Chapter 87\ Creativity under fire

When we returned from Dubai, I went back to my own flat in Aley and resumed commuting between my hometown and Beirut. On many days I found myself unable to reach the Mirna al Chalouhi building, which was at the boundary of Bourj Hammoud, due to the battles that had flared up the previous night between Kahale and Dahr Al Wahsh, or the roadblocks around Jisr Al Wati in Sin El Fil, which we always tried to avoid. One day, I bumped into an old Boy Scouts friend by the name of Nadim Andraos, who had tried to contact me while I was in Dubai. Nadim seemed delighted to find out that I was back in Beirut and invited me for lunch at his summer home in Mhaydseh off Bikfaya’s main street. The entire Andraos family were there for the traditional Sunday lunch, and this gave me the opportunity to be introduced to Sami Jalkh, the cousin of Nadim. Sami had been invited by Nadim as he had been waiting to meet Nadim’s advertising friend since my time in Dubai.

Sami was an industrial chemistry graduate who had been busy – since his graduation from the UK and return to Lebanon – overhauling and modernizing the Andraos family soap business. He was so keen to discuss what was on his mind that he began briefing me right there and then. I was torn between observing courtesy towards my hosts, who had invited me to join their family’s Sunday lunch, and their cousin, who did not want to waste a single moment securing the badly needed marketing support he required for the new brand he was preparing to launch.

Sami had completed his first step of diversifying their factory’s production and was ready to launch a powder detergent that was suitable for laundry, dishwashing, and cleaning floors. This new product had the brand name “Perlex”, and Sami wanted me to handle its launch. We carried on with our meetings at my office throughout the week, where we were joined by Nahi Ghorayeb, Alain Brenas (who was filling in for his father who had traveled to France) and Fadia Kattar, who was the account executive assigned to help me on the project. Our brainstorming led to a launch plan that was to kick-off with a TV burst, which would then continue as the backbone of the entire brand introduction and sales generation follow-up. As TV jingles were popular at the time, we agreed on Fouad Joujou producing the commercial. Fouad, being another colleague from my Boy Scouts days, recommended Elias Rahbani to compose, orchestrate and record the jingle, since it was the era of the Baalbek International Festival, Fairuz, and the Rahbani Brothers. The shoot took place at a flat on Rue Jeanne d’Arc and the cast was an Eastern European model who played the role of the mother, while the young daughter and son of the flat owner played the role of her children.

There was not much to boast about the story or the sales pitch, but Elias Rahbani’s lyrics and music instantly topped the Lebanese folk charts. Young and old were humming the tunes of “Kteer kteer kteer binaddif Perlex”. Mothers replaced traditional nursery rhymes with the Perlex jingle to put their babies to sleep. Repeat orders started pouring in at the Andraos Soap Factory and Sami kept inviting the entire TVC team for drinks to celebrate the campaign’s smashing success. This could have caused us to collectively lose our creative sanity as we dived in to assist Sami in finalizing another new product – the Perlex soap bar. This had been the core business of the factory before Sami came on board. Luckily, the agency insisted on a pre-production product test, so we distributed hundreds of samples all over Lebanon, then went back to collect user feedback. The result was largely negative, which Nahi attributed to the fact that the brand name had been recently established as a 3-in-1 household cleaner, which sort of repelled any association with the world of beauty soaps, soft skin association and cosmetic fragrance. The Perlex soap bar was killed right there and then, in its cradle.