Adland

by Mark Tungate

  Since its launch, the agency has worked for advertisers such as telecoms giant NTT, beverage behemoth Suntory, Japanese Railways, Fuji Xerox, Sky PerfecTV! and even Burberry. It has made pop promos, designed packaging and organized events. It has also racked up a stack of awards at international advertising competitions. And it does not hesitate to make TV ads that are 30 seconds or even one minute long. (One ad, for the TV station Star Channel, weighed in at a colossal two minutes.)

  Oka believes advertising should stir viewers’ emotions and cling to their brains for hours after the spot has screened. The Tugboat style is bold, optimistic and often faintly trashy, mashing Manga elements with surreal Anglo-Saxon humour. For instance, an ad to promote Japanese Railways’ express service to the ski slopes featured a skiing ostrich. And the agency’s visceral ‘Ronin Pitcher’ spot, to promote baseball coverage on PerfecTV!, was a John Woo-like explosion of slow motion violence. Viewers got a gory close-up of the pitcher’s fingernail shredding as he hurled the ball at supersonic speed. To promote Fuji Xerox photocopiers, a series of ads depicted a pushy salesman surprising people in their baths or accosting them outside public toilets. All this is risky stuff for taboo-ridden Japan.

  ‘You can tell how straight-laced clients are by looking at how many agencies have followed in our footsteps,’ says Oka. ‘The sum total is zero. We’re the only ones doing the kind of advertising we do. I expected to start a revolution, but so far it hasn’t happened.’

  Because of this, the agency has turned its attention abroad. It has begun pitching seriously for business outside Japan and building informal links with other hot shops in Europe and the United States. ‘My goal now is to be the first small Japanese agency to have a credible international reputation,’ Oka says. ‘I want to be mentioned alongside agencies like [the UK’s] Mother or [Amsterdam agency] 180.’

  Oka may just have the talent and determination to succeed. Forget the ronin pitcher – meet the ronin ad man.

  13

  The alternatives

  ‘Exiles from the mainstream’

  The tall narrow building on Herengracht in Amsterdam may once have been the home of a wealthy merchant. Like many of the houses along this picturesque canal-side street, it is approached via an imposing stone staircase. On entering, you half expect a butler to materialize and take your coat before ushering you into a book-lined room, perhaps with a fire blazing in the grate. But this is a 21st-century advertising agency: the butler has been replaced by a brisk receptionist; the fire with a plasma screen and a crescent-shaped leather sofa.

  Welcome to the headquarters of 180, one of the most successful of a group of super-hip agencies that have clustered in Amsterdam. Some, like KesselsKramer, have Dutch roots; others, like 180, Wieden & Kennedy, BSUR and Amsterdam Worldwide, are tribes of expatriates who have deliberately exiled themselves from the mainstream.

  On the metaphorical map of advertising, the Amsterdam crowd is out on the edge. But it also forms part of a larger grouping that might be referred to as ‘the alternatives’. These are the boutiques, the micro-networks – the agencies that offer a divergent path to the big global ideas factories. Some of them emerged in the eighties, still more in the nineties. Armed with an enviable reputation for creativity, they are also known for their early adoption of the internet. A few of them even managed to drop the surnames and think up brand names for themselves.

  One of the peculiarities of the Amsterdam clique is that it tends to specialize in sports shoe brands. 180 handles Adidas, Wieden & Kennedy works for Nike and Amsterdam Worldwide is contracted by Asics. This partly relates to the old axiom about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer: the European headquarters of Nike had been located near Amsterdam for some time before Adidas moved its communications department into the same orbit; a trick it had also pulled on Nike’s home turf in Portland, Oregon.

  But the links between the agencies are even closer than that.

  Amsterbrand

  Back in 1992, Scottish adman Alex Melvin had spent 10 years working as a strategic planner for various London ad agencies. He’d handled big accounts such as Guinness, British Rail and Midland Bank. But Melvin was also a sportsman with two great passions: soccer and sailing. That year he decided to devote more time to the latter – a lot more time. He left advertising to set up a racing team in Stockholm with round-the-world yachtsman Ludde Ingvall.

  That took care of the sailing. Soccer was next on the agenda.

  The following year, Melvin wasn’t expecting much when he took a call from a headhunter. But his attention snapped into focus when he heard that the post in question was with the agency Wieden & Kennedy, which had set up shop in Amsterdam to service the Nike account. ‘They need someone who knows a bit about football,’ the headhunter told him.

  Based in Portland, Oregon, Wieden & Kennedy had been founded 10 years earlier by Dan Wieden and David Kennedy. The pair had worked together at McCann Erickson’s Portland office, but it was during a stint at a smaller agency called William Cain that they met Phil Knight, owner of an obscure sports shoe brand called Nike. He became the duo’s first client when they decided to go it alone. The agency thrived on the back of its close partnership with Nike, for whom Wieden penned the ‘Just Do It’ slogan. It helped that Knight disapproved of most advertising. Innovative and exigent, he challenged the agency to impress him. ‘Nike constantly wants us to surprise and amaze them,’ Wieden said, defining in fewer than 10 words the only client relationship that can lead to great advertising (‘What makes Nike’s advertising tick’, The Guardian, 17 June 2003).

  The ads ranged from gritty and dramatic to elemental and human. A spot for Nike’s Air Revolution shoe featured muddy Super 8 images of athletes, both professional and amateur, over the Beatles song ‘Revolution’. The Beatles took legal action over the use of the track, resulting in some useful additional press coverage. But even without the surrounding furore, it was one of the most effective uses of rock music in advertising. Another commercial, for the ‘Just Do It’ campaign in 1988, starred an 80-year-old San Francisco runner, who said, ‘I run 17 miles every morning. People ask me how I keep my teeth from chattering in the wintertime. I leave them in my locker.’

  Wieden & Kennedy was the first agency to challenge the hegemony of Madison Avenue. And now it was moving into Europe.

  Alex Melvin thought he’d better just do it.

  He joined W&K in 1993 as its first European planning director. He then embarked on what he describes as ‘the best five years of my life, personally and professionally’. As well as being a key figure in the development of Nike’s global football strategy, he worked with Microsoft (on the launch of Windows 95) and Coca-Cola. He also found himself surrounded by a highly unusual group of people: ‘The agency was populated by creative refugees from all over the world of advertising. In my opinion, that one office of Wieden & Kennedy changed the way international advertising was done. Micro-networks, the use of digital media – we were experimenting with all that stuff.’

  But the problem with the overseas branches of US agencies, in Melvin’s view, is that they can’t help importing an American style of advertising, ‘in this case, West Coast cool’. With a couple of colleagues – Guy Hayward and Chris Mendola – he began wondering what a purely international agency would look like. After all, global brands required advertising with no cultural baggage. ‘This would be an agency with absolutely no affiliation – zero cultural heritage. And as none of us spoke Dutch, it might as well be based in Amsterdam.’

  Unfortunately, Wieden & Kennedy got wind of the fact that the three were planning to leave – as well as a scurrilous rumour that they were pitching for the Adidas account. Melvin insists that, although they were aware of the Adidas pitch, they were innocent of contacting the company. (They were later officially cleared of the charge after a legal wrangle.) Nevertheless, they were tossed out on their ears. The intensity of the rivalry between Nike and Adidas can scarcely be imagined. ‘Since we found ourse
lves on the street in a strange city where we didn’t speak the language, the decision was made for us. We decided we’d pitch for Adidas anyway.’

  A brief phone call to Adidas turned up the helpful information that one of the agencies on the pitch-list had dropped out – as well as the slightly less encouraging news that the embryonic 180 had only 48 hours to convince Adidas that it deserved to be heard. Enlisting the help of creative director Larry Frey, who had worked with Wieden & Kennedy in the United States and Japan, they ‘sat in a small apartment and plastered the walls with ideas,’ says Melvin.

  An analysis of the Adidas brand revealed that it was undergoing a major resurgence thanks to two things: the introduction of the Predator football boot and the growing street-wear phenomenon driven by Adidas Originals. Partly as a result of the latter, a whole generation of young consumers regarded Adidas as much as a street fashion brand as a performance sports brand. ‘Our pitch to Adidas,’ Melvin continues, ‘involved an approach that clearly grounded Adidas in the world of performance sport, to avoid it becoming subject to the fickleness of fashion. We distilled our thinking down to two words: “Forever Sport”. That line ran on all Adidas communication for four years until the job was done in consumers’ minds.’

  The pitch took place in London. Obviously they won the business – that much you know – but it was a slight case of ‘be careful what you wish for’. Melvin says, ‘[Adidas] wanted a commercial on the air in 35 countries within three months – when we didn’t even have an agency.’

  180 went on to produce years of eye-popping advertising. And unlike many of the traditional agencies, it had a handle on the digital environment from the very start. In 1999, in the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, the agency hired comedian Lee Evans for a series of short films. The 12 two-minute vignettes showed Evans visiting various athletes, trying out their equipment and generally playing the clown. The athletes were all sponsored by Adidas and the films were lightly but noticeably branded. They were designed to be shown on the internet – but TV stations demanded to air them and the vignettes even ended up getting screened in the UK on the BBC, a resolutely commercial-free environment. ‘We got in a bit of trouble for that one,’ chuckles Melvin. ‘The spots were so entertaining that they just didn’t look like advertising.’

  A highlight of the ‘Impossible is Nothing’ campaign in 2004 was a special effects extravaganza that depicted a miraculously rejuvenated Muhammad Ali in the boxing ring with his daughter, Laila.

  ‘There’s no magic formula for making great advertising,’ says Melvin, ‘but the first ingredient is world-class talent. And that’s the great thing about Amsterdam: it’s a city that’s easy to attract talent to. It’s easygoing, it’s multicultural, it has a reputation for creativity and it is at the heart of Europe.’

  There are many parallels between 180 and another Amsterdam agency: StrawberryFrog. The agency rebranded itself Amsterdam Worldwide in 2008 when its founders parted ways, but it remains historically important as one of the agencies that put the city on the international advertising map.

  Born on Valentine’s Day 1999, the agency fitted into a late nineties context in which the ‘virtual network’ suddenly became possible. Globalization was proceeding apace, the European telecommunications industry was deregulating, internet penetration was rising and mobile phones were about to become ubiquitous.

  Founders Scott Goodson and Brian Elliott were both nomadic Canadians. Goodson saw the potential of the wired world in Sweden, where he initially went to visit his future wife – and ended up co-owner of a creative agency called Welinder, whose biggest account was Ericsson. The Swedes being the most techno-literate people in Europe, Goodson had a mobile phone in 1989 and was developing internet advertising in 1992. He met Elliott, a strategic planner, at the same agency.

  A couple of years later, Welinder was bought by Publicis and Goodson moved on, accepting a job with J Walter Thompson in Toronto. The atmosphere wasn’t quite the same, as he related in telephone conversations with Elliott, who had moved to a small agency in Amsterdam. Elliott recalls, ‘The problem was that, at Welinder, we’d seen that a different kind of agency was do-able. Scott was frustrated because… well, you know what it’s like at a big international agency: a conference call can never involve too many people. But the web had made size irrelevant. A small number of people could communicate with the world. So we thought, “Enough – we can do this.” ’

  Amsterdam was chosen because it was cheap, groovy and connected. Apart from the tax advantages, it was a mercantile city and a cultural crossroads. Goodson stumbled on the name StrawberryFrog when he was looking for the opposite of a ‘dinosaur’, which is how he’d begun to view the traditional Madison Avenue agencies. He started out with ‘lizard’, but then somebody suggested the amphibian. ‘But we didn’t want to just call ourselves “Frog” because that’s kind of boring. So we did some research and found… the strawberry frog, which is from the Amazon. It’s actually red with blue legs. It’s kind of a funky little red, blue-jeaned frog… I also think it does a good job of explaining what we do. We’re a small, highly-focused, passionate group of people that moves very fast and efficiently’ (‘Ready, set, leap!’, Reveries magazine, October 2002).

  At the beginning, the agency was viewed as intriguing but quirky. Elliott says, ‘We’d get invited to big pitches as the wild card. It was, “Let’s get those crazy StrawberryFrog guys in here.” We were the comic relief. But then we would win the pitch.’

  Professional radicals

  At the end of the 1990s, Campaign chose an outfit called Howell Henry Chaldecott & Lury as its Agency of the Decade. Founded in 1987, HHCL was the British template for the alternative agency – the hot shop that everyone else wanted to emulate. For a while, it seemed as revolutionary in nineties London as Doyle Dane Bernbach had been in fifties New York.

  The founders of HHCL were Robert Howell, Steve Henry, Axel Chaldecott and Adam Lury. Howell had been an account handler at Young & Rubicam’s London office, Lury a planner at BMP and Henry and Chaldecott a respected creative team at WCRS.

  The agency’s opening salvo was to run a trade press ad showing a couple making love on a sofa in front of the telly. Aimed at clients, it read: ‘According to current audience research, this couple are watching your ad. So who’s really getting screwed?’ As a result, the agency got sacked by one of its first clients, Thames Television. But it was a hell of a debut.

  HHCL staff carried business cards identifying themselves as ‘professional radicals’. The agency scrapped the old-fashioned advertising notions of ‘creatives’ and ‘suits’ and challenged everyone in the agency to come up with ideas. It encouraged clients to become involved in the creative process during ‘tissue meetings’ (in which the agency presented them with rough drafts, or ‘tissues’, of potential solutions).

  HHCL made fresh, funny, low-budget TV spots that were a marked contrast to the overblown epics of the eighties. Although the agency came up with many innovative campaigns, its most enduring contribution to the TV advertising archives was probably its work for Tango, the fizzy drink. The first spots were simple: somebody would take a sip of Tango and a fat, bald man, entirely painted orange, would spring out of nowhere and slap their face. It was surprising, absurd and very English.

  But HHCL was not just about absurdist humour. Its ads for Fuji camera film were black-and-white portraits of people excluded from mainstream society owing to race, disability or age. And the multiracial cast of the agency’s TV commercials – black and Asian actors with regional accents – showed a realistic Britain for perhaps the first time in advertising.

  The real significance of HHCL was as a laboratory for advertising techniques that would become familiar after the turn of the millennium. Its aim was to offer ‘3D marketing’ – now more often referred to as ‘integrated’ or ‘360 degree’ marketing. It considered design and public relations central to its remit. It acquired a sales promotion company and merged it with the mai
n agency. It was home to a host of dotcom advertisers, and in 1994 it was the first agency to include a website address in a TV spot. It also pioneered the branding of ‘idents’, sponsoring the brief flashes that identify programmes at the beginning and end of ad breaks. HHCL no longer exists, but it remains a shining moment in British advertising.

  Among its many fans were the founders of another London agency that set out to transform the business: Mother. It remains highly influential at the time of writing, although it seems slightly more establishment these days.

  Mother was founded in December 1996 to handle the launch of Channel 5, the UK’s fifth terrestrial television channel. It broke with the traditions of the eighties in many ways, starting with its location. It was one of the first creative concerns to set up shop in the east of London, in Clerkenwell, rather than in Soho or Covent Garden. Its headquarters resembled an artist’s atelier, with staff ranged along workbenches in the same open-plan room. Once again, the ‘suits’ were ditched: instead of account planners and handlers, figures called ‘strategists’ were a combination of the two. Overseeing all this were the ‘mothers’, who played the coordination role normally handled by the traffic department. Meanwhile, staff had pictures of their actual mothers on the backs of their business cards. The ground floor was ‘dominated by a giant kitsch caravan… the lighting is by chandelier’ (‘Mother loves you’, Creativity, 1 March 2002). The agency has since moved to sleek, shiny offices up the road in Shoreditch, but the collaborative look of its space remains intact.

  The agency’s name is said to have been chosen because your mother is someone you can rely on. Coincidentally, it was also the codename of the male government official who gave the orders in the cult TV series The Avengers, which rather chimes in with the kitsch quality of some of Mother’s work. Many of the agency’s early spots were drenched with references to the look of 1970s television. As might have been expected in fad-prone London, the style was aped by other agencies, with the result that Mother moved away from it.