STUFF FROM THE LOFT - Dave Dye

During my first year in advertising, a shiny new book turned up at the agency (Brooks Legon Bloomfield).Weirdly, some in the creative department referred to it as 'the bible'.It's actual name was The Designers & Art Directors Annual.I was told it showed the best advertising and design from the U.K.Although, also at this point, the U.K. arguably produced the best advertising and design on the planet.This was the 1986 version.The advertising featured was judged by 72 jurors.Only 4 were female.1 was Barbara Nokes.315 advertising creatives had their work included.29 were female.Of those, Barbara Nokes had the most ads reprinted.She was the 5th most successful creative overall. (14 entries and a silver).I didn't think about whether she was male or female at the time, I just loved her work.Always smart and punchy.At the time, she was working with one of my favourite art directors; John Hegarty.She's been top of my wanted for the last decade.She finally relented.Enjoy.

Being one, I'm very aware of my fellow double d's out there in advertising.Dave Droga - met once, gave him a lift after judging D&AD together.Donny Deutsch - never met, seen him on Morning Joe though.David Denton - did a few ads with him at BMP, did Cointreau 'Ice melts', amongst many others.Don Draper – never met, seems cool.And Derek Day - less known than the first three, but well worth checking out.I'd hear his quotes on a regular basis back in the early nineties.My then writer, Mike McKenna, had worked for Derek twice, first at Ted Bates, then Butterfield Day Devito Hockney, and would regale me with 'war' stories.I was new to the business, so ate them up, desperate for clues on how it worked.Mike's most repeated was a version of this - "I showed him our campaign for (insert various campaign names here)...Derek pulled a face, like a bulldog chewing a wasp, pull a face, then said (insert various clever critiques here)... and the scales fell from my eyes”.In a sea of dumb, crass ads, Derek's work always seemed clever and considered.Often not criteria that wins big awards.They tend to go to flashy and different.If I had a brief and wanted to win an award, quite a few writers spring to mind, if it needed help to my family business grow, Derek's would spring to mind.Looking at his career, there's a whiff of Zelig* about it. (*You’ll have to google it, soz.)Hired by Alan Parker to work at the best shop of the sixties - Collett Dickenson Pearce.Hired by John Webster to join arguably the best shop of the seventies - Boase Massimi Pollitt.(In part 2, we find he was also hired by David Abbott to join arguably the best shop of the eighties - Abbott Mead Vickers.)Then onto Doyle Dane Bernbach.Smith/Greenland in America, under futurist Faith Popcorn.Back to Blighty to become Creative Director at 25.Setting up a Cramer Saatchi-like creative consultancy for seven years, earning a ‘Seymour’ when Geoffrey was still in short pants. (Again, I refer you to google.)Then taking a 75% pay cut to join new agency Wight Collins Rutherford Scott in an attempt to win creative awards.And that’s just part one.We had a great chat, hope you enjoy it.

British advertising may have had more successful businessmen.More accomplished creative directors.Bigger award winners.But never a better Creative.No one has more ideas living in British people’s heads than John Webster.They didn’t gatecrash either – they were invited in.Singing and dancing their way past the barriers and into the national consciousness.One big, happy conga line; Smash Martians, Cresta Bear, Honey Monster, John Smith’s Arkwright, the Prize Guys, the Humphreys, and on and on.Born across four different decades.Created, unlike other ads at the time – alone and using research.Occasionally John and a writer are credited, but primarily John was both the art director and writer.At the time, Bernbach’s 1+1=3 was the law, so that was very rare.Rarer still, were Creatives who embraced research.Creatives viewed it as a killer of creativity and innovation.I thought I’d look into these aspects of John’s process.First, by talking about how John created ideas.Fortunately, Dave Trott broke his anti-podcast rule, which is great, because I couldn’t think of anyone better to talk to on the subject.Dave worked with John through the seventies and is obviously a brilliant Creative in his own right. (He’s not just a blogger kids.)Next, I’ll talk to planner Sarah Carter about how John used research to shape ideas, but first, here’s Dave…

Imagine a day where you don’t own a computer, and you lose your phone just after breakfast.We used to live like that.Every damn day.With virtually no access to information.Researching how to be better at your job wasn’t a thing.Advertising people didn’t do podcasts or post articles about their work.True, there were books, but not many.Aside from awards annuals, the main two were ‘Ogilvy On Advertising’ and ‘Bill Bernbach’s Book’.Occasionally you’d photocopy an article from Campaign, Creative Review or Direction magazine.Dave Trott’s ‘How To Get Your First Job In Advertising’ was the most useful.I had a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.The text was so faded and broken up it looked like an old religious document.Which it was in a way.It’s still great. (I’ve attached a copy below.)Later, The Copy and Art Direction Books turned up.They were a revelation – good creatives explaining how they create.(If you haven’t read Richard Foster’s piece do, you’ll be a 9% better writer after reading it.)We have the opposite problem today; too much.But it leads to a kind of inertia.A bit like living next to St. Pauls, you put off visiting, because you think ‘it’ll be there tomorrow, next week, next year’.The other problem is who is or isn’t worth listening to?LinkedIn if packed with people aggressively telling you exactly how to create ads as good as the ones they… like.At the other end of the spectrum are people like Dave Trott, George Tannenbaum, Brian Burch, The Behind The Billboard guys, Rory Sutherland, Ben Kay and many more I’ll be embarrassed tomorrow that I forgot to mention.And Steve Hudson.He posts a series called The Power Of Advertising on LinkedIn where he breaks down his (and Victoria Fallon’s) ads from nose to tail.From brief to air.What’s great about it is the work.A lot of teams have a style or preference, Steve (and Victoria) don’t.At least, not that I can spot.What links Audi to Anti-Smoking to One To One to Levi’s to Kingshield other than they’re all great?The weirdest thing about our chat was realising how short their creative career was.10 years.They took it very seriously, which lead to some great work, but maybe some bad decisions too.Hearing about Steve’s career was a bit like watching a horror film.Instead of shouting ‘LOOK BEHIND YOU!’ I was shouting ‘DON’T RESIGN TO HEGARTY!’ or ‘STAY AT ABBOTT MEAD!’.Anyway, it was a great chat, hope you enjoy it.

Whatever happened to funny ads?Have clients stopped buying them?Or have agencies stopped writing them?They used to dominate the ad breaks.Humour was the first tool you reached for after being handed a brief.Why? Well, as that Poppins women says ‘A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’.Actually…did they dominate ad breaks?Maybe I’ve slipped on my rose-tinted specs again?I reach for an old D&AD Annual.Randomly, I pick up 1991’s.34 tv and cinema ads featured; 28 were funny.Of the 28, the most awarded were for Barclaycard and Red Rock Cider.They feel slightly odd today.They aren’t ‘advertising funny’, they’re actually funny.In a way that I can’t imagine them popping up between Bake Off?I don’t know whether it’s because they don’t take the product very seriously? Some even make fun of it. (Imagine; making fun of the very people who pay the bills?)Or maybe getting bigger laughs than the programmes that surround you feels like bad form?Like you have aspirations above your station.I decided to do a bit of rudimentary desk research, discovering that humour is still surprisingly popular.The public love it, apparently.Much preferring it to being lectured to or bullshitted.So why the lack of funny ads?Even ad testing companies are urging us to produce more.(Yes System 1, I’m talking about you.)In an effort to better understand this humour thing, I went straight to the Chairman of the Board, the Grand Fromage, the Capo di Tutti Frutti – John Lloyd.Not only did he shoot both the campaigns above, he’d spent two decades beforehand producing the funniest stuff on tv, including Not The Nine O’clock News, Blackadder and Spitting Image.We had a lovely chat, hope you enjoy it.

So far, I’m about eighty podcasts in.If someone tells me they listen, they usually follow up with ‘that Frank Lowe one’s great’ (or ‘sick’, depending on their age).I always ask why, but never get a clear answer.They just like it.It was enjoyable to record too, but I left wondering whyhe’d barely mentioned Lowe Howard-Spink.As if he’d only ever worked at CDP.Which was a shame, CDP had been amazing, but they weren’t my era.Lowe’s was.By the time I’d snuck into advertising the cool agencies were the new ones – GGT, BBH, AMV and the agency that carried Frank’s name.Year after year, they won big awards for big clients.Stella Artois, Vauxhall, Tesco, Heineken, I could go on.So I will – Lloyds Bank, Reebok, Weetabix, Gordons Gin, Parker Pens, The Mail On Sunday, Condor, Castella, Tizer, Ovaltine, KP, The Hanson Trust, Birds Eye, Smirnoff, Coca-Cola – they were huge.And all of those clients won awards.And, unlike CDP, they started opening or acquiring offices across the globe.But it wasn’t always this way.In 1981, only months after opening their doors, they were in turmoil.Totally dysfunctional.Having swiped a big chunk of CDP’s senior talent, they didn’t have a plan or structure of how to use them.Who over-saw who?Did anybody over-see anybody?Who was Creative Director?Dave Horry? Alan Waldie? John O’Driscoll? John Kelley? Alfredo Marcantonio? Or the recently added former CDP superstar Geoff Seymour?They found that too many creative leaders meant they had no creative leader.Six months in, Horry, O’Driscoll and Kelley walk.On the way out the door, they advise Frank that he needed a Creative Director and it should be the least-known and youngest of the breakaways – Alfredo Marcantonio.Suddenly, things started to work.We talk about why and the rest of Marc’s career, hope you enjoy it.

A muffin company wants to make more money.It's hard to increase their current customers weekly muffin intake - so they need add some new ones.To flip muffin fans who aren't choosing theirs, they need to tell them about their company or muffins that will get them to try one.And tell them in a way that gets their attention.But the first thing they need to do is choose who to speak to. An ad agency?A design company?Branding agency?Packing firm?Social media experts?Behavioural scientists?Media agency?I could go on.And on.Is it helpful to muffin companies out there to slice ‘communication’ into so many tiny specialisms?Some ad agencies dabble in design, some designer companies do the odd ad.But why is it so segmented?Essentially, we're all working with words and pictures to create personalities.Michael Johnson has always straddled that line, the last 30 years running Johnson Banks.And straddled it well, picking up every creative award going, for design and advertising.We had a great chat, hope you enjoy it.Dx

Pick up any New York Art Directors Club Annual from the sixties and you can feel the heat coming off the pages.The Writers are using words previously confined to conversation, the Art Directors are trying to find new ways to present the information (‘Creating new pages’ as Helmut Krone put it.)Then, the seventies.A whole different story; the experimentation and energy appear to have dried up.True, there are still lots of good thoughts and lines, but in terms of how it's presented the search for 'a new page' seems to have come to an end.Maybe it was agreed at some Annual General Art Directors meeting that Art Directors should stop pfaffing around, decide once and for all what a god damn ad should look like!If it was, the look they settled on was this;All headlines should be set in a bold serif font.Squeezed.(In the spring you’re allowed to use initial caps for each word.)Underneath the headline should be a photo (the more serious the better).100 words of copy should be divided into two columns and placed under the picture.Put a logo bottom left.Job done.It's odd, because the job of an art director is to set a distinctive tone and get attention.To do both, you have to create something that looks different from the norm.All companies aren't the same and unusual get's more attention than familiar.As the '70's ended so did the Art Direction lockdown.Art Directors began to play again.One of the leading players was Gary Goldsmith.Take a look at his VW Rabbit ad from 1981.It looks nothing like an ad, let alone a VW ad.Or his Chivas Regal Christmas ad.Where's the lovely photograph of the whiskey they had in the previous 200 award-winning Chivas ads?Giant letters turning up at all angles?Copy out of a brightly coloured box, a box printed in a 5th colour (it added $1m to the cost of production).What the hell was he playing at?I guess that’s the point, look through the work below you can feel the joy of a human being communicating to others.He'll hate me for saying this, but as a small child I used to look through the One Shows to find Gary's work.Each client would always have its own distinctive look.If the clients were premium the ads felt premium, if the clients were more basic the ads felt more basic.Every campaign had a bespoke look.The only thing they had in common was that they felt intelligent and playful.I had a great chat with Gary, hope you enjoy it.

'Recorded any new podcasts lately?'I get asked this a few times every week.The askees range from college attendees to retired adman.As I pick the people I interview, they seem as famous as The Beatles to me, but they're often unknown to the askees.After offering up a name and watching a blank expression appear, I reach for a quick handle, something from culture that I think they'll know.Occasionally it's an ad fact; 'Set Up Fallon before his name was lopped off' (Tom McElligott), but it's better if it's something that's escaped from the pages of Campaign and the various awards annuals and seeped into the culture.A good test is whether it would pique the interest of your parents.For example, mine wouldn't be fussed about who founded Fallon, but they might be interested in the bloke who 'Created those Smash Martians and Cresta Bear ads, yet wasn't John Webster' (Chris Wilkins), or the 'Typographer who used to be in a band with David Bowie' (Dave Wakefield) or maybe the guy who 'Shot all those Gary Lineker Walker's ads' (Paul Weiland).Should I bump into another askee before I post this, and they haven't heard the name Trevor Beattie, the problem wouldn't be trying to think of a cultural link they may know, it will be trying to figure out which one is most relevant to the person in front of me.I could create a very bespoke answer.Because Trevor seems to have had a disproportionate amount of brushes with popular culture.Here's a few that spring to mind:He went to school with UB40.Worked for the bloke who wrote the R-Whites 'Secret Lemonade Drinker'.Did those Weetabix 'Skinhead' ads.Got Bob Hoskins to do the voiceover.Hired by the guy who wrote Campari's 'No, Luton Airport'.Wrote those ads where people turn into Bertie Bassett.Created an Irish Tourist Board campaign featuring Wendy Craig and Billy Beaumont.Wrote 'Cats Like Felix Like Felix' in 1989 (it's still used).Discovered Holly Willoughby for Pretty Polly ad.Wrote ‘Hello Boys’.Shot with Hugh Hudson.Did that 'Cometh The Hour' David Beckham ad.Created that F.C.U.K. campaign.Owns the biggest Muhummad Ali collection in the world.Did a Unicef ad with Nelson Mandela.Persuaded Chris Cunningham to direct his first commercial.Shot an ad with David Lynch.Used John Shuttleworth for Yorkshire Tea ads.Rewrote Lionel Bart's ‘Food, Glorious Food’ for McCain’s ad.Pays for hundreds Veterans to go back to the beaches of Normandy to commemorate D-Day every year.Approved 'Double Life'.Invested in 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'.Bought the original Abbey Road sign.Approved Peter Kay’s John Smith's campaign.Oversaw the marketing for Tony Blair and New Labour for three successful General Election campaigns.Created poster for that film 'Layer Cake'.Hired Zowie Bowie.Produced the cult film ‘Moon’.Made a documentary about Rudolph Nuryev.Produced a documentary about the history of the Spitfire.Producing a film about Brian Epstein.Trekked to the South Pole with Buzz Aldrin.Produced a documentary about Thalidomide (Attacking The Devil).With Harold Evans.Going to space in 2020.(At the time of writing he's desperately trying to make a film about Hilda Ogden.)We had a great chat, hope you enjoy it.

Context.It’s the word that comes to mind every time I think about writing one of these intros.What seems familiar today was once considered very left-field, risky or just plain crazy.Each pushes the peanut along for the next generation.Take the 1988 D&AD Annual, it’s hard to believe now, but all but one ad in the press and poster section had black headlines, the one that didn’t was Graham Fink’s Metropolitan Police campaign.I was a generation behind Graham, so watched from afar as he and his writer Jeremy Clarke tried to push the peanut forward.They made ads taking the piss out of other ads, (Hamlet), they got England’s Cricket Captain to stick two fingers up to the establishment after being arrested for smoking dope, (Hamlet again), and they were the first to blow a million pounds on the production of a single tv ad, (B.A.).I had a great chat with ‘Finky’, hope you enjoy it.

Words.Boy, they’ve really fallen off their perch.They used to be so respected, as were the people who knew how to use them.They could breathe life into cold, dead facts, in their hands ‘our beer costs a lot’ could become ‘Reassuringly expensive’.Better and shorter.Writers would often burn the midnight oil in an effort to get the maximum meaning from the minimum word count.It’s odd, because people have never read more than they do today, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google, emails, texts, not to forget books, magazines and the odd newspaper.In fact today, there’s no part of the communication process that doesn’t rely on words, including the deck that explains the communication process.But for some reason, the skill of using them effectively is no longer being taught or even valued. Tim Riley has been choosing his words carefully for three decades now, we had a great chat about his time using them at some the best agencies in London.Hope you enjoy it.

After years of being amazed at what was on the net, I’m now increasingly surprised at what’s not.Three years ago I was trawling for a particular ad of Tom’s, not only couldn’t I find it I could barely find any of his work.Outraged, I gathered together as much of his work as I could lay my hands on and put out a post called ‘Hands Up Who’s Heard Of Tom McElligott’.I was trying to be snarky and ironic, like you may write ‘Hands Up Who’s Heard Of John Lennon?’.Two things happened:1. An enormous amount of people checked it out, 65k.Most had never heard of him, he was being shared and referred to on Twitter and Facebook a ‘really cool pre-internet guy’.2. A few members of his department got in touch to point out that some of the ads featured were not under Tom’s watch, they were overseen by Pat Burnham.Then Pat Burnham emailed me; I opened it cautiously.‘Just wanted to get in touch to say thank you, I really enjoyed your blog post, best, Pat.’It made me feel bad.What can I do to make amends? Interview him, I’d never done it before but it seemed like a good thing to do.I’ve now posted about 50 interviews.So it feels appropriate that Tom is my first podcast interview. He hasn’t given an interview for 25 years and said he doesn’t plan on giving one on the next 25.I Hope you enjoy listening to Tom as much as I did.