Adland

  Abbott Mead Vickers, the agency that Abbott formed with his friends Peter Mead and Adrian Vickers, is now the most powerful in Britain, having evolved into AMV BBDO. At the time of writing, it was the most successful agency brand in the UK for the 10th consecutive year. When Abbott retired, Marketing Week worried that the ‘cultural guts of the agency’ would be ‘ripped out’. But his legacy clearly lives on.

  British readers of a certain age will be familiar with Abbott’s work: his mouth-watering descriptions of food for Sainsbury’s, his British Telecom advertising (‘It’s good to talk’), and of course the campaign he devised for The Economist, which we’ll turn to in a moment. A much-loved TV spot from the 1980s promoted the Yellow Pages telephone directory. An elderly man was shown visiting second-hand bookshops in search of a rare volume. ‘Do you have Fly Fishing, by JR Hartley?’ he enquired. Each time the answer was no – until he became fatigued and despondent. In the next shot we saw him with a telephone directory on his knee, much revived as he hunted for the book from the comfort of an armchair. Finally, he got through to a shop that had the book in stock. He asked them to set it aside for him. ‘My name?’ he repeated. ‘Yes, it’s J… R… Hartley.’

  The ad was polished, understated and humane – classic AMV stuff.

  Abbott was born in Hammersmith in 1938 but brought up in the London suburbs, away from the Blitz. His father was a retailer who owned three stores. (It’s no coincidence that many of adland’s leading figures, from Bill Bernbach to Martin Sorrell, had entrepreneurial fathers.) Abbott shone at school and won a scholarship to read history at Oxford. It was here that he met Adrian Vickers, who was studying law. Some reports describe them chatting animatedly in Oxford coffeehouses, which is a nice image, so let’s stick with it. But Abbott never completed his degree: he was summoned home to run the family business for his ailing father, who eventually died of lung cancer. Later, when he ran an advertising agency, Abbott refused to take on any tobacco accounts.

  Unable to save the family firm, Abbott found himself out of work. In the meantime, he’d been inspired by a book about advertising. It was Madison Avenue, USA, by Martin Mayer – the same book I toted up and down that street last spring, unaware of the connection at the time. Abbott liked the sound of the colourful world contained within its covers. ‘At the time [1961] I was a backward 22-year-old,’ he once told The Financial Times. ‘It never occurred to me that someone spent their time writing words in ads’ (‘A deceptively spare style’, 25 October 1984).

  He managed to get a job in Kodak’s advertising department, where he edited an internal publication and wrote ads for industrial x-ray film. But his goal was a big advertising agency, so he applied to Mather & Crowther. They gave him a copy test – which he failed. He begged them to let him sit it again. They acquiesced – and this time he passed. In those days the agency was still run in time-honoured fashion, with the copywriters working in a separate pool, away from the creative department. The most junior copywriter sat by the door; the most senior got a desk near the window. Once you’d written your copy, you placed it in the out tray, from which it was collected by a young Alan Parker type. That was the last you saw of it until the finished ad appeared in the press (‘Man of letters’, Design Week, 18 April 2002).

  After two years of this, Abbott spotted an ad for Remington electric razors made by the newly opened London branch of Doyle Dane Bernbach. He became another Bernbach disciple and – after spending a few months honing a DDB style – successfully applied for a job there. Working with art directors for the first time, he began producing bolder and more confident work – and getting noticed. In 1966 he was sent for a spell at the New York office – the ultimate consecration. On his return, he was made copy chief. Not long after that, he became creative director. According to Design Week, Abbott had no fewer than 26 pieces in the 1969 D&AD annual.

  The magazine also unearthed this charming description of Abbott’s craft, from an essay he wrote in 1968: ‘Let’s start at the beginning: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz – you are looking at the copywriter’s toolbox. With these 26 little marks on paper we have to persuade people to buy our client’s products, ideas or services. If we jumble them one way, we can sell with a laugh. Mix them up another way and we’re provocative. Another, and we’re sympathetic. It beats Scrabble. And we get paid for it.’

  Abbott’s first stab at his own agency came with the creation of French Gold Abbott. But this doesn’t seem to have worked out, and soon he was being wooed by his old friend Adrian Vickers, who had worked at SH Benson, and his former colleague Peter Mead, whom he had met at Mather & Crowther. Finally, in 1977, Abbott Mead Vickers was born.

  Abbott created a wealth of fine advertising during his 20 years at the agency, but The Economist case study is worth going into in more detail. The relationship began in 1984. Ironically, Abbott almost didn’t work on the campaign at all. Something about the way his pitch had been received persuaded him that The Economist had been unimpressed, so he let the publication know that he had changed his mind about working on the account. Abbott was justly confident in his own abilities and, with plenty of clients beating down his door, he had little to lose. The magazine had other ideas, and found itself in the unusual position of having to persuade Abbott to take the job.

  Initially, the campaign followed the rules of almost every promotional drive for a media product, which was to focus on the content. But Abbott realized that a more effective approach, which would also dispense with the need for time-consuming meetings with The Economist’s editorial team, would be to focus on the publication’s brand identity. At that stage, the ads were still black-and-white; but as Abbott stared down at the magazine on his desk, he realized that if he blew up its distinctive red-and-white masthead, it would be more or less the size of a 48-sheet poster. So why not use the masthead as the basis for a campaign? The red and white would be highly distinctive and inextricably linked with the product. And as a copywriter, Abbott instinctively felt that the ads should be about words, rather than images.

  Among the first ideas that Abbott produced for the new campaign was the one that has remained a firm favourite: ‘“I never read The Economist”. Management trainee. Aged 42.’ It set the tone for the witty, sophisticated and ever-so-slightly smug posters that have followed, each May and October, until the present day.

  As a poster campaign, it was a risky idea in the first place – using a mass medium to promote a niche product. But while the posters clearly position The Economist as an exclusive club, they also suggest that it is easy to enter. Whether you are rich or poor, a banker or a garbage collector, you require only one attribute – intelligence. At the same time, although outdoor campaigns traditionally run the risk of ‘wastage’ – being seen by many people for whom they are not relevant – the Economist posters generate a feeling of warmth about the brand; and they attract advertisers to the publication.

  Shortly after winning the Economist business, in 1985, AMV followed the trend of the times and went public. Abbott, Mead and Vickers brought in an outsider, Michael Baulk – then managing director of Ogilvy & Mather in London – as agency chief executive and managing director, ‘to manage their brand,’ as he puts it. Baulk remembers the eighties fondly: ‘Collett Dickenson Pearce creatively and the Saatchis commercially were examples to everyone else. A whole wave of new agencies got started and the City encouraged them to go public. A lot of personal money was made and a lot of public interest was created. Advertising suddenly became news. It was really the time when a new generation took on the establishment and won.’

  In 1991, AMV sold out to BBDO and merged with the London arm of the US agency network, creating a £130 million entity. ‘The nineties were very generous to us,’ says Baulk. ‘Once the advertising industry had recovered from the recession of the early 1990s, it began to grow at double digit rates, so everyone was doing well. That was the catalyst for our growth. But you get to a certain point where you need an international network of some kind if
you’re going to grow any further. Of course, we chose our partner very carefully. We considered BBDO to be the most creative network, which also had a great respect for local sovereignty. And it gave us access to clients like Pepsi and Gillette.’

  AMV whizzed past Saatchi & Saatchi as the UK’s biggest shop in 1997. The following year, with this achieved, David Abbott retired. In 2001, however, he was inaugurated into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame – the second English writer to be accorded this honour after David Ogilvy. But by then, Abbott’s place in advertising history was assured.

  The buccaneers of Venice Beach

  Although it might be unfair to suggest that, in the eighties, the real action was taking place away from Madison Avenue, let’s go ahead and do that anyway. In 1990 the US trade bible Advertising Age chose as its Agency of the Decade an operation based in Venice Beach, California. Its boss was a renegade perfectionist who believed ‘good enough is not enough’, its resident creative genius considered shorts and flip-flops acceptable working attire, and its unofficial symbol was a pirate flag. For connoisseurs of colourful characters, Chiat/Day was a mouth-watering story.

  Although he is closely associated with a peculiarly West Coast brand of creativity, the late Jay Chiat was born in New York – in The Bronx, to be exact, the son of a laundry deliveryman. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1953 and tried out a handful of unsatisfactory jobs – including a stint as a tour guide at the studios of NBC – before being called up for military service. Describing his job as ‘broadcasting’, he was assigned the post of information officer at an airbase in California. After being discharged, he worked briefly on recruitment advertising for an aerospace company. Then he landed a job at a small Southern Californian advertising agency called the Leland Oliver Company. He’s said to have written five advertisements on his first day.

  Inspired and ambitious, Chiat realized that not only was there money to be made in advertising, but that California might be the place to do it. In her book about Chiat/Day, Inventing Desire (1993), Karen Stabiner writes, ‘At that time, Southern California was the wild frontier; all the famous, established agencies were based in New York or Chicago. There was little competition, there were great expense account lunches… and he enjoyed the work.’

  He launched Jay Chiat & Associates in Los Angeles in 1962. After a conversation with Guy Day, the owner of another agency, over hotdogs at a baseball game, the pair decided to merge their companies and create Chiat/Day, in 1968. The relationship was a turbulent one and Day eventually left. He later told Advertising Age that the only thing the pair ‘agreed on 98 per cent was the advertising’ (‘Jay Chiat, ad pioneer’, 29 April 2002). The agency swooped and dipped through the seventies, winning and then losing Honda – a brand that it had dragged from obscurity.

  Blows like that did not rattle Chiat for very long, however. Stabiner characterizes him as a powerhouse, driven by a quest for what he called ‘ads that jolt’. ‘He was propelled by an odd disdain for any objective he managed to obtain,’ she writes, ‘as though his ability to accomplish it diminished the inherent value of the achievement.’

  Chiat saw his agency as a crew of wild buccaneers harrying the stately galleons of Madison Avenue. ‘We’re the pirates, not the navy,’ he would say. And yet there was some cold, cerebral science behind the showmanship. In 1982 Chiat became the first to introduce the British practice of account planning to the US industry, supporting creativity with strategic thinking. The agency’s ads were spectacular, but they weren’t founded on vapour.

  Nor did the agency’s successes come without sweat. Chiat drove his people as hard as he drove himself, which prompted one wag to nickname the agency ‘Chiat/Day and night’, as a commentary on the number of hours staff were expected to put in. ‘If you don’t show up for work on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday,’ was another quote attributed to Chiat. But he was also known for organizing sybaritic parties and ensuring that there was more than enough food on hand to fuel his employees’ creativity. ‘In the Chiat/Day vernacular, food meant love,’ writes Stabiner. ‘The Venice office spent US $1,000 a month on pizza alone.’

  The results of this tough love were advertising landmarks. The agency created the overactive Energizer Bunny, for example. Perhaps more impressively, it hijacked the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics for Nike by covering the city with oversized posters, giving citizens the impression that the brand was the event’s main sponsor, when in reality Converse had paid US $4 million for just that privilege. At the same moment, Chiat/Day created the vogue for spectacular posters that had a jaw-socking visual impact and only a mute logo by way of explanation.

  But the Chiat/Day ad that everyone adores was for Apple Computer.

  ‘1984’ and the Super Bowl factor

  When Phil Dusenberry said that TV advertising got into its stride in 1984, he could hardly have picked a more appropriate year. ‘1984’ was the name of a TV spot that aired only a handful of times, yet achieved instant and lasting acclaim.

  Apart from the ad’s director, Ridley Scott, the name most often linked to ‘1984’ is that of Lee Clow. The creative force behind Chiat/Day, Clow was (and is) the long-haired, bearded, sartorially relaxed surfer I mentioned earlier. Committed to California, Clow once told Adweek that he grew up on the beach and ‘only moved about ten miles in my life’ (‘Clow riding high on Chiat/Day creative wave’, 6 August 1984).

  Although he attended art school, he effectively taught himself advertising, comparing his own work to the ads he found in Communication Arts magazine and the New York Art Directors Show annuals. After starting out at a graphic arts firm, he spent four years as an art director at the agency NW Ayer/West. At the beginning of the 1970s he decided that he wanted to work for Chiat/Day. According to Adweek, he targeted the agency with a year-long self-promotion campaign called ‘Hire the Hairy’, of which the most amusing element was a jack-in-the-box that popped open to reveal a bearded Clow simulacrum.

  Clow was by no means the only creative thinker drawn to the Chiat/Day dream factory. Steve Jobs, the boss of Apple, felt that the agency’s iconoclastic attitude meshed with his own. Apple paid US $1 billion for the 60-second commercial that was to launch the Macintosh.

  Written by Steve Hayden and directed by Scott in the dystopian style of Blade Runner, ‘1984’ took its cue, obviously, from George Orwell’s novel. The spot featured an army of ashen-faced drones marching into a darkened hall, where a bullying dictator harangued them from a giant video screen. An athletic blonde in sports gear charged down the aisle, pursued by black-clad riot police. Pausing, she whirled a sledgehammer above her head and hurled it into the screen, smashing the dictator’s image into a billion fragments. With the arrival of the nonconformist new Macintosh, promised the ad, ‘you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984’. The ad has often been taken as an allusion to the then-dominant IBM, something Apple denied at the time.

  Another oft-recounted story, almost certainly true, is that the Apple board was uneasy about the spot, and that Jobs saved it from oblivion by insisting that it ran. To pile on yet another myth, most accounts state that the ad aired only once, during the Super Bowl broadcast. However, reports published closer to the time indicate that it ran for at least a week, in the form of a teaser campaign in smaller markets and a 30-second version in selected cinemas. One of these sources, Adweek, adds that the spot even ‘enjoy[ed] an appearance on the CBS Evening News’ (‘Adweek’s ’84 All-American Creative Team’, 4 February 1985). Only a year after its January 1984 screening, the magazine described the ad as ‘making advertising history’. It helped to push initial sales of the Mac to more than 40 per cent above projections, with 70,000 computers flying out of stores in the first 100 days. It set a trend for ‘event advertising’, in which commercials were expressly designed to be so eye-popping that they generated a halo of media attention.

  ‘1984’ also established the National Football League’s Super Bowl game not only as an essential sporting fixture, bu
t as the annual showcase for the best TV advertising. Every year, on the first Sunday in February, agencies and their clients roll out their most sensational work for more than 100 million American TV viewers. And because it’s a premium live event, it stubbornly resists ad-skipping technology. On the contrary: great commercials have become part of the reason for tuning in. If you’re looking to build brand awareness among American adults aged 35 and under, the Super Bowl is one of the quickest ways of doing it – if not exactly the cheapest. In recent years the cost of a 30-second advertising slot during the Super Bowl has soared to as much as US $4 million, from US $42,000 when broadcasting of the event began in 1967. Even the internet has turned out to be an ally of Super Bowl advertising – agencies now regularly trailer their work on YouTube as the big day approaches.

  Ironically, two years after the success of ‘1984’, Apple pulled its advertising out of Chiat/Day, adding to the impression that Chiat was almost as good at losing big accounts as he was at winning them. (Of course, Steve Jobs had gone by then too – and turbulent times lay ahead for Apple.)

  Although it’s probably a fallacy, there is a widespread belief in the advertising community that when an agency gets bigger, its creative output becomes less daring. Big, in other words, equals bad. Jay Chiat spent much of his career wondering how big his operation could get before it became bad. At its peak, in 1992, it had billings of US $1.3 billion and 1,200 employees, as well as a Frank Gehry-designed headquarters shaped like a pair of binoculars. (Chiat once described himself as a ‘frustrated architect’ – and it is partly to his theories about creativity and the working environment that we owe the cliché of loft-like advertising agencies stuffed with punch-bags, pool tables and other toys. He robbed executives of offices and then everyone else of personal desk space, inventing ‘hot desking’ in the process.)