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One of the questions I get asked most often is: ‘what has been the biggest change in advertising over the last 40 years?’
It’s easy to look at the role of technology and talk about the digital revolution, which undoubtedly is amazing, but whenever I answer this question I talk more about the globalization of the advertising business, which, of course, is a result of technology. The important issue here is that we must remember that it isn’t just technology that makes a difference, but how we use it also creates change.
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We all know that the phenomenon of mobile texting came about not because mobile phone operators understood its value to their subscribers – it was never viewed as a consumer product – but because subscribers recognized the value of short, sharp messages that could be responded to at the receiver’s leisure. || And, of course, it was very cost-efficient: never forget that.
It’s always important to remember that it’s not the technology that matters, but what we do with it. Remember Walkman? I bet Sony wish we would. It was a brilliant innovation based on existing technology. The genius was making taped music mobile. However, it seems Sony became obsessed with making tapes smaller instead of adopting digital technology and expanding our mobile music collection exponentially.
Technology has created the opportunity for our ideas to go global. Naturally clients have leapt upon this opportunity, which allows them to control their image and reduce costs. || Why have 10
commercials when you could just have one? || It’s a no brainer for many big corporations. || But in our rush towards globalization have we also lost our ability to touch people? In many cases we have. Creating work that can cross borders has too often ended up with the adoption of some ‘amazing’ technique instead of an idea. This is lazy thinking, too often born out of the difficulty of getting a number of clients from the different regions to buy in to the idea. || It’s easier selling a technique – ‘Hey, we’re going to get the buildings to dance!’ – as opposed to a powerful idea that moves people. The often-heard reaction – that won’t work here – is hard to argue against. Dancing buildings work everywhere. Or do they?
But just as Mr Bernbach showed us how to create great advertising for the masses, so today our creative challenge is to create ideas that can cross borders and yet still touch people.
I remember an interview with J. K. Rowling. She’d just finished her Harry Potter books and was asked what age child she had in mind when writing the series. Potter goes from age eight to 18. ||
She said she didn’t, she wrote them for herself. She created something that touched her and, in doing so, touched millions. That’s the best advice anyone can give if you’re trying to create work that talks to a global audience.
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Our work at BBH for Levi Strauss showed that creativity could cross borders, yet still be acclaimed. This is a pretty basic point if you’re building your agency’s reputation on creativity. It was out of this experience that we developed the craft of visual narrative: telling a story without words. || I would provocatively say to our writers: ‘words are a barrier to communication’. Not because I didn’t value them – I did – but all too often they were over used to explain an idea instead of enhancing it.
In the early days of BBH our desire to create work that could cross borders opened up a number of interesting creative opportunities for us. The most unusual was a project for Pepsi.
Kevin Roberts, who now runs Saatchi & Saatchi globally, had contacted us after seeing our 501s campaign. At the time Kevin was managing director of Pepsi’s business in the Middle East. It was their most profitable region outside the US. Why the Middle East? Think about it for a moment and you can see why: it’s unbelievably hot, consuming alcohol may result in eternal damnation and (not least) Coca-Cola were embargoed because of their presence in Israel. I’m not sure what was more profitable at the time: just printing money or bottling Pepsi and selling it in the Middle East. Who needs advertising, you might ask?
The reason BBH was given this brief was because of Pepsi’s belief that the embargo on Coca-Cola in the Middle East was going to be lifted. Which eventually it was.
Once that happened Pepsi would have some real competition. With this in mind, Kevin decided it was time Pepsi engaged with their customers’ emotions and not just their thirst. They needed to build some brand loyalty.
Now, if you think there are restrictions in creating global advertising wait until you get to a place like Saudi Arabia. I think the censors there would recoil from a blank screen. However, despite the challenges the advertising would face, he believed we could create something distinctive.
Remember: focus on the opportunities, not on the problems.
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Kevin provided BBH with one of the best briefs I’ve ever been issued. He explained that when he went to New York for the annual global Pepsi get-together each region from around the world presented its advertising in order of value to the company. Naturally, the US, as the biggest market, went first, followed, for the reasons I explained earlier, by the Middle East, presented by Kevin. Just
to make matters worse, the US division of Pepsi had some genuinely outstanding advertising at that time. Their ‘Choice of a new Generation’ campaign, which used famous stars, had everyone talking. Mind you, the commercial in which Michael Jackson’s hair burst into flames wasn’t exactly the kind of headline they were looking for. The director of that spot, Bob Giraldi, told me how it happened: Jackson was scripted to make an entrance through two walls of fire. I know, not exactly original! Anyway, on the command ‘action!’, young Michael bounded through the explosions of fire. The only problem was that he had so much hair lacquer on that his head burst into flames. This is one of the sad outcomes of over-coiffured hair. Unfortunately for Michael, someone hadn’t bothered to read the ‘highly inflammable’ warning that usually appears on the side of hair sprays. At its heart, Kevin’s brief to me was simple: when he stood up to present he didn’t want egg on his face! Now that, as a brief, is brilliant. You know exactly where your client is coming from and the reaction they want from your work: it’s got to stand up to scrutiny by a sophisticated but jaded marketing community in New York.
I think we delivered with a completely mad piece of advertising that got through the Saudi censors and was a hit in New York. It can be done.
We shot a two-minute spot in the Australian outback that was a cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and a James Bond movie starring the refreshing taste of Pepsi. || It was so over the top it was funny. Interestingly, the more ridiculous and absurd we made it, the fewer problems the censors had. ‘The thirst’ became a hit.
We had to make sure everyone held the hero can of Pepsi in their right hand. Apparently, in Saudi Arabia if you don’t you’re insulting everything that’s sacred to Arabian culture. And that can really piss off a lot of thirsty Saudis.
While we were working on the Pepsi campaign I went to Jeddah to familiarize myself with the market. It was the weirdest place I’ve ever been. I remember being taken to a very smart department store by the Pepsi people, Jeddah’s answer to Harvey Nichols or Bloomingdales.
Walking around the store we passed through the cosmetics department. I don’t normally spend a lot of time in cosmetics departments, but the ensuing scene enthralled me.
Standing there were three veiled women, covered from head to toe, trying on Chanel lipstick. They were being served by a man as women weren’t allowed to work in Saudi Arabia.
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It was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen. The three women would each select a lipstick, take it up under their veil, apply some, put the lipstick down and pick up a mirror that would also then have to go up under the veil so they could check out the lipstick. I stood there mesmerized by this
performance. Who knows what they could see under all that clothing or what the bearded counter assistant offered? Despite this, the end result was the purchase of several lipsticks and, therefore, an increase in Chanel’s profits. Talk about a brand giving you an inner glow! What was going on underneath that veil? And the lesson here? As alien as that culture was to me, here were three women doing something as simple as buying lipstick. It could have been Bloomingdales in New York – obviously without the veils and bearded salesman.
Back at BBH it was dawning on us that you certainly could create global campaigns from one place, especially if you were talking to a relatively young audience, but time differences and the resistance of local clients to accept our business model meant that we would have to consider opening offices in other regions.
To be fair, sometimes there are genuine differences that one region finds hard to understand about another. I suppose Wieden+Kennedy have discovered this with Nike. Their office in Portland, Oregon, has produced some brilliant global work, but consider whether, from that location, they would be able to understand the relationship fans have with football, or, as Americans say, soccer? It’s a very un-American sport, so they realized that they needed an office located in a football- soaked culture to help make Nike a credible player in this global sports arena. As a result, Wieden +Kennedy opened an office in Amsterdam and Nike, an American brand, are, I would argue, now a credible force in football.
It’s important to have beliefs. It’s also important to know how they have to evolve.
But the big question for us and our ambitions was how many offices should we open and where should we start?
It seemed to us there was no point in trying to compete with the major networks. We’d seen TBWA try to do this. || It’s not impossible, but before you know it you’re spending more and more time administering a complicated network of offices. It’s hard enough managing one office, but to manage 20, 30, 40? Forget it.
If you administer a large network the passion about the work rapidly dissipates. It becomes a process rather than a principle. It does wonders for your airmiles, but nothing for your creativity.
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So we started talking about the ‘micro network’. A network of a few offices located in important economic centres – between seven and ten offices at the most. This made much more sense for two main reasons: one, it was manageable, and two, we sensed a desire from certain clients to be more impressed with the quality of ideas rather than dozens of pins on maps showing office locations.
The biggest problem certain clients had was finding a great idea. Delivering an idea on the ground was relatively easy: a big, unifying idea was the issue.
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At this time, in the 90s, conventional wisdom would have said the next step in our growth would have been for BBH to take our brand to the US. We already had a number of American clients, so that would certainly have been the logical move. We would have followed a well-worn path so many agencies before us had taken. ‘Go west, young man.’ But by now we had our ‘Black Sheep’ philosophy, a philosophy born out of that very first poster we created for Levi Strauss to promote black denim: ‘When the world zigs, zag’. So we decided to zag and go east and start an office in Asia: to open up our brand to a region that didn’t at that time have a huge number of hot agencies. They certainly had some outstanding people, creatives who had brought their talent to the region and had produced some great work, but very few London creative agencies had gone in that direction. || Most were looking west, so we set our eyes on Singapore.
Starting a new office is more time-consuming than anyone ever realizes, and, I concede, more costly than they can imagine. We certainly wanted to open an office in the US (which we did, in due course), but genuinely thought we could learn a huge amount, which in due course we did, by zagging our way to Singapore.
Before we could credibly develop our global ambitions we had to have a global media partner. Without the ability to talk about media options and the reality of placing work in local markets we just wouldn’t be credible. We needed media input. Of course, we could have just gone to any media player and agreed a deal to work with them. But that would have meant handing over our client relationships to a media company for nothing.
Now, as much as I’ve said, money is the last reason to do anything, I also don’t think (and neither did John and Nigel) that our client relationships should just be handed over on a plate. They represented hard-earned business that we’d fought to help make successful. Nigel’s observation was, ‘I don’t want my gravestone to read, “he died a pauper but you should have seen his showreel”.’
It was obvious that if we were to be successful as a global agency we had to sell a stake in BBH to an agency with a respected and credible worldwide media business. We decided quite early on that there was only one option: Starcom. They were the media player we most respected and, fortunately for us, they were owned by Leo Burnett.
I say fortunately because Nigel had been a rising star at Leo Burnett in the early 70s and therefore felt an affinity with them. I think we also liked and trusted them – we very much respected what
they stood for and what they had achieved. They had produced brand-building campaigns that had been globally successful and, while not exactly my kind of work, it was work that I could respect. Most of all, and this is the most important point, was this issue of trust. We weren’t looking for clones of ourselves but people who had some beliefs and knew how to spell the word integrity. As part of this journey to find a credible partner, and before we finalized the deal with Leo Burnett and Starcom, I remember having a conversation with Jay Chiat. He was trying to put together a group of like-minded agencies that, based on creative principles, would be the foundation of a network of independently owned agencies that would become a global force. He wanted us to join him in this federation of agencies.
It sounds great in theory, but unless you’re financially bound to each other it’s impossible to make it work.
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Worse than that was the fact that the first agency he’d approached to set up this network was MOJO out of Australia. Now, at that time, if there was an agency that was more different from Chiat/Day it would almost certainly be one with the initials M, O, J and O. || They put jingles on just about every piece of business they worked on and obviously had a belief that singing was better than thinking. To say I hated the work they produced would probably be an understatement.
When we expressed doubts about MOJO’s creative beliefs to Jay Chiat, never mind the whole agency network concept, he talked us into having dinner at Le Caprice in London with him and MOJO’s international chairman.
Out of respect for Jay, Nigel Bogle and I went and listened politely as he explained why he thought MOJO, Chiat/Day and BBH could be the start of a great business venture.
It was at this moment that Nigel went into what I call ‘Bogle mode’. In no uncertain terms he explained why he thought MOJO would be the last people in advertising BBH would ever want to be in partnership with. One look at their work would have convinced you of that.
Jay took it all in his stride as the bloke from MOJO nearly choked on his steak tartare, stuttering and protesting their creative credentials. Obviously, their ‘down under’ definition of creative was different from ours. I recall that he wasn’t singing: perhaps a quick jingle would have been better. In the end, despite Nigel’s good advice, Chiat/Day did a deal with MOJO that eventually collapsed for all the obvious reasons. In the end MOJO were bought by Publicis, where thankfully they’ve made them sing less and got them thinking more. I’ve always found it advisable to listen to Nigel. Sadly for Chiat/Day they didn’t have that kind of relationship with him.
If you’re going to merge two cultures, you’d better make sure they’re compatible. Our part ownership with NeoGama in Brazil, now NeoGama/BBH, has been brilliantly successful because we all believe in the same things and buy the same kind of creative thinking. If the two are not compatible then what actually happens is that one organization takes over the other. It’s dressed up as a merger because it’s better for egos and PR.
In the advertising business most mergers don’t work. Why? An agency is a collection of beliefs – you can’t just package them up and merge them with someone else’s. || The whole thing’s a
nonsense. In the end, one culture has to be dominant. You should decide, when ‘merging’, which of the cultures, if they’re different, is going to be the dominant one and get the pain out of the way early on. We certainly weren’t going to be part of a charade like that.
Our deal with Leo Burnett was certainly the best deal we’ve ever done and has benefited both them and us. We went into it with something to offer Leo Burnett – the chance for them and Starcom to be part of our expansion – and for us to gain access to the powerful and effective media company that was Starcom. We always went into it with a win-win philosophy – they had to gain as much as us.
It was important for us to maintain our independence and therefore our ability to operate as we saw fit. Our creativity and intelligence were built on that positioning. We were able to hire the best