Or should it be thanks for the memory? Either way, 1989 and 1990 are years Lebanese advertising agencies are unlikely to forget, much though they would like to do so. Maybe it is because the advertising industry here began 1989 with high hopes and expectations. Advertising had been one of the first services to be "dollarised" in late 1987 in what turned out to be a successful bid to create stability in the midst of 730% hyperinflation of the pound. A lot of new Made in Lebanon products were being brought to market, spurred by plummeting wages and the soaring cost (in pounds) of imports. So 1988 had been a good year for advertising and 1989 promised to be even better.
That wasn't what the fickle finger of fate had in mind. The good news of 1989 for the advertising executives interviewed for this survey was that they survived. Trust Advertising's Nazih Moussallem recalls driving to his office on most mornings (the shelling usually began after lunch in Gen. Michel Aoun's six months of "Liberation War" against Syria). He wanted to be on hand if business came in. Some did. Much to his surprise. Trust broke even in 1989.
H&C Leo Burnett fared somewhat better, thanks to its international budgets for brands of products of mass consumption. War or no war, those advertisers knew Lebanese needed detergents, cigarettes and, increasingly as the bombardments intensified, Scotch Whisky. The agency adopted crisis plans, according to Maher Ashi, the present head of H&C Leo Burnett, but was intact when the fighting ended. None of the staff was laid off and everyone was on full pay, he says.
Erwin Guerrovich of Intermarkets notes that international brands abandoned ideas of planning for advertising in Lebanon during this period, depending instead on advertising for the quantities of goods agents were able to move. This, however, did not hit the volume of advertising as badly as an outsider might expect. One reason, he explains, was the search by Lebanese importers or local manufacturers for cheaper substitutes for better-known brands and the need to advertise the replacements. Another reason, Guerrovich says, is that Lebanese media granted very favourable terms to advertisers to obtain their business. "It meant a little went a very long way." he says.
But 1989 was only a foretaste for worse to come in 1990, when Gen. Aoun and the Christian Lebanese Forces militia fought each other to an inconclusive standstill in February, March and April. For Jean-Claude Boulos of Inter-Regies the war came home to him on the TV news when he realised he was watching the building housing his agency going up in flames.
He was lucky because the fire spared his offices. Nonetheless, he moved key files to safety from what had become the front lines. "It was my 16th move in 16 years," he says. It is a record he has no desire to see commemorated in the Guinness Book of Records.
Others were not so fortunate. Trust and Intermarkets had offices in the same building, which was gutted by fire. Intermarkets was able to rescue client servicing and creative records and used specialists to retrieve some of the information on computer diskettes stored in a safe but damaged by the intense heat of a 9-hour blaze. Trust was totally wiped out. "We couldn't rescue a pencil," Moussallem says. Yet it is also clear from what he says that the ideas of shutting down Trust never entered his head. He set to work immediately to rebuild it from scratch. Trust's Creative Director Alain Brenas and the agency's creative talent were sent out of the country, first to Jordan and later to Cyprus, to maintain contacts with non-Lebanese clients and to hold together the creative team as a functioning unit.
Trust's greatest asset along the comeback trail was its roster of clients. "They all stayed with us," Moussallem says proudly. But the agency's accounts were a writeoff. Trust did not know how much it was owed by clients or how much the agency owed its suppliers. It took eight months of painstaking detective work to reconstitute 90 percent of Trust's financial records, according to Moussaliem.
Also gone were Trust's creative work for clients and it cost $20,000 to replace TV advertising films and other material needed to service their needs and keep the agency trading. With the Christian zone broken into two segments, account executives living in different areas maintained contacts with those clients they could reach and, in the absence of telephone, they communicated with each other and with Moussallem with citizen's band radios. In the summer of the year Trust, with a staff of 11, was able to move into refurbished offices located in the edge of what had been no-man's-land during the warfare between East and West Beirut. The creative team was recalled early the next year and Trust today has a staff of 30. The days when Trust consisted of a handful of files in Moussallem's bedroom closet are now history.
The fire kept Intermarkets out of business for only about three days, although to describe its new offices as makeshift is an understatement. They consisted of Guerrovich's beach cabana at Portémilio in the territory north of Beirut controlled by the Lebanese Forces. Other space was found in the home of Intermarkets' Deputy Chairman Raymond Hanna in Rabieh in the foothills held by Gen. Aoun's troops and in offices in West Beirut's Verdun Street.
Although no more than a score of kilometers separated Intermarkets' three outposts, keeping them in touch with each other and coordinating their activities required journeys of several hundred kilometers every few days by Sonia Chaanine. To reach Portémilio from West Beirut involved a flight from Beirut International Airport which made a wide detour over the sea out of artillery range to land at Kleyate, a small airport close to Lebanon's northern frontier with Syria. Then followed a drive south to within sight once again of West Beirut, with the return journey necessitating the same movements in reverse order. Eventually, Intermarkets was able to pull itself back together at offices in East Beirut and in September 1992 the agency came full circle by moving back to its original building, which is still being rebuilt. The fragmentation of Lebanon (according to Transmediterranean, an importer and distributor of important mass consumer brands, there were 17 distinct markets in this country in 1990!) caused lesser upheavals for other agencies.
For a while H&C Leo Burnett's Headquarters in Lebanon was Ashi's home and later clients were serviced from a hotel in the village of Baabdaat. Philippe Hitti, who heads Publicité Universelle, moved the agency to the East Beirut suburb of Sin-el-Fil to avoid a daily wait of up to six hours to cross from Gen. Aoun's territory to Ashrafiyeh, then controlled by the Lebaneese Forces. Hitti recalls the total lack of understanding by a militiaman who searched his car as he brought files accross the front line. "We have got to work," Hitti told the gunman, who displayed absolutely no concern for the plight of civilians trapped by ruinous political feuding.
The uneasy cease-fire which culminated in a swift overthrow of Gen. Aoun in October 1990 did not mark the end of the woes of some Lebanese agencies, notably those with pan-Arab networks. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 sent advertising, which had been booming in the Gulf, into a nosedive (Guerrovich reckons it fell by 65-70 percent for the rest of the year). Events in Lebanon and later in the Gulf forced H&C Leo Burnett to impose pay cuts and lay off some staff. The agency was already experiencing shortages of skills due to the emigration of key personnel who had either reached the limits of their disgust over what was happening in their homeland or had abandoned hope for the future in Lebanon.
Those who stayed behind faced a weary climb upwards, but by the end of 1991 Ashi had been able to restore salaries to pre-crisis levels.
Despite political upheavals in 1992, which witnessed for the first time since 1958 a government forced to quit by street demonstrations and legislative elections which were boycotted by most Christians, advertising remained surprisingly buoyant. This reflected the economy's underlying residual strength, although it was strength that went largely unrecognised by a majority of Lebanese (see Robin Mannock's accompanying article on the economy). The advertising spend for 1992 was estimated to be about $42 million.
How do the heads of Lebanese advertising agencies view their future? With few exceptions, they predict 1993 will be a good year with an advertising spend rising to between $50 and $60 million. Even Publirizk's Wajih Nakhle, who is pessimistic and believes 1993 will be a year of continuing recession, foresees much better times in 1994. Faith in the future likewise brought an important new player to Lebanon when Saatchi & Saatchi opened an agency in Beirut at the beginning of 1992. Saatchi's Ramsay Najjar admits it was "impossible" to begin in a normal fashion but says he and Elie Khoury, the agency's creative director, were determined to chance their luck in what Najjar describes as "the new look for advertising." Najjar and Khoury began as associates with Saatchi but this relationship has since been converted into a full partnership with the international agency.
(ArabAd)
