Chapter 85\ Shredding QAT Leaves with Moulinex

The Dubai agency continued to grow and attract people from all around the Intermarkets network. Samir Fares, one of the founders and the agency’s vice president responsible for corporate affairs and public relations, moved from Bahrain to Dubai and settled into a modern flat at the tip of the creek, establishing a regular lunch table for himself at the Carlton Tower Hotel. Then one day I received a call from a family friend who said that her brother – a graduate in industrial chemistry – had been in Dubai for a couple of months on contract with a UAE industrialist who had plans to establish a beauty soap factory. The machinery he had ordered from Europe had been indefinitely delayed since the ship that was carrying the cargo was involved in a major accident and sank. The friend wanted to know if I had an opening for her brother at Intermarkets.

Tony Housseini came in for an interview the following morning and I asked him to stay, making him the first industrial chemist to convert to advertising. Tony was assigned to work with Samir Fares, whom he found to be his God-sent coach because of his mastery and love of PR, which was unique at the time. Tony quickly picked up the ropes of professional PR and became a typical case of “like teacher, like student”.

We also hired a British lady to be our English copywriter, a couple of designers and finalizers, and a young accountant named Mohan to assist Nicolas Majdalani. Then one day Nahi Ghorayeb contacted me from Beirut to announce that we had won the account for Moulinex, the French electronic appliances company. This was great news, as it was a very active brand and it had been some time since we had won a major account. I was personally excited because I had been involved with Moulinex while handling Fontana at Publicite Universelle and knew Sami Ghorayeb, the Moulinex agent in Lebanon and the company representative for the Middle East. I was familiar with Sami Ghorayeb’s style of operation, as well as his regional distributors network and their markets.

To kick off the relationship, all the general managers of Intermarkets’ agencies flew to Paris for a client orientation. The Gulf dealers also attended, and it was great fun getting to know them at their favorite joints in Paris – not only in the office environment. On our return, we were quickly submerged by Moulinex in all our markets. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were the most demanding, but other markets emerged, some of which Intermarkets did not have a physical presence in. Yemen was one such market and was assigned to me.

Sami Ghorayeb, who was orchestrating campaign progress with the agency, asked us to visit the Moulinex agent in Sanaa and deliver copies of all the TV commercials in our film library to him. While we were there, we were also required to investigate why he had requested commercials for machines that Moulinex had never sold in their market. On my first day in Yemen, I went to meet the Moulinex agent, who was very happy to receive the commercials and to find out that these were being hand-delivered by the new agency. During our discussion, I received the answer to Sami Ghorayeb’s question. In Sanaa they had booked 365 spots on national television. This meant a Moulinex spot at prime time, every evening. The dealer did not care what product they showed, as every airing brought crowds of buyers to their showrooms and their salesmen sold people machines, they had never thought of buying. Yemeni families were even buying the Moulinette, which they used not for preparing kibbeh, but for shredding qat to allow their elderly to chew. The dealer then took me on a market tour, which was concluded with a qat chewing session. 

I went to sleep at the newly opened Ramada Hotel and when I woke up, I thought I had gone blind overnight. I was not able to fully open my eyes, so I got up and walked slowly to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot and extremely painful. I called Nadim Hassan Ali, our Hams affiliate, only to discover that he was away on a British American Tobacco market tour. To my luck, Nadim’s wife, Aida, took my call and when I shared my problem with her, she asked me to get ready and said she would pass by to pick me up and take me to an eye doctor. After some time, Aida arrived in her Land Rover and rushed me to what she described as the best eye doctor in Sanaa. 

We walked into a crowded clinic with many people seated on the floor. The nurse, in a dark-colored Yemeni veil, allowed Aida to walk straight into the doctor’s consultation room. The doctor was busy cleaning the eye of an old lady, which was covered in a puss-like coat. He suddenly jerked when he discovered that strangers had invaded his consultation room. After a couple of minutes and a quick explanation from Aida, the old lady was ejected from the consultation chair, and I was sitting in her place. The doctor, who prioritized the checking of my painful eyes in response to Aida’s insistence, did not sanitize his testing equipment, which he pulled out from the old lady’s eye and moved to mine. He finally prescribed a cleaning fluid and a topical cream, which we bought from a pharmacy on the way to my hotel. 

Upon arriving at the hotel, I was handed four telexes sent by Erwin Guerrovich, who had moved to Bahrain. Erwin was chasing me to call him at Intermarkets Bahrain and when he did not hear back from me asked me not to return to Dubai but to fly to Bahrain instead, as he wanted us to meet. I waited for the Sanaa telephone operator to link me with Eddie Moutran’s house, where Guerrovich was staying. I explained the problem with my eyes, suggesting on delaying the meeting until I felt better, but he insisted on having the meeting at the earliest. 

The next morning my eyes were in a much worse condition, but I still took the early Gulf Air flight to Bahrain where Erwin was waiting. He wanted our meeting to be a private one, so he asked Eddie Moutran, whose desk he was sharing, to leave the two of us alone for a private chat. The Intermarkets president and CEO explained that our network had grown as a result of my personal initiative to challenge the “let us stay within the safety of our homes” mentality; to move out and be able to serve our clients. First to Bahrain, then developing another agency in the UAE, which led to regional expansion. He had called me because he felt that the time had come to pull our network agencies together, stressing that I was the right person to do it. He then added that the situation in Lebanon seemed to have calmed down, so he and I needed to plan to go back to our home base. 

That evening, at the residence of Eddie Moutran, despite my now-more-complicated eye infection, we celebrated my promotion to vice president of regional operations.