My first assignment at Publicite Universelle was to monitor local newspapers for coverage of the Hungarian Food Week organized by Amine Aour, one of the agency’s clients. I was instructed to flip through the pages of the Lebanese dailies and weeklies, look for reports on the event and mark them as a first step. Then I was to clip the coverage and paste it on sheets of letter-headed paper, ensuring to also paste the masthead of the periodical and its date on top of each piece of coverage.
Amine Aour was the client of Elie Nawar, and Elie was still unhappy with the prospects of my internship. In no time, I was bombarded with his criticisms for failing to spot some of the coverage. However, my first friend at the agency – the young Georges Feghali, who was responsible for the cinema advertising department – told me that Nawar was making sure that I did not receive all the publications to create an excuse (with his partner) to bring about an end to my internship.
In the meantime, and after a couple of months at Publicite Universelle, I enquired with Philippe Hitti about the possibility of coming to the office during the weekend, as I had an urgent monitoring report that I had to complete for early Monday dispatch, otherwise I would be in his partner’s line of fire. I came down from Aley that Saturday – the first day of the weekend in Lebanon – and as the lift stopped on the fourth floor, I saw that the agency door was open, and the lights were on. To my surprise, as I walked inside there was a lady in her late 50s with flashy colored blond hair sitting in the place of our petite brunette Rita. She stopped me before I even had the opportunity to ask if I had landed on the wrong floor. She picked up the phone and whispered, and in a second a man stepped out of Philippe Hitti’s room to demand why I was there. When I explained that I was coming to catch up on a delayed project and had cleared my Saturday office presence with Monsieur Philippe, the man curtly told me: “Go back home, Ammo, (uncle, a word intentionally used to intimidate) and on Monday Monsieur Philippe will tell you what you need to know.” I walked out in shock, and only then did I notice the overlay on our Publicite Universelle sign that bore the name “Publico”.
I found it extremely difficult to wait until Monday, but as I walked into Philippe Hitti’s office, he erupted into one of his amplified bursts of laughter, which made his words difficult to comprehend. Finally, he explained – while still giggling – that Publico was our neighboring agency up the street, and that they did not have a conference room at their office. The owner, Antoine Andrea, had agreed with Hitti and Nawar to use the conference room at Publicite Universelle. The good neighbors welcomed Andrea and his overseas clients on the condition that such meetings could only happen on Saturdays.
In the end, I passed Elie Nawar’s torture test when my training program was altered. So, I stopped checking for the Hungarian Food Week coverage and was moved to the creative department.
There, I was tasked with helping to look for reference photos and advertisements. Photo libraries were not known at that time and agencies had to rely on such a primitive method to help design ads. One day, Vahe Yeverian, the well-known basketball player and Publicite Universelle’s creative director, briefed me to search for a photo of a young man playing the trumpet in an outdoor/picnic setting. I looked for hours in the old magazines that were my assigned hunting ground, but to no avail.
This was a Friday afternoon, so I apologized to Vahe, and rushed to my class at AUB, haunted by the prospects of my failure. On Saturday morning, I got up very early in Aley and rushed to wake up my younger brother Raafat, who was the trumpet player and bandleader in the town’s Boy Scouts troop. I dragged him and our family poodle, Beauty, to the nearby pine forest.
The photography session that followed was animated by trumpet music and Beauty’s howling. Funnily enough, this generated the most pleasant of surprises when I got to Publicite Universelle with the processed photos and placed them on Vahe’s desk. The following week, my first ad for Sharp portable voice recorders appeared in several weeklies, signaling the start of my journey through ad land.