUB we were regular readers of Outlook, the university journal that was published weekly by a group of volunteer students. Outlook had regular advertisers, including Parker, Fred Perry, and Dunlop. When the issue for May 1968 came out, I read a recruitment ad for P&G, which got me so excited. I spent that week working on putting together my first CV. When I became happy with the final attempt, I mailed it to the Geneva address that was provided and waited patiently. The response came quickly in the form of a letter inviting me to an interview the following month at the Phoenicia Hotel.
In time, I received a note stating that I had to contact a gentleman by the name of John O’Keeffe at the Phoenicia. Later, I found out that a team of P&G marketing executives were concluding a market visit and that evening were attending a farewell dinner hosted by P&G’s Lebanon agents, the Al Saeed family. My interview time was limited to one hour, which made the whole exercise short but packed.
O’Keeffe turned out to be an Englishman who spoke in a distinct Queen’s English, and this required my full attention so as not to miss anything that was being said. My interviewer took a quick look at my CV, which he pulled out of his old-fashioned briefcase, and asked me to tell him about my professional experience, since he expressed interest in the fact that I had been working while pursuing my university education. He was keen to know details about the campaigns I had conducted, and their results. He also spent time listening to my description of Lebanese village folklore, as I had told him about my hobby of hiking. Then came a knock at his door from one of his senior colleagues, who announced that Nouhad Al Saeed had arrived and was waiting for them in the hotel lobby. As we stepped out of the lift, I saw two more P&G executives bidding farewell to Samir Ayash and Hanna Sawan, two of my AUB colleagues, who turned out to be the only other shortlisted applicants.
After a couple of weeks, I learned that both Samir and Hanna had received employment offers and were packing to move to Geneva where they were to be posted. Then I received my own letter which said that P&G were impressed with my advertising experience to the extent of wanting me to join their appointed advertising agency in Beirut. The letter further explained that they had taken the liberty of writing to Mokhtar Shamli, the managing partner of Shamli, Saffouri & Partners, requesting him to take me onboard as a member of the agency’s account team. So, I went to my interview with Mokhtar Shamli who, as soon as I stepped into his office, startled me with a statement that he seemed to have prepared in advance. He said that he was a very close friend with my current boss, Philippe Hitti, and accordingly he did not want to stab him in the back by offering me the job suggested by P&G. I walked out of that meeting feeling that all my dreams of a glamorous job in Geneva had been shattered in two minutes.
Years later, on a Friday in Saudi Arabia, I went down to the swimming pool of Al Kandara Hotel to find Samir Ayash, who had a pool membership since he had been transferred from Geneva to work out of the P&G distributor’s office in Jeddah. Samir explained that he was living not far from the hotel and the swimming pool was the hangout for him and many of his friends. Samir wanted to know why I hadn’t joined their agency and what I had been doing since the interview at the Phoenicia. Naturally, I told him about my move from Publicite Universelle to HIMA and the merger that created Intermarkets. During this chat, I boasted about the blue-chip accounts handled at my agency, including Unilever. Samir, who was a smart witty guy, made it a point to mention that if an agency was involved with Unilever – even as far away as Alaska – it would never stand a chance of picking up P&G business in his region.
Samir’s assignment in Saudi Arabia was soon completed with success and he was summoned back to Switzerland. Then one day while I was visiting Jeddah, I opened a local newspaper at the hotel on an early Friday morning and was shocked to read a bold headline calling for the closure of the Tide detergents factory. A fatal accident had taken place at the entrance to the factory the previous night, and this was the “nth” time such an accident had occurred at this blind spot leading to the factory, which had been the subject of ongoing public complaints. This triggered a bold headline from Jeddah’s leading daily newspaper, Okaz. Friday being the weekend in Saudi Arabia, I knew that no one from the Abou Daoud organization would be alerting P&G about this. And by the time the local team returned to their offices on Sunday and rushed to share the news, the P&G offices would be closed until the following day, which represented precious time lost when considering the crisis management environment, they were all in.
At that moment, I remembered having kept Samir Ayash’s business card in my Saudi Arabian business card holder. I quickly found it and sent a telex reporting the incident. After a short while, Samir called me at the hotel to thank me and asked for a complete translation of the Okaz story, knowing that it was not possible to scan or photograph it in Jeddah on a Friday. By the time my translation was received in Geneva, Samir and a team of P&G legal and PR experts were already dashing to the airport to fly to Jeddah.
These incidents were my early introduction to the P&G friends’ group, if such a group had ever existed.