Tales of the wandering adman

The year was 1965 and the place was Beirut.


I was sitting at the “Horse Shoe Café” on Hamra Street with my father and a friend of his. The fellow was one of the Middle East’s most renowned admen who had been invited to join us as for months I had pestered my father with my obsession to become an adman myself. “OK - you want to go in this crazy profession? I’ll introduce you to someone who can tell you everything you need to know – and I sure hope you’ll change your mind and join a more honorable trade”.
Like all Lebanese dads, mine wanted me to be a lawyer, a doctor or an engineer.
An hour and two cappuccinos later, I knew what a rough layout was and what a copywriter does. I had an idea of media, client service, the “art department” and the average cost of a TV commercial. My mind was set: Adland, here I come!
In the Egypt of my childhood, I had always been attracted by brands, packaging, illuminated outdoor signs, wall painted adverts, magazine and newspaper ads; all of which I could memorize precisely. At the age of 14, without really knowing what I was doing, I had written my first ad and had it published in my school magazine, “to give the publication a more professional look”. And when my family moved to Lebanon, I was thrilled by the addition of TV and Cinema commercials. Beirut in the 60’s was an aspiring adman’s dream; and I was lucky to be able to fulfill mine.



OK – that’s the glossy side of the story; now let’s go down reality lane.
After knocking at several doors, I joined a small ad agency in downtown Beirut (Souk Ayass) as a trainee/media assistant. In summary, this meant filling out media order forms which I had to deliver to newspapers together with the corresponding printing blocks; definitely not the glamorous job I had hoped for. But I frequently sneaked in the “art department” and befriended the designers. They were good at their craft, however I felt their copy was feeble; so I offered to help. Soon after, I got my own stool and table in the art department and became the “copy guy”. Gradually, I started meeting clients to “sell” my ads until, three years later, one of them made me an “offer I couldn’t refuse”, and which of course I accepted.
I moved back and forth three times from the agency to the client side. And with each client experience – irrespective of how enriching that was – I felt like a fish out of water and run back to the agency.
In 1978, I was living and working in Canada when my friend Alain Khouri called and offered me to set up an agency in Kuwait as part of what was at that time the “Impact” network. After much thinking and a trip to Kuwait to get a sense of the place and people, I said yes. That decision and the ensuing set of incredible circumstances changed both my personal and professional lives. Three months after I joined “Impact” to set up the Kuwait agency, BBDO came knocking at our door as part of their search for a regional partner. We must have done something right because by the end of that year, we became IMPACT/BBDO. The summer of 1982, I went to Harvard for a course in Marketing Management and after a four-year stint in Kuwait, I was offered to join BBDO’s International Group in New York.
The trip from downtown Beirut to Madison Avenue had taken me a short fifteen years.

A year in New York, four years in London as Deputy Managing Director of BBDO Europe, then back to New York to help win the Apple account, align more Pepsi and Gillette business across the BBDO agencies – by that time, excessive travel had worn me out and I needed to be home for a while.
“Cossette”, the largest agency in Canada, offered me that opportunity and a VP–Director of Client Service position in their Montreal office. But after three years of Air Canada, L’Oreal, Yoplait, Club Med and several major local accounts, I started missing the international action and when BBDO asked me to re-join, I grabbed their offer.
In 1990, I was appointed President and Chief Operating Officer of BBDO Europe, based in Paris. A year later, I joined BBDO Worldwide Board of Directors in New York – the first Middle Eastern to sit on the Board of an international agency and the youngest Board member of my company back then. Beirut was far in time, but never too far in my mind.
The 90’s were a great decade for me in every respect. BBDO Europe was a terrific experience and it was rewarding to have contributed to winning worldwide clients such as Mars, Bayer, Total, Seat, Mazola and Wella while growing BBDO’s relationship with Pepsi, Henkel and Gillette among many others. It was equally gratifying to have expanded BBDO’s presence across Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Africa and completing several acquisitions in various marketing-communication disciplines in the largest European markets.


Forty-five years later, the year is 2010 and the place is Beirut; again.

Some things change, others don’t.
I’m sitting at “Costa Café”, previously known as “The Horse Shoe”.
Except for the café’s new name; the street is as buzzing as ever and Beirut is still Beirut.
The media revolution we have witnessed worldwide has transformed our profession totally, though the fundamental purpose of marketing-communication remains the same. Resilient as we are, we’ve smoothly moved from printing blocks to blogs, unscathed by the tornado of change.
After ten magnificent years in Europe, traveling across the globe and amassing an incredible amount of air miles, I re-joined Impact/BBDO in 2000, as Regional Director and Senior Consultant to the Group. I spend a good deal of time in the Middle East region, working with the Directors of our twenty operations and more often with Alain Khouri, the Group Chairman; my friend and business associate for more years than we both wish to count.
Our life is molded by the encounters we make and by how we pursue them. Providence has put on my path a good number of exceptional individuals. I opted to make a few of them both my friends and colleagues and they reciprocated generously. Ever since I met Alain, my career and his were intertwined many times and in many ways. We can complete each other’s sentences and when silent, each other’s thoughts. It is the kind of intellectual partnership I wish for everyone in this business where – no matter how good you are – you still need another viewpoint, a different perspective, a challenging thought, an endorsement of your idea or simply a sounding board you can trust. Other remarkable people I was fortunate to work with at BBDO include Vilim Vasata, Willi Schalk, Allen Rosenshine, Tom Watson of Omnicom - my mentor for 30 years - and the late French adstar of all times, Philippe Michel.
I have learned a lot from those great people and used my experience to form my own opinion on what counts the most in what we do in this profession: the work.

Creativity in all its forms – including astute usage of knowledge, research and insights – is central to building business success for brands and clients. However, when I talk about creativity, I shun from the mundane, the superficial and the superfluous. Only big ideas build big business – ideas which are specific and proprietary; ideas capable of occupying a turf no other brand can capture; a terrain so fertile you wouldn’t take any risk of leaving unattended.

Broadly speaking, I do not like advertising that attempts to tell me how to lead my life: “elevate your ambitions”, “be yourself”, “aspire to this or that”…I think that this trend which started with Nike’s “Just do it” – a truly powerful and sustainable line – was poorly extended to other brands. Many of those campaigns seem to either give meaningless orders or provide generic, baseless, patronizing advice. They often state the obvious and hence, are incapable of capturing an exclusive communication turf.

I like communication which inspires rather than pontificates. For example, David Ogilvy’s best known ad for Rolls Royce had this beautiful headline: “At 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.” One of today’s Rolls Royce ads reads as follow: “For power, style and presence, a Rolls Royce Phantom has only one serious rival: the person who owns it”. Needless to tell you, if I own a Rolls Royce or aspire to have one, the last thing I want is some silly copywriter telling me that I have style…

I am not good at giving advice (ask my son), but if you twist my arm here’s what I would tell aspiring creative people: your imagination and your intelligence are only a base. A ton load of knowledge is what gives you substance – and culture is what gives you style. So, keep learning. And never, ever stop reading.
Pablo Picasso (borrowing from a quote generally attributed to Romanian sculptor and carpenter Constantin Brancusi) said: “When we are no longer children, we are already dead”. I’ve been really lucky in that I had the opportunity to work all those years at a profession that I enjoyed and one that always made me feel like a kid.