Adland

by Mark Tungate

  In the 1950s, advertising agencies had their own research departments or worked with closely held research subsidiaries. This changed in the 1960s, when consumer goods companies began developing their own, in-house research departments, or paying for detailed studies of target consumers. To reflect this shift, agencies began to reduce their research staff. Rather in the way that their media departments would become separate entities later on (see Chapter 10, Media spins off), some agencies saw their research departments break away to form independent companies competing for business in the open market. At the same time, research methods and the means of analysing data were becoming more sophisticated. This created a paradox. Pollitt wrote: ‘[As] more data relevant to sharper advertising planning were coming in, more and more people qualified to handle it were leaving the agencies.’

  Working on accounts at Pritchard Wood, Pollitt felt there was a danger that agencies would begin to pick and choose data, bending it to suit the direction of their thinking rather than the other way around. ‘I decided therefore that a trained researcher should be put alongside the account man on every account. He should be there as of right, with equal status as a working partner.’ Pollitt referred to this new type of researcher as ‘the account man’s conscience’.

  When he set up the agency BMP with two colleagues in 1968, it was structured from the very start on an account manager/account planner team basis. ‘From the outset at BMP we added an important new dimension to the planner’s role, which has almost come to be the dominant one… we started to involve [them] more closely in the development of creative ideas.’

  A smashing agency

  Boase Massimi Pollitt started in true late-sixties style. In order to advertise the new agency, a fleet of chocolate-brown Mini Coopers emblazoned with the initials BMP was driven around London. Account man Martin Boase, creative Gabe Massimi and, of course, planner Stanley Pollitt left Pritchard Wood & Partners with seven other members of staff. All 10 were shareholders in the new operation.

  Martin Boase says, ‘We were determined to produce not only original creative work, but also soundly-based advertising, which had provoked the whole account planning idea. In those days there was an awful lot of formulaic, soundly-based advertising and a great deal of original yet highly indulgent work. Pollitt realized that by introducing the planner into the creative process you could be original yet strategic. Most start-ups are about people wanting to run things themselves or simply make money. We were actually rather more crusading: we wanted to create an entirely new type of agency.’

  Gabe Massimi left the agency about two years into its existence. He was replaced as creative director by John Webster, who had also come over from Pritchard Wood. Webster, it transpired, was an advertising genius – particularly in the field of TV commercials – and he became one of the industry’s most revered creatives. (Sadly, he died shortly before I began researching this book.)

  As with the work of CDP, anybody who was a kid in Britain in the 1970s is likely to have Webster’s TV spots engraved on their memories. He created an animated, sunglasses-wearing polar bear for the soft drink Cresta, a large yet benign orange-haired Yeti called The Honey Monster for Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal and – best of all – the Smash Martians. These animated tin men would roll around laughing as they watched films of earthlings washing, peeling and boiling potatoes. The Martians, of course, used Cadbury’s instant Smash mashed potato – just pour on boiling water and give it a stir.

  The irony and self-deprecation of Webster’s TV spots – laced with a subtle dose of surrealism – combined the key ingredients of classic British advertising. In Webster’s heyday people really did claim that the adverts were the best thing on the telly. Many British commercials still put entertainment first – and often succeed in looking as if there’s nothing being sold at all.

  In the late 1970s, BMP set up an outpost in Paris. It was unsuccessful, but the Paris link persisted and in 1977 French communications conglomerate Havas bought 50 per cent of BMP. Two years later, Stanley Pollitt died of a heart attack at the age of 49. This shock forced the agency’s remaining founders to rethink its future direction. Boase says, ‘We wanted to spread the shareholding to the generation who had come into the agency after us.’ BMP bought itself out of Havas for £1.2 million and went public. After two years, it had a stock market capitalization of £50 million.

  In the 1980s, BMP became embroiled in a tempestuous round of negotiations with another French agency, BDDP (see Chapter 8, The French connection), which had been busily buying up its shares. Boase fought off the hostile takeover by selling to the company that had once been Doyle Dane Bernbach. It is now the London outpost of DDB Worldwide. It remains one of the most awarded London agencies.

  The Saatchi saga begins

  The agency with the intriguing double surname came later: in the beginning it was Cramer Saatchi. Charles Saatchi and Ross Cramer met at the London outpost of the US agency Benton & Bowles, which Saatchi joined in 1965. Charles was the copywriter of the duo. Having left school at 17 and hot-footed it to the States, Charles, like all the advertising stars of his generation, was electrified by the work being done there by the likes of Bill Bernbach. When he got back, he was ready to give the London scene a similar shot in the arm. Saatchi was 22 when he arrived at Benton & Bowles – one year older than another future star, John Hegarty, who was already working at the agency. Hegarty at first assumed Saatchi was an Italian name. (‘I expected some bloke who couldn’t spell and still lived with his mother,’ he chuckles today.) In reality, Charles and Maurice Saatchi and their older brother David were born in Baghdad to an Iraqi Jewish couple, Nathan and Daisy. Forced out of an increasingly anti-Semitic Iraq after the Second World War, the family moved to the UK, where Nathan had started a textile business. Thus the brothers grew up in leafy Hampstead, a perfectly English childhood.

  After a brief period working with Hegarty at Benton & Bowles, Charles was teamed with senior art director Ross Cramer. Before long, they found the atmosphere at Benton & Bowles too stultifying for their radical ideas and moved to where the action was: Collett Dickenson Pearce. Here the pair produced a string of remarkable ads, including racy ads for Ford – comparing various models to rival cars, an American technique quite unheard of in the UK at the time – and witty ones for department stores Selfridges and Lewis’s. The D&AD awards flew in. Eighteen months after their arrival at CDP (following a brief but unsatisfactory stint at a smaller agency) Cramer and Saatchi went into business with their own ‘creative consultancy’.

  Cramer Saatchi was based above a fast-food joint in Goodge Street – in the same building where David Puttnam had set up his photography agency and BMP also occupied floor space. The pair recruited John Hegarty and another young adman called Jeremy Sinclair. The latter was to have a major impact on the Saatchi saga by devising one of Britain’s most famous print ads.

  The background to the ad that fuelled the Saatchi legend could not have been more mundane. While waiting for one of his children at the school gates, Ross Cramer had fallen into conversation with another parent, a woman who worked at the Health Education Council. When she discovered what Cramer did for a living, she mentioned that her boss was looking for an advertising agency. Soon, Cramer Saatchi was applying its forceful words and images to public health advertising. One print ad was a picture of some noisome brown sludge being poured onto a saucer, accompanied by the words: ‘The tar and discharge that collects in the lungs of an average smoker.’ The antismoking campaign attracted considerable press coverage – but not as much as the agency’s best ad for the HEC.

  It’s a strikingly simple image of a young bloke in a V-necked sweater. His palm rests tenderly on his enormous pregnancy bump as he gazes at the camera with a doleful, resigned expression. The text reads: ‘Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?’ Capturing at once the downside of permissiveness and the nascent women’s liberation movement, the ad presaged the more thoughtful 1970s after the extend
ed party of the sixties. Years later, the BBC voted the image one of the top 10 British ads of the century. At the number one position was another Saatchi ad, ‘Labour isn’t working’. But by then, the agency had evolved.

  When Ross Cramer left the agency in 1970 to embark on a career as a commercials director, there was one obvious candidate to replace him. Maurice Saatchi had followed a different yet convergent career path to that of his brother. Less flamboyant and more strategic, he had graduated from the London School of Economics and joined a small trade press company called Haymarket Publishing. He was tasked with relaunching a dusty periodical called World Press News, aimed at journalists and advertising people. It was transformed into Campaign, the advertising trade magazine. Provocative and punchy, equal parts gossip and news, Campaign was the mirror of the business it portrayed. It quickly became the bible of British adland (which it remains). Maurice was a success.

  And yet he was clearly confident enough in his brother’s abilities to leave Haymarket and become the co-founder of Saatchi & Saatchi – a name ‘so bizarre no one will forget it in a hurry’, as Charles pointed out.

  On 11 September 1970, Campaign carried the front-page headline, ‘Saatchi starts agency with £1 million.’ The brothers also took a one-page advertisement in The Times. It was possibly the only time they had to pay for column inches. The Saatchis were news, and would remain so for years to come.

  Mrs Thatcher’s ad agency

  Along with people like John Hegarty and Jeremy Sinclair – who stayed on from the Cramer Saatchi period – the new agency attracted an impressive line-up of talented young players. One of them was ebullient Australia-born account man Bill Muirhead, who recalls, ‘Everyone was about my age and they had a certain attitude. I’d been at Ogilvy, where they had all this rule-book stuff. But we took the rules and threw them out of the window. We were always getting into punch-ups with regulatory bodies.’

  Another recruit was a personable media director named Tim Bell. Highly charismatic, Bell later went on to become one of Britain’s foremost public relations practitioners. In advertising history, however, Bell’s name is most often associated with that of Margaret Thatcher – and with the 1979 Conservative Party election campaign. Although Charles Saatchi led the creative effort, Bell presented the work to the Conservative Party leader. As far as Margaret Thatcher was concerned, Tim Bell was the face of the agency.

  Saatchi & Saatchi was appointed by the Conservatives at the prompting of Gordon Reece, the party’s head of communications and the man who is often credited with honing Mrs Thatcher’s steely image. As a sizeable British-owned agency that had developed a reputation for creativity, Saatchi & Saatchi met all the party’s requirements. Bell made his first presentation to Thatcher in June of that year.

  Much of the Saatchis’ work for the Conservatives was exemplary, but the poster that the BBC chose as the advertising image of the 20th century was the idea of deputy creative director Andrew Rutherford. He came up with the line ‘Labour isn’t working’, above a photograph of an unfeasibly long and winding queue outside an unemployment office. (The Labour party publicly attacked the photo as fake, which was beside the point: like all the best advertising, the poster crystallized a perceived truth.) In reality the poster only ran at a handful of sites, but the media furore it provoked made it one of the most cost-effective ads in history. The Saatchi & Saatchi campaign didn’t exactly win the election for the Conservatives – the strikes and unrest during ‘the winter of discontent’ did that – but it was certainly a factor. When Mrs Thatcher came to power on 4 May 1979, the Saatchis could take at least part of the credit.

  A few years earlier, in 1975, Saatchi & Saatchi had merged with a stock-market-listed agency called Compton, part of the larger Compton Advertising of New York. The deal gave the New York operation 26 per cent of the merged entity – and Saatchi & Saatchi access to a juicy list of clients, including Procter & Gamble and Rowntree Mackintosh. It also meant that Saatchi & Saatchi had gone public.

  Around this time, the company gained a sharp young financial director in the form of Martin Sorrell, educated at Cambridge and Harvard. Sorrell’s business acumen would help the Saatchis realize their increasingly ambitious expansion plans. As if to confirm that an era of growth and prosperity was about to begin, the agency moved out of its Regent Street base and into Compton’s larger offices in Charlotte Street.

  In 1982 Saatchi & Saatchi won the British Airways account – which was to become one of its signature pieces of business. The first TV commercial was genuinely spectacular. It began with an ominous shadow passing over the streets of Britain as if a giant spaceship was about to touch down. People emerged from their houses to peer anxiously up at the sky. Finally, the entire island of Manhattan came in to land at Heathrow Airport. ‘Every year,’ the endline explained, ‘British Airways flies more people across the Atlantic than the entire population of Manhattan.’

  The grandiose TV spot was in proportion to the magnitude of Saatchi & Saatchi’s global ambitions. The eighties had begun.

  07

  Eighties extravagance

  ‘A question of prestige’

  The 1980s are often regarded as the golden age of TV advertising. Cable television was in its infancy, expensive global campaigns were newly fashionable and agencies could afford the best directors, many of whom were honing their craft, creating shimmering images for music videos. Advertising and MTV – which launched in 1981 – pushed the products and the lifestyle that seduced a new breed of young, upwardly mobile consumers. This, then, was the time of the yuppie.

  In the United States it was as if the world had been turned on its head – London’s burgeoning creativity was inspiring Madison Avenue. ‘For a long while TV ads were little more than moving print ads,’ said Phil Dusenberry, who was the creative powerhouse behind BBDO through this period and beyond. ‘I remember sitting in a darkened room in the 1970s looking at a bunch of ads from Britain and saying to myself: “This is the kind of stuff we should be doing!” It was so much more entertaining than most of the advertising that was coming out of the States at the time. TV advertising didn’t really get into its stride until the 1980s. By 1984 it was really going places.’

  But London ad agencies were indulging in more than just a frenzy of creativity. The entire restaurant and bar scene of Soho seemed to be catering solely to media and advertising people – and to those who wanted to bathe in their champagne-tinted glory. Smart young agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi and Bartle Bogle Hegarty had chosen Soho as a base over the advertising industry’s previous centres of gravity, Mayfair and Covent Garden. This was mainly because all the cutting rooms and photography studios were in Soho – the area’s traditional status as a red-light district, still tawdry around the edges, meant that minimal rents were charged for maximal spaces. Soho, effectively, became London’s Madison Avenue.

  Neil French, a well-known copywriter who worked at the London agency Holmes Knight Ritchie in the late seventies and early eighties, says nostalgically, ‘I guess what made the era special was that so many erudite and talented blokes happened to be in the right place at the right time, when the art of communication was limited to press, posters, and TV – with radio if you knew a famous comedian to deliver the script. Life was so much simpler, and the only distractions were the pubs, the Zanzibar, and hordes of ra-ra skirts.’

  Writing for The Independent, Stephen Bayley referred to the ‘Porsche-driving, champagne-drinking, coke-snorting image of 1980s advertising’ (‘Goodbye to all that’, 22 December 1996). Recalling the era, Bayley pointed out: ‘As UK advertising agencies battled to win the increasingly large number of multinational, billion-dollar accounts that decided to centralize their business in London during the 1980s, entertaining clients became a high priority. So, in due course, did entertaining staff. An agency’s capacity to party came to symbolise its capacity to do everything else: win business, attract the best staff, make advertisements… It was all a question of prestige.’
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  An article in Campaign a few years later featured anonymous accounts of unwise behaviour. ‘My creative director at the time used to drink gin as if it were tap water,’ said one art director. ‘After all, how can you come up with a great campaign or a unique idea unless you’re under the influence of some form of mind-altering drug?’ A young personal assistant stated that when she entered the advertising industry, in around 1982, ‘cocaine was considered a relatively harmless drug’ (‘The plague of addiction’, 2 October 1992).

  For the majority of people in the business, however, the 1980s were more about cash than coke. In the decade from 1978, total spend on advertising in the UK grew by 315 per cent. It was a time of mega-mergers, going public and achieving global reach. And at the centre of it all was Saatchi & Saatchi. As Stephen Bayley wrote, ‘Everything the agency did in those days was larger, brasher and more confident than anyone else.’

  The Saatchi saga continues

  In the spring of 1986 a salivating article in Time magazine commented: ‘In this era of the entrepreneur, nearly everyone and his brother are thinking big. But Charles and Maurice Saatchi, London’s most successful admen, are thinking gargantuan’ (‘The British admen are coming!’, 28 April). It confirmed that the brothers were on track to turn Saatchi & Saatchi into the biggest advertising agency in the world.

  The main subject of the article was the Saatchis’ ‘estimated US $100 million acquisition’ of the US agency Backer & Spielvogel, best known for its Miller Lite ads. The deal put Saatchi & Saatchi at the number three position in the listing of the world’s biggest agencies, behind Japan’s Dentsu and the Madison Avenue monolith Young & Rubicam. The same piece defined the media image of the brothers. ‘The reclusive Charles drives to his office every day accompanied only by his pet Schnauzer and often spends his lunch break playing chess,’ it claimed. ‘The more outgoing Maurice has excelled in courting outside financing for the company’s rapid growth.’