When I left BMP and started GGT, John Webster said I would struggle to make a success of it.
This was because he knew I wasn’t very good at handling middle weight and heavy weight teams.
I’d been trained in New York, and my style was much more American than English.
I wasn’t as polite and gentle as you needed to be.
My style was too combative, my language too confrontational.
But the exact things that made me bad with seniors, made me good with youngsters.
Keep the language simple.
Keep the instructions clear.
Have the same rules for everyone.
Reward results, not people.
Youngsters are much simpler than senior teams.
All youngsters want is work, lots of it.
They want to get their career moving in a hurry.
It had always seemed to me that agency creative departments were run very wastefully.
For what it cost to buy one really expensive senior award-winning creative team, you could get ten younger teams.
As a creative director, I must be able to get more and better work out of ten junior teams than one heavyweight team.
Especially as the award-winning team probably had lots of job offers, so they feel they’re doing you a favour anyway.
Young teams aren’t like that.
Particularly young teams who’d been out of college a couple of years and were stuck in bad agencies.
For them, the job is a lifeline, their one chance get their career on track at a good agency.
So they grab every brief like a present.
Everything’s an opportunity to get some work out that’s going to make their name.
We needed good, young, cheap people like that, to prove you could run an agency with just juniors.
Then we’d train them up, and they’d be as good as, or better than, the expensive heavy weights.
So, over several years, we hired the following.
A young team from Dorlands (Steve Henry and Axel Chaldecott).
A young team from JWT (Dave Cook and Chris Bardsley).
A young team from First City Advertising (Dave Waters and Jan van Mesdag).
A young copywriter from an airbrush studio in Sheffield, and a typographer (Paul Grubb and Sam Hurford).
A young team from Ogilvey (Pete Gatley and Nick Wray).
Then one day at Bounds Green station, I spotted a funny poster saying, “Starve a meter, take the tube”
So I called up FCB and found it was young team called Damon Collins and Mary Wear.
So we hired them too.
And we told them all the rules.
We want three things.
We want a lot of work.
We want it high quality.
And we want it on time.
We won’t tell you how to do it.
We don’t care if we never see you.
But we don’t want to any excuses.
And you know what?
It worked.
We had a great agency full of great youngsters, doing great work.
If I came in at the weekend they were always in there.
Working, playing music, or just hanging out.
Did any of them feel ripped off?
I doubt it.
They all went on to win awards (if you’re into that) at other agencies.
And they all went on to become either creative directors, executive creative directors, or start their own agencies.
“Junior” is just a state of mind.
A great idea doesn’t know it was had by a junior.

When I was starting in advertising, someone told me we’re like lawyers.

We are paid to argue a case the best we can.

It’s our job to put up the best possible argument in our client’s favour.

(Assuming, of course, that they’re not making or doing something we could never morally work on.)

Also, we can’t choose to work on things that we know about or enjoy.

Since we don’t personally represent the entire advertising audience, we have to be able to work on things that don’t interest us.

Men have to be able to work on tampons, women have to be able to work on The Discovery Channel.

Whether you’re interested in cars, beer, perfume, clothes, whatever, you have to be able to work on them.

You have to be objective, not subjective.

You have to get out of your comfort zone.

For this reason I’ve always given students things that I know they don’t want to work on.

Things that will make them feel uncomfortable.

This will force them to think rationally about how to persuade people.

If you left it to students they’d just do campaigns for anti-racism and legalise-marijuana.

But, because these are things they already agree with, they won’t learn anything from them.

So I try to give them more difficult things that force them to think.

Several years ago I gave them Mac as a brief.

At that time Microsoft ruled the world and Mac was in terrible trouble.

But one student had a great solution.

He just had a headline saying, “MICROSOFT DO ALL THEIR ADS ON A MAC”

It was a great idea because every ad agency used Macs for artwork.

So whichever agency did Microsoft’s ads was bound to use Macs.

Unexpected, upstream, predatory thinking.

But giving students tough briefs didn’t always work out well.

One evening I gave them The National Front as a brief.

I knew they’d hate it and struggle with it, and I was right.

They were so anti the brief they couldn’t even think clearly.

All they could do was a lot of ads with racist name-calling.

They couldn’t be objective and engage with the problem.

I was disappointed and I forgot to take the roughs down.

Next morning the staff couldn’t get into the agency.

The cleaners had arrived early to clean up after the class, seen the ads on the walls, and gone on strike and locked the agency.

Because they’d seen the ads on the walls and they thought we had taken on The National Front as a client.

When I was youngster at BMP, I was thinking about how to progress my career.
As a writer I knew I was good, but I wasn’t great.
I knew I couldn’t just rely on my talent to get famous.
I’d have to think of another way.
Well how do other people do it?
I knew, lots of them wrote articles and gave speeches.
This gave them a fame beyond their talent.
Okay, I can do that.
I need to start by writing an article.
So I called campaign and asked them what sort of article I could write.
They said, what’s different about you?
I said, well I see all the students because no one else is interested.
They said, okay write an article about students in advertising.
So I did.
I wrote an article saying you shouldn’t pull a student’s book apart unless you were prepared to help them put it back together.
Don’t just destroy their confidence to boost your own ego.
If you’re not prepared to help them do a new book, just give them a list of bad agencies where you think they stand some chance of getting a job with the book they’ve got.
Anyway, this ran in Campaign and I pinned it to my wall.
Then one evening a scruffy student came in to show me his book.
It was dreadful.
I thought I really don’t have the energy to help him put a new one together.
So I went out to get a list of sub-prime agencies for him.
While I was out, he read the article on the wall.
When I returned he looked at the list of agencies and said, “I’ve read your article and I think you ought to make the effort to help me put a new book together.”
Effectively, he embarrassed me into giving him a placement at BMP.
He was there a month and worked hard and put a much better book together.
Fast forward about 18 months.
I’ve opened my own agency and the same guy pops in for a coffee.
He says, “Dave, I don’t know what to do. I’ve been taking my book around for nearly two years. Everyone says it’s good, but no one’s given me a job. What should I do?”
I said, “The best advice I can give you is to panic.”
Of course, he asked me what I meant.
Because, all through your life everyone tells you not to panic.
So I said something like, “Being reasonable is what’s kept you unemployed. Being quiet and calm has caused you to accept a situation you hate. It’s time to do whatever it takes to change that situation. It’s time to go beyond embarrassment. This will involve getting out of your comfort zone. The fuel for that is panic.”
At his next interview, they said his book was very good, but they were looking for someone older, someone more experienced.
So he went straight out to an Oxfam shop.
He bought a long scruffy overcoat, a tatty old trilby hat, and a long straggly beard.
Then he went back to the same agency, with the same book.
He made them laugh, but he also embarrassed them into giving him the job.
The agency was CDP, the greatest of all the UK ad agencies.
The student was Graham Fink.
Since then he’s worked with some of the best people in the business.
He’s won tons of awards (if you’re into that).
And he’s creative head of the third biggest agency in the UK.
So when I say it’s not just about your book full of ads, that’s what I mean.

Jimmy Greaves was the most prolific goal scorer England ever had.

He was being interviewed about how he scored so many goals.

He said, “I’d reckon to get in the box 400 times a year.

About 200 times the ball would come across.

About 100 times I’d connect with it.

About 50 of those would be on target.

About half of those I’d put beyond the goalie.

And 25 goals a season would do me.”

So there it is from the greatest striker: do it by the numbers.

When I started my first job, I was like most juniors.

A lot better at print than TV.

So that was all anyone ever gave me: press briefs.

I wanted to learn about TV, but it was a vicious circle.

You’re not good at TV: so they don’t give you any TV briefs: so you never get good at TV.

I had to find a way to break the circle.

So after work, when all the senior teams had gone to the pub, I’d take the TV briefs off their desks and photocopy them.

Then I’d work late at night writing scripts.

Then present them in the morning before they got in.

It didn’t make me a lot of friends with the senior creatives, but in that first year at BMP I got six commercials made.

One of them was very good, two were okay, and three were bad.

But at least I was getting practice at TV.

In order to get 6 commercials made in those days, you would have to make at least 20 animatics for testing.

To get 20 animatics made, you’d need to have presented about 60 scripts to clients.

To get 60 scripts presented you’d need to show the creative director over 100.

And you’d probably have another 100 that weren’t good enough to show him.

That’s 200 scripts to get 6 commercials.

So there you have it.

A Career in Advertising: The Jimmy Greaves Method.

Mark Twain tells the story of a young boy he met in the mid-West.

Every time a stranger came into town the other boys delighted in showing the stranger just how stupid this boy was.

They’d hold out two coins, a dime (10 cents) and a nickel (5cents), and tell the boy he could keep one.

He’d always pick the nickel because it was bigger.

Every time he did it all the other boys laughed.

Mark twain took him aside and said, “Son, I have to tell you that the small coin is worth more than the bigger one.”

The boy said, “I know that mister. But how many times do you think they’d let me choose if I picked the more valuable one?”

In the original context, the boy is stupid.

Change the context, and he’s smart.

This is what the government of Singapore did.

Singapore is a small island, and short of organs for transplants.

Like Britain, people are too lazy to carry an organ donor card.

So the Singapore government changed the law.

Everyone’s  organs are automatically donated when they die.

Unless they carry a non-donor card.

Now Singapore has plenty of organs for transplants.

Because everyone’s too lazy to carry a non-donor card.

In the original context laziness was a problem.

Change the context and laziness solves the problem.

It works in advertising too.

London Docklands was an inner city development area.

Dockland’s main competitor was Milton Keynes.

It was portrayed in the ads as a pretty place to live, lots of green fields, cows and sheep, out in the country.

Docklands looked like an awful place to live by comparison.

So we changed the context.

Instead of looking for a great place to LIVE, you should be looking for a  great place to WORK.

Paul Grubb and Steve Henry wrote the strapline, “WHY MOVE TO THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, WHEN YOU CAN MOVE TO THE MIDDLE OF LONDON”

By changing the context, moving a business to the country looked like a dumb thing to do.

It worked so well that Docklands now has the tallest buildings in Europe, and Milton Keynes still has green fields and cows.

And, of course, it’s true for media.

Roughly the same amount of people with money read The News of the World and The Sunday Times.

So, where would you put an ad for Rolex?

Think what the media says about the brand.

It’s not just about the ad, it’s about where it runs.

Like everything, it’s all about context.