Adland

  According to the book Inside Collett Dickenson Pearce (2000), compiled by two former staffers – deputy chairman John Ritchie and creative director John Salmon – the motivational spark for the launch came from Dickenson. He ‘dropped in for a drink’ at Pearce’s flat in Devonshire Place one evening and said casually: ‘Why don’t we start an advertising agency?’ Rather than start from scratch, the duo acquired John Collett’s existing agency, Pictorial Publicity, which was ‘going through a very rough patch’ and had only one major client, a rather downmarket mail order company flogging an assortment of outdoor equipment, from binoculars to Wellington boots.

  While starting the agency was Dickenson’s idea, Pearce knew that there was a gap in the market. As Salmon and Ritchie put it, ‘John Pearce felt there was a crying need for an agency that could produce unusually effective results for clients who did not have a fortune to spend. He reckoned that the bulk of advertising, while based on sound strategy, was terminally dull… [He] thought there was an opportunity for advertising that was inspirational, enterprising and most of all noticeable.’

  Pearce’s masterstroke was to bring with him from Colman Prentis & Varley a laconic Yorkshireman named Colin Millward, who became the creative director and imaginative force behind CDP. A number of famous names passed through CDP – and all of them pay homage to Millward. They include the film director Sir Alan Parker, who says, ‘He was without a doubt the single most important person in the agency. It was his energy, vision and taste that made CDP what it was. He also had the good sense to employ all of us lot in his creative department.’

  Various sources describe Millward as ‘no-nonsense’, ‘eccentric’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘unruly’, ‘wise’ and ‘brilliant’. When asked why so many talented art directors came from Yorkshire, he replied that pollution covered every horizontal surface with a film of grime, so you could draw anywhere.

  In Inside CDP, another famous alumnus, David Puttnam, recalls a typical meeting with Millward. ‘I’d take an ad into his office for approval and he’d sit and bite his nails for a while and then, in his funny voice, he’d say “It’s not very good is it?” and I’d say “Isn’t it?” and he’d say “No, not very good at all.” And I’d ask “What don’t you like?” “You work it out. Take it away. Do it again. See you tomorrow.” ’ Puttnam learned from Millward that ‘competence is a point of departure, not a point of arrival’.

  As if to emphasize its kinship with Doyle Dane Bernbach, CDP was one of the first British agencies to sit art directors with copywriters – elsewhere, they were still working in separate departments. Indeed, DDB tried to buy the agency two years after its creation, but Dickenson and Pearce were disinclined to sell despite the fact that, at that stage, CDP was still debt-laden and struggling.

  Two factors that lifted the agency out of the danger zone were John Pearce’s insistence on the importance of media placement, and the launch of the Sunday Times Colour Supplement, the first colour magazine to be offered free with a British newspaper. With his background in publishing, Pearce realized that the right choice of media and the quality, rather than the quantity, of the audience were critical to the success of a campaign. The Times supplement thus became a showcase for CDP’s lavish, witty print ads for clients such as Benson & Hedges, Harveys Bristol Cream and Whitbread Pale Ale. Encouraged by the promise of additional advertising income, other newspapers soon launched their own colour supplements. In an echo of J Walter Thompson in the 1920s, Pearce considered that glossy magazines were ideal vehicles for advertisers because they often hung around on coffee tables – and in dentist’s waiting rooms – waiting to be flicked through by an idle reader.

  Blockbusters in the basement

  Alan Parker thought of CDP as a small agency that made great magazine ads when he arrived in 1968. He had started out at the age of 18 at Maxwell Clark, an agency so obscure that many employees felt it should change its name to ‘Maxwell Who?’, because that was what they were asked whenever they said they worked there. At first, Parker’s responsibilities were limited to ‘copy forwarding’, which meant dragging proofs around various different departments and getting the stamp of approval. But on his travels around the agency he saw that the creative department was ‘by far the most enjoyable place to work’, so he set his sights on getting a job there.

  ‘There was an art director called Gray Jolliffe, who later became a famous cartoonist and a great friend of mine. At the time I was just this young kid, but he encouraged me by giving me ads to do and marking them: “six out of ten, must try harder”, that sort of thing. Eventually they got pretty good, these ads, so I was made a junior copywriter. That was when Doyle Dane Bernbach and Papert Koenig Lois opened, and everyone wanted to work for them. I went for an interview at DDB and didn’t get in – but Peter Mayle [later the author of A Year in Provence], who was copy chief at PKL, hired me to work there.’

  Cultural differences between the UK agency and its American parent soon made PKL an uncomfortable place to work, so Parker decided to move on. Mayle encouraged him to go for an interview at CDP, which Parker joined almost the same week as a certain Charles Saatchi. ‘The agency attracted a lot of good people because it had a reputation for paying well,’ says Parker. ‘For instance, it got people from DDB, which was a great agency but paid crap money. CDP realized that to get talented creative people you had to pay them a decent wage, and it cracked open the industry’s pay structures. We had notoriously crummy offices in Howland Street – they looked like the canteen of a secondary modern school – but John Pearce always said he preferred to pay for people rather than furnishings. That’s how you ended up with Ross Cramer, Charlie Saatchi, Tony Brignull… this all-star creative department.’

  Parker concedes, however, that the creative rebels would never have got their often startling work past the clients were it not for the ‘fantastic, eccentric, maverick’ leadership of John Pearce. ‘The philosophy of the agency was that the account people had to sell whatever we did. They had no involvement in the creative process whatsoever; there was no research. They were simply great salesmen. It was a creative paradise – and no doubt a unique period in British advertising history.’

  Demanding at the best of times, Millward put additional pressure on his creatives by dividing them into three groups and, as Parker puts it, ‘setting us against one another’. ‘Halfway down the narrow corridor of our crummy office, I hung a string with a sign saying “The creative department starts here”. The trouble was that Ross Cramer had written the same thing on the other side.’

  Parker’s most important contribution was to turn CDP from an agency that made great print ads into one that was equally skilled at TV work. Unlike the London branch of DDB, which for a long time remained focused on the written word, CDP managed to reconfigure its creativity for the small screen. And Parker was the catalyst.

  ‘At that stage commercial television in Britain was relatively new and the commercials were very pedestrian: they were silly cartoons or someone holding a packet of washing powder. We had no history of making TV commercials, but I wanted to have a go at it. So I asked Colin Millward if we could have a budget to buy a 16 millimetre camera and a tape recorder and start experimenting in the basement. For some reason the basement at Howland Street was just a huge empty space, half-filled with junk and cardboard boxes. So I used the other half to shoot commercials.’

  His initial approach was instinctive, to say the least. ‘My art director Paul Windsor was good at lighting, and we had another guy operating the camera. In other words, I was the only one who didn’t know how to do anything. But as I’d written the things, it was obviously going to be me who shouted, “Cut!” Pretty soon I was organizing everyone: “You do this, you do that… Okay, let’s try again.” They’d look at me with raised eyebrows as if to say, “Ooh, get him!” But at that moment, I became a director. It’s strange, because my only ambition at the time was to become the creative director of the agency.’

  Dragooning agency
staff as actors, Parker grew increasingly embroiled in his experiments. He was inspired by Howard Zieff, who’d shot commercials for Doyle Dane Bernbach and Wells Rich Greene in the States. But union rules meant that Parker’s ads had to be remade by a professional production company. ‘This was frustrating because I thought our raw little pieces were better than the remakes. It all changed when John Pearce was showing a client around the agency one day. They got to the media department and there was no one around – the place was deserted. He asked, “Where is everybody?” and someone said, “They’re all downstairs making a commercial with Alan.” I was doing a commercial for Benson & Hedges Pipe Tobacco, set in a Russian embassy before the revolution, and I had the media department dressed up as ambassadors, with all the ladies from accounts in long dresses and tiaras… it was ridiculously elaborate.’

  The next day, Parker found himself in an office with John Pearce, Colin Millward and Ronnie Dickenson. ‘They said, “Alan, we want you to leave.” I thought, “My God, I’ve never been fired in my life.” Then they said, “We want you to start a television production company. We’ll give you an interest-free loan to get you going and we’ll give you some work.” I was probably less excited than they’d anticipated, because all I wanted at that point was Colin Millward’s job. As far as I was concerned, they were giving me the boot in the most elegant way imaginable.’

  The Alan Parker Film Company went on to shoot award-winning ads for the likes of Birds Eye Beefburgers and Heinz Spaghetti. ‘Almost everything was 30 seconds in those days – you were lucky to get 45 seconds or even a minute. It’s a real art form to be able to tell a story, make a point, make someone laugh and sell something in such a short period of time. It can also be frustrating – which is why my ads increasingly began to look like miniature films.’

  In the book Rewind (Jeremy Myerson and Graham Vickers, 2002), Parker is praised for introducing a ‘new, more “realistic” style of TV commercials: engaging mini-dramas that brought a touch of wit and credibility to even the most contrived scenarios’. With his hit musical Bugsy Malone (1976), Parker became one of the first British commercials directors to cross over into feature films. But others were hot on his heels.

  Lowe and beyond

  CDP not only attracted talented copywriters, photographers and film-makers, but also the people who nurtured them. Take account man David Puttnam for instance. As Parker recalls, ‘He believed so strongly in the photographers he commissioned to shoot his ads that he finally decided to devote his time exclusively to promoting them. People tend to forget this, but he was the first truly professional photographers’ agent in London.’

  Puttnam later went on to produce Bugsy Malone, as well as Parker’s antithetically gritty second feature film, Midnight Express (1978). Puttnam also produced The Duellists, the big-screen debut of another commercials director, Ridley Scott. For CDP, Scott made a series of nostalgia-bathed commercials for Hovis bread, set in the cobbled streets of an archetypal English village.

  ‘Ridley went into films just after me, but he continued to make commercials, which I didn’t,’ says Parker. ‘I was stung by an early review that said something like, “Alan Parker comes from advertising, which gives us a useful stick to hit him with”. Directors who came out of advertising were considered crass – we were not real filmmakers. Ridley said the critics were just jealous because we made more money than them.’

  The pair had occasionally talked about going into business together. ‘Ridley made the pretty films and I made the ones with dialogue, so between us we reckoned we had it sewn up. But we kept arguing over whether it should be called Scott Parker or Parker Scott, so it never happened.’

  Instead, in 1968, Scott formed the production company RSA Films with his brother Tony. It remains one of the world’s leading commercial production companies, with offices in London, New York and Los Angeles.

  As a commercials director, Scott’s work had been championed by another account man at CDP – Frank Lowe. While account executives were under orders not to interfere with the creative department, the ‘suits’ were in fact the agency’s secret weapons, as they had been charged with selling even the oddest, most challenging work to clients. According to Parker, Lowe not only defended but demanded outrageous creative work.

  ‘When he joined the agency I was told I wouldn’t like him, because he had opinions,’ chuckles Parker. ‘I said, “He won’t get away with that here.” On the day I met him he was dressed entirely in black, because it was the anniversary of the plane crash that had killed the Manchester United team [on 6 February 1958]. Of course we hit it off straight away, and he’s been one of my closest friends ever since. He was a passionate advocate of great creative work.’

  By the early 1970s, CDP was no longer a small agency. Outgrowing its cramped Howland Street offices, it had moved to larger premises on Euston Road. It had also developed global reach, thanks to a partnership with Paris agency FCA and subsequent similar deals with shops in Brussels, Amsterdam, Milan and Tokyo. Colin Millward’s creative role had broadened, with John Salmon taking over the creative direction of the London office. Fortunately, Salmon’s standards were every bit as high as those of his colleague.

  John Pearce suffered a heart attack in 1971 – and although he returned to the agency when he recovered, it was in a more consultative role. Eventually, Frank Lowe was installed at the helm. ‘To most creative people at the agency, Frank was simply the best account man they’d ever met,’ recount Salmon and Ritchie in Inside CDP. ‘He cared passionately about the work and would only present the agency’s clients with advertising that he believed to be outstanding.’

  In his own contribution to the book, Lowe reaffirms the inspiration provided by the uncompromising Colin Millward and the galaxy of talents that swirled around the agency. But Lowe also takes time to praise CDP’s clients. He writes pointedly: ‘[They] seemed to value the opinion of their agency and, on balance, would go along with it. They didn’t argue about money all day long trying to get things cheaper, they just wanted the best because they knew it would work for them. They always found a little extra time if the agency didn’t feel they had cracked the problem. This, in turn, always seemed to pay off.’

  After a golden decade, the 1980s began gloomily for CDP. Frank Lowe left the agency to set up his own operation with planner Geoff Howard-Spink and several members of the creative department (including Alfredo Marcantonio). Among many other achievements, Lowe’s agency went on to create a popular and enduring campaign for that ‘reassuringly expensive’ lager brand, Stella Artois.

  On 10 September 1981, at the age of 68, John Pearce had a second heart attack – this time fatal. The story was not over, but an era had ended.

  As with every other hot shop in advertising history, CDP could not maintain its creative dominance forever. Though it continued to produce some excellent work throughout the 1980s, the spotlight moved slowly away from the agency to illuminate other areas of the London advertising scene.

  The master planner

  Although it was no slouch on the creative front, the other British hot shop of the 1970s made its mark on adland history with the development of a rather more esoteric craft. Stanley Pollitt, of the agency Boase Massimi Pollitt, is generally considered the father of planning.

  In fact, to be fair, he shares that honour with Stephen King of JWT. To complicate matters, the term ‘account planning’ was conceived by a third man, Tony Stead, at a JWT brainstorming session in 1968. This led to the merger of the agency’s marketing, media planning and research departments into a single unit under the heading of account planning. For the purposes of concision, however, we’ll concentrate on Pollitt – an appealingly colourful character – and the remarkable agency he co-founded with Martin Boase and Gabe Massimi.

  Physically, Stanley Pollitt resembled a cross between the British comic Eric Morecambe and the American journalist AJ Liebling (he even shared Liebling’s passion for boxing). Donnish, balding, overweight, scruffy and bes
pectacled, he was rarely seen without a cigarette and enjoyed a glass of wine with lunch. His wayward dress sense and lack of presentation skills (he is described as ‘inarticulate and boffin-like’) could not disguise his acute intelligence, however. A colleague summed him up as ‘an orderly mind in a chaotic body’. He had a rather raffish background: the son of an artist, he was born in Paris in 1930. He attended St Paul’s College and then Cambridge, intending to become a barrister. Instead, through a family contact, he ended up working at the London advertising agency Pritchard Wood & Partners. It was here that he developed the concept of account planning.

  Fortunately for us, account planning is more interesting than it sounds. It concerns bringing the voice and the desires of the consumer into the advertising process. In the sixties, this meant taking researchers out of the ‘back rooms’ of agencies and putting them next to the account teams as campaigns were being developed. In the book Pollitt on Planning, edited by Paul Feldwick in 2000, it is described as ‘the greatest innovation in agency working practice since Bill Bernbach put art directors and copywriters together in the 1950s’.

  To précis Pollitt’s own description, the planner is a research expert who relies on first-hand interviews as well as data to develop an in-depth understanding of consumers. The planner forms a ‘threesome’ with the account manager and the creative and is expected to express a clear point of view on the direction of the campaign, rather than merely supplying useful statistics. An insight from a planner can inspire a creative team. The planner also analyses the effectiveness of campaigns.