Adland

by Mark Tungate

  Whether the image was accurate or not, it was the one that became fixed in the minds of journalists: Charles busy creating behind the scenes, while the more extrovert Maurice, with his trademark heavy-framed spectacles, fronted the company. They were the most famous admen in Britain, running an organization that was no longer a mere agency, but a global advertising empire. Their motto was ‘Nothing is impossible’; and it seemed to be the case.

  As well as Backer & Spielvogel, the group snapped up another US agency, Dancer Fitzgerald, and the giant Ted Bates Advertising – a deal that cost it US $450 million. It also bought management consultants, researchers and direct marketing operations. Its standard policy was to pay half the asking price up front and the rest in instalments, ensuring the loyalty of existing management for a fixed period.

  By the end of 1986 Saatchi & Saatchi PLC had spent US $1 billion acquiring 37 companies. It had 18,000 employees in 500 offices across 65 countries. But the Americans had grown wary of the group, which had waded into the stable, cloistered environment of Madison Avenue and begun dismantling and reconstructing agencies. As a result of these reshuffles, clients occasionally found themselves in bed with their competitors. Some of them leapt right out again.

  In 1987 – in a move that in hindsight seems to typify the excesses of the decade – Saatchi & Saatchi decided to buy a bank. It approached Midland, the fourth largest bank in Britain. The overture was summarily rejected, to derisive asides from the City. This setback prefigured a turning of the tide for Saatchi & Saatchi. In September 1987, the stock market crashed.

  For a while it looked as though Saatchi & Saatchi would weather the storm – then all hell broke loose. Alison Fendley writes: ‘In 1988 Saatchi & Saatchi was… the biggest advertising group in the world. Three years later, its shares had lost 98 per cent of their value and the company was no longer number one.’ The advertising business was experiencing its worst slump since the war and the Saatchi organization was being dragged down with it. In 1989, after 18 years of consecutive growth, the company issued its first profits warning.

  Although, like Charles, Maurice had sold some of his shares in the company, he was still chairman and CEO. Instead of walking away from the wreckage – as both of them could easily have done – the brothers sought outside help. They brought in Robert Louis-Dreyfus and Charles Scott, from a Pennsylvania-based research company called IMS, as respectively chief executive and finance director. The two newcomers accepted the challenge of bringing the group back from the brink – and Scott remained to take on the role of chief executive in 1993 when Louis-Dreyfus was lured away to help the ailing German sportswear firm Adidas.

  According to Alison Fendley, the relationship between Maurice Saatchi and Charles Scott became strained, as Saatchi worried that Scott was not doing enough to put the company back on the right track. In the end, though, it was not this uneasy partnership that forced Maurice to leave the agency he had co-founded – but American shareholder activism. A group of rebel stockholders represented by David Herro decided that in order for the company to start over again, Maurice Saatchi had to go. His impressive salary, his flamboyant lifestyle and his tense relationship with Charles Scott were all produced as evidence against him. Acting in his favour was the support of important clients – including British Airways and Mars – and many members of staff, who saw him as the figurehead and brand identity of the company.

  It was not enough to convince the shareholders. In January 1995, the news emerged that Maurice had been ousted in a boardroom coup. The media lapped up the story – after all, Maurice Saatchi had always been their favourite adman – and even the satirical Private Eye magazine paid him a backhanded compliment with the sardonic headline, ‘Man with glasses leaves job’.

  Maurice Saatchi did not let matters lie. Shortly after his ousting, Time magazine reminded its readers of the first line of the novel Damage, written by his wife, the bestselling novelist Josephine Hart: ‘Damaged people are dangerous, they know they can survive’ (‘Damage and Destruction’, 23 January 1995). And so he did. Saatchi still had loyal friends, in the form of Jeremy Sinclair – who had been with the agency since the Cramer Saatchi era – Bill Muirhead, and David Kershaw, an account executive who had risen through the ranks to become head of the London agency. They quickly began drawing up plans for Saatchi’s return as a partner in a new agency. Charles, now more embroiled in the world of art than in that of advertising, lent his support to the business. After operating for a brief spell under the name The New Saatchi Agency, M&C Saatchi sprang to its feet in 1995 as an international agency, with offices in London and New York. One of the first things it did was to win back the Saatchis’ most iconic account, British Airways.

  Today, in the typically self-contradictory fashion of the advertising industry, two Saatchi-branded entities exist: Saatchi & Saatchi and M&C Saatchi. Those who know the background to the story can tell them apart – anybody else has a right to feel confused. For identification purposes, M&C Saatchi bills itself as a younger and more dynamic agency, specializing in ‘brutally simple’ ideas. In 2004, it floated 39 per cent of the agency on AIM in order to fund its expansion into mainland Europe. At the time of writing, it has 26 offices in 18 countries: ‘As few offices as necessary rather than as many as possible,’ its website comments, as if to distance itself from its estranged cousin.

  But one thing neither of the Saatchi entities have is the British Airways account, which M&C Saatchi lost in 2002 – to an agency called Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

  Jeans genius from BBH

  Saatchi & Saatchi was not the only advertising agency attracting attention from the media in the 1980s. Another, much smaller operation was grabbing eyeballs with a series of remarkable TV commercials for Levi’s 501 jeans. The ads created a retro fantasyland – a 1950s that never existed – full of pouting girls in tight mohair sweaters and sharp-cheekboned boys with pomaded hair. The glossy images were accompanied by luscious soul hits that, having been discovered by a new generation, zoomed to the top of the charts. The most celebrated ad in the series was called ‘Launderette’. To the sound of Marvin Gaye singing ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, a young man clad in jeans and a black T-shirt sauntered into a launderette. Without further ado, he stripped down to his pristine white boxer shorts and put his clothing in one of the machines. Then he settled down to read a magazine, to the delight of female onlookers.

  For something that lasted only a minute, the ad had a disproportionate effect on British popular culture. It brought back not only Levi’s, but fifties fashion and soul music. As an unexpected bonus, it got men out of Y-fronts and into boxer shorts. Young women everywhere heaved sighs of gratitude. ‘To this day,’ admits John Hegarty, ‘I’m not sure what we sold more of: jeans or boxer shorts. Ironically, we were originally going to put him in Y-fronts, but the advertising standards people thought it might be too risqué. Boxer shorts were less revealing – and they added to the authenticity of the ad.’

  When Campaign was debating who to choose as its ‘man of the decade’ at the end of the eighties, it veered towards John Hegarty. ‘Of the many advertising rules set in stone,’ the magazine wrote, ‘this is the most deeply-etched: “Thou shalt not set trends: thou shalt only follow them.” In the 1980s, that stone tablet was split in two… BBH told us what jeans to wear; sent records to the top of the charts; and produced commercials whose launches became media events for a national press suddenly obsessed with advertising and admen’ (‘Who is the man of the decade?’, 6 January 1990).

  Hegarty complains that photos make him look a little too craggy these days (‘I see them and think: “Who is that person?”’), but with what one could still describe as a mop of unruly hair, a broad smile that sets up pleasant creases beside his eyes and a voice calibrated for persuasion, he’s very much the charismatic creative. As we know, Hegarty began his career at Benton & Bowles. He’d originally wanted to be a painter. ‘I went to art school at Hornsey, but when I got there I was disappointe
d to discover that I was unlikely to become the next Picasso,’ he says. ‘One of my teachers, a wonderful man called Peter Green, told me I had lots of good ideas and that I should become a graphic designer. So I went to the design department of the LCP [the London College of Printing; now the London College of Communication], where I was rather perplexed to find that they all wanted to be artists.’

  Fortunately, Hegarty found another mentor in John Gillard, who took a group of promising students under his wing: ‘He introduced me to the work of Doyle Dane Bernbach, which for me was a seminal moment. It brought together all the things I’d been thinking and I suddenly realized, “This is what I want to do.” It was as if a switch had been thrown and a light had come on. It showed that advertising could be witty and smart – but also inclusive.’

  One wonders what the UK advertising industry would have become without the influence of Bernbach. In Hegarty’s view, ‘What [Bernbach’s work] did was create an entire generation who actually wanted to work in advertising. Before us, advertising people still secretly yearned to be artists and novelists. But we wanted to be part of that whole sixties revolution in music, fashion and design – and we felt we could do that through advertising.’

  Initially, however, the advertising revolution lagged behind the others. ‘At that time advertising was still controlled by the big corporations. You couldn’t just open a boutique in Carnaby Street, the way the fashion people had. You’d have to go along to an agency and say, “I’ve got these earth-shattering ideas for ads,” and they’d say, “What are you talking about? – you’re only a kid!”’

  Fortunately, he found a job as a junior art director at Benton & Bowles, under creative director Jack Stanley. But he managed to get himself fired after 18 months. ‘Obviously I was a pain in the arse, because I kept telling them where they were going wrong. Turned out I was right, but they didn’t want to hear it from a 22-year-old art director. I would argue with the client, which in those days simply wasn’t done. I wanted to convince them that their work could be creatively distinctive. The problem was that Doyle Dane Bernbach had created modern advertising in New York in the early sixties, but the concept hadn’t quite arrived in England. The idea that you should entice, engage and entertain audiences was a million miles from the prevailing thinking. They just wanted to hit people over the heads with the same message hundreds of times.’

  Hegarty then spent a short period at a small Soho agency working on the El Al airlines account – a client for which Doyle Dane Bernbach had done some groundbreaking work in the United States. Hegarty was pleased with the work he did there, but he upped sticks again when he was invited to join Charles Saatchi and Ross Cramer at their new agency, in 1967. ‘We moved into this fantastic building in Goodge Street that was also home to David Puttnam’s photographic agency, a new agency called BMP and the designers Lou Klein [who designed the D&AD’s yellow pencil trophy] and Michael Peters. It was like the Chelsea Hotel in New York – a creative hub. Everyone was involved in everything, from ads to design to coming up with concepts for films. It was way ahead of its time, because in those days advertising people were supposed to stay in their box.’

  And so Hegarty became one of the founding members of Saatchi & Saatchi. He stayed there until 1973, when he was recruited to set up the London branch of an organization that billed itself as the first European multinational agency, TBWA (see Chapter 8, The French connection). It was here that he met his future partners John Bartle, a planner, and Nigel Bogle, an account man. ‘To be honest, although we were part of a European network, we were really operating as an English agency – we did wonderful work for brands like Ovaltine, Lego and Johnson & Johnson. In 1980, we became Campaign’s first ever agency of the year.’

  But the trio became increasingly frustrated with TBWA’s structure, which involved placing a certain percentage of each agency’s profits into a central pot. ‘The situation changed later, but at the time we felt that the best-performing agencies in the network, like our own, were propping up those who weren’t up to scratch. So we decided to go our own way.’

  Bartle Bogle Hegarty opened its first offices in Wardour Street in 1983. It pitched for its most famous client, however, before it had even moved in. The agency was barely a month old and working out of rented space when it received a letter from Levi’s. ‘It said they were compiling a list of agencies they might like to pitch for their European account and they wanted to meet us. At first we thought it was a joke. We rang Levi’s and said, “We’ve got this letter, but we’ve only just started up so there must have been a mistake.”’ Not at all, said Levi’s. ‘Apparently we’d been recommended by a researcher who’d worked with us on Ovaltine at TBWA and had since moved to Levi’s.’

  The news threw the trio into a panic. The initial meeting was to be held in ‘the worst conference room imaginable, decorated with hunting prints and ghastly wallpaper’. It was hardly the image of a hip young agency. So Bartle, Bogle and Hegarty plastered the walls with the work they’d done at TBWA, almost entirely obscuring the offending flock. The meeting went well. When the Levi’s representatives had left, the BBH team took down the posters – and the wallpaper came off with them. ‘We actually had to pay to have that bloody wallpaper put up again,’ laughs Hegarty.

  Still barely entertaining any thoughts of winning the business, BBH was surprised to hear that it had made it to the shortlist. The agency’s policy was not to indulge in any speculative creative work. It was committed to the principle of devising the right strategy before it started making ads – so at pitch stage the trick was to convince the client that it had a thorough understanding of the brand and its future direction, rather than arriving with a stack of artwork. ‘But we got nervous because we heard rumours that BMP had shot a commercial, and that McCann, the incumbent agency, also had a load of stuff prepared. We very nearly backed out – but that seemed ridiculously defeatist, so we decided to push on to the bitter end.’

  Levi’s desperately needed a new approach at that stage. Thanks to the post-punk phenomenon, jeans had become unfashionable: one only has to look at an early Spandau Ballet video to see just how irrelevant denim had become. Now installed in its new offices, BBH prepared to pitch. ‘This time we had our own conference room, but the place was half-finished. The only things that made it look good were these incredibly cool designer chairs from Italy.’ The pitch was simple: no poster designs, no pilot commercials – pure strategy. ‘We told them that they should stop denying their roots. They were all about America and they needed a new way of expressing that.’

  Hegarty suspected that the pitch had gone well, but he was a little disconcerted by the presence of Lee Smith, then president of Levi Strauss Europe. ‘He was one of these good-looking American guys with a firm handshake. I thought he’d consider us a bunch of amateurs. At the end of the meeting, I nervously asked him if he had any comments. He suddenly broke into a giant grin and said, “Gentlemen, this is the finest chair I’ve ever sat in.” The seat won the pitch.’

  The story is characteristic of the self-deprecating Hegarty, who is justly known as one of the more human people in advertising. He even admits that, at a very early stage, the agency was forced to re-pitch for the Levi’s business. ‘We’d done some print work using rivets and stitching to establish an aura of authenticity around the brand. We’d also made a TV ad where a guy smuggles some jeans into Russia. Then suddenly there was an internal reorganization and we were back at pitch stage.’

  Levi’s sales were still in the doldrums, but the company agreed to give BBH more time, while also focusing attention on its classic 501 product. ‘Launderette’ was part of the agency’s second wave of work for the brand. More than 20 years later, BBH was still working for Levi’s, after a string of award-winning ads – accompanied by numerous hit pop songs.

  But BBH, of course, is about far more than jeans. This is the agency that came up with the line ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ for Audi. Consider the audacity of selling cars to Briti
sh consumers with a German phrase that most of them barely understood – but which felt right. Another key client is Johnnie Walker, for whom BBH devised the slogan ‘Keep Walking’. More recently, the agency has defied political correctness with a series of deadpan ads for Unilever’s Axe fragrance (the brand is known as Lynx in the UK). The ads insist with knowing implausibility that no woman can resist what is, in reality, a rather banal product. ‘The Axe Effect’ turns everyday guys into babe magnets.

  During the rush to the stock market in the eighties, BBH stood on the sidelines and watched, considering that independence equalled creative freedom. Its logo, after all, is a black sheep. In 1997, however, it sold a minority stake to Leo Burnett. This enabled it to fund its ‘micro network’ model. Although it would open international offices, they would be regional hubs, inextricably linked with one another and able to collaborate on projects as well as operating independently. For the time being these are London, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, São Paulo, Shanghai and Mumbai.

  A great sea change in BBH’s history came in July 2012, when Leo Burnett’s parent, Publicis, took full control by acquiring the 51 per cent stake that still belonged to its founders. But BBH chief executive Nigel Bogle assured The Guardian newspaper that the agency would not lose control of its destiny. ‘We were looking for an opportunity that would ensure that our agency maintained a high degree of autonomy and could continue to abide by the values characterized by the black sheep’ (‘Publicis takes full control of BBH’, 5 July 2012).

  Perhaps because of its relatively compact size, BBH still feels fresher and more relevant than many of its contemporaries. Like the original yuppies, BBH simply refuses to grow old.

  The gentleman copywriter

  I was disappointed that I didn’t get to meet David Abbott, co-founder of one of the most respected British agencies of the eighties – and indeed of all time. But Abbott has shied away from giving interviews for a while now. When the magazine Marketing Week requested an audience on his retirement, in 1998, he sent a polite fax saying, ‘Sorry, but I don’t want to be profiled. Even I’m bored with me. Thanks for asking.’ It had all the hallmarks of this revered copywriter’s style: concise, elegant and witty.