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Elie Khouri has an aura of cool. He conveys a sense of being calm, not easily ruffled, and having an even-keeled sense of purpose. Like a veteran tugboat captain, steadily piloting his vessel through choppy waters. Or maybe a surgeon in the operating room, his scrubs covered in blood and guts, quietly requesting a clean scalpel.

There’s little that fazes Khouri, the head of Omnicom Media Group in Dubai. Starting from zero five years ago, he has grown the firm into a media powerhouse that claims the leading spot among regional media buyers, and those who work with him say he’s done it without losing his head.

“You don’t feel threatened or intimidated with him around,” says one employee. Many other agency bosses have a reputation for arrogance, but not Khouri, he says. “He’s got very high expectations, but he always realizes what it takes for you to meet them. He gives you the resources to get there. He’s very good at giving guidance – not orders, but guidance. ... I’ve never seen him lose his temper.”

THREE’S A CROWD
Schooled in finance rather than advertising, Khouri began his professional career as a currency trader. “It was too much number-crunching. It was too boring for me,” he says. Several friends had gone into advertising and, attracted by the glamour of the profession, he took a job at Impact BBDO in Cyprus. It was 1988. He was 23 at the time.

So began his climb up the hierarchy of the advertising world. From 1988 until 2000, he split his time between the Lebanon, Cyprus and Dubai offices of Impact BBDO, finally rising to the post of associate managing director. But as the millennium neared, the advertising world began one of its periodic upheavals. One by one, each of the major networks started unbundling their media planning and buying operations from the mainstream ad agencies and combing them into the big media buying units of today. “This is when the guys told me, ‘Elie, just go and set up OMD.’”

“The guys” are the principals of regional Omnicom affiliates, who now sit on the board of Omnicom Media Group: Alain Khouri of Impact BBDO, Ramzi Raad of TBWA Raad, and Najam Khawaja and Babu Subramaniam of what was formerly the region’s two DDBs. It’s a crowd, and it wasn’t easy merging all their media operations into one company. Though the agencies are all partners or affiliates of global communications giant Omnicom, they are also competitors.

“It was three different media departments that had nothing to do with one another, three different cultures that you had to bring together under one roof,” he says. “Three partners with different agendas, different ways of doing things. It wasn’t easy, but we took the time to do it right. We spent a year talking to the different companies, looking at opportunities. We spent a year devising a partnership protocol that protects everybody’s interests.”

Omnicom Media Group, which Khouri now heads, is the parent company of leading media buying unit OMD and alternative media agency PHD, among various other communications-related subdivisions. Khouri says he rejects the term “media buying unit” in favor of “communications company,” which better encompasses OMG’s other offerings, including branded entertainment, research and digital media.

“We devise communications programs,” he says. “You have a big debate in the industry: Where does it start? Does it start with the touchpoint, with the contact point, with the consumer? ... Or does it start with the creative, and let’s see how to use it later?

“We are of the view that it has to start [by asking] who’s the consumer and how do I reach him? What’s the best way of engaging, basically.`”

KHOURI, MEET KHOURI
Elie Khouri is the son-in-law of Alain Khouri, the Impact BBDO head honcho. When he married the boss’s daughter, conveniently for her, she was named Khouri already. He met his wife in the late 1980s when she was on a training job at Impact BBDO in Cyprus.

But the marriage didn’t make his professional life easier, he says. Far from it. “This is the most difficult thing you can ever do,” he says. “Whatever you do, they say ‘Ah, he’s here because of the boss.’ So I had to pay the hard way. I had to over-prove myself. I have to make sure I’m here because of me, and not because of a family thing. And I think I’ve managed to do that over the years.”

Part of that is making sure everybody at the agency is well taken care of. Khouri argues that this, rather than his ability to stay calm, is the key to his management style. “My philosophy is that if you do that properly, then the product of the agency will be great and the profits will come at the end,” he says “If you’re focused on profits at the beginning, you’re doomed to fail.”

So how does he deal with somebody with a bad temper? How does he persuade a hot-headed employee, for instance, to cool off? His answer is telling: He doesn’t.

“To me, people are people. You’re not going to change them,” he says. “When you hire them, your job is to put them in the right place. A lot of good people are put in the wrong place, so naturally the magic of management is finding them and putting them where they should be. And if they’re not in the right place, then you have to move them.

“Fine – so you have a guy who’s bad-tempered,” he continues. “If he’s bad-tempered and that’s his character, then fine – if it’s not upsetting the environment around him and it’s not affecting his performance. If he is annoying everybody and he’s not delivering, then of course he’s in the wrong place. But if he has a bad temper and people still like him, because once in a while he has a bad temper, but generally speaking he’s a fantastic manager and leader, why not? I don’t want everybody to be like me and I’m sure nobody can be like me. You have to accept people and their differences.”

Asked what he does to keep calm, Khouri doesn’t have much to say. “That’s how I was born. ... I don’t react quickly. That’s how I am.”

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