The Power of Paraphrase

Over the years I have had the pleasure of partnering with (and learning from) some wonderful facilitators. And, amongst them all, a few particular moments remain in the memory.

One such was in Amsterdam. I was working with my colleague Emma Luten, helping one of the top ad agencies there, JWT, to create a new vision and strategy.

From quite early on, it was clear that the local management team was unhappy. Overwhelmingly Dutch, they clearly did not like each other, scoring points off one other at will, and resentful of working in the meeting in the international language, English.

So, after about twenty minutes, one of them told Emma to put away the marker pen, to sit down and be quiet.

“We need to talk to each other,” he said. “In Dutch.”

They went at it, hammer and tongs, many speaking at once, voices raised in anger and frustration, nobody listening to anyone else. Emma and I sat silently.

After half an hour or so, they paused to draw breath. Emma said: “Do you mind if I say something?”

“What?”

“Well, it seems to me that there are three main issues here.”

“And they would be...?”

Emma calmly laid them out before them. The team was stunned and reluctantly agreed.

“My suggestion would be that we use these issues as task headlines and work together on each of them in the remainder of this meeting,” said Emma.

So that’s what we did.

Kenny Ball RIP

Sad to note the passing of one of the giants of British trad jazz, trumpeter Kenny Ball.

Along with Chris Barber and Acker Bilk, we forget these days how big trad was in the late 1950s and early 60s, easily competing with the emergent Liverpool sound.

“Midnight in Moscow” and “Samantha” were his biggest hits.

When he left school, he joined the ad agency, J Walter Thompson, as a messenger, establishing a day job while he built his musical skills and reputation playing in evenings. I took the same route a few years later, but with a rather different outcome.

Because he was an “old boy”, he and his band used to be invited to play each year at JWT’s Dinner and Dance (yes, really) at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane.

Happy music. Great for dancing.

My first new product

Our adorable ten year old daughter seems to relish more than ever the unwrapping of Christmas presents, but, surprisingly, it was the Jellytots that seemed to create the most immediate joy. So I thought I’d re-publish my blogpost about their launch. It was the first that I published – on 27 October 2009 and doubtless had a microscopic readership then:

When I left JWT, where I’d had a very menial series of jobs starting with the mail room, I was lucky enough to land my first real break in “adland”, as Assistant Account Executive on what was then the UK’s largest single TV advertiser, Rowntree’s. I was twenty-three.

It shows the subservient role that innovation had then, that while the experienced folk were managing the main established brands, I was immediately assigned to the two new ones in the pipeline, a carbonated soft drink brand called POP (that sank without trace), and a small round fruity sweetie in a bag aimed at young children and their concerned mums.

That one, Jellytots, passed its fortieth birthday two years ago. Tightly targeted, it was never going to be a major player, but the fact that it still holds the stage is testament to the clarity of thinking and creative expression, in both company and agency, that went into the brand’s initial strategy, product, packaging and advertising.

Rather extraordinarily, Jellytots was the favourite of my now seven year-old when she was around four.

There is no doubt that I learned massive amounts about what works and what doesn’t in innovation from that seminal experience long ago.

Launching After Eight in France

I was given the task of persuading our French colleagues to launch After Eight mints in France and, what’s more, to adapt and adopt the British TV campaign.

You remember the scenario? Upper class British dinner party. Everyone in evening clothes (tuxedos, black ties, long frocks, tiaras etc). Silver candelabra on a groaning table. Plum-in-mouth accents. Horsey laughter. After Eights being passed.

JWT at their most posh.

The French thought this quite impossible.

First of all, chocolate and mint together? Absurd.

Then, all those ridiculous clothes. Nobody in France goes to dinner dressed like that.

“Nor do they in England,” I responded. “It’s a… joke.”

Long pause…

“Why would anyone want to go to dinner dressed as a waiter?” they enquired.

Game. set and match.

Pitching Schweppes

We were pitching the Schweppes business against JWT and Ogilvy. The bluest of blue-chip accounts at the time. (Where are they now?)

It was the first really important new business opportunity after the merger of Saatchi & Saatchi with Garland-Compton. I was leading a mixed team from both agencies - another first.

We had some terrific creative work – and an excellent presentation. So now to get down to rehearsal.

“No,” said managing director, Tim Bell (above, now Lord Bell), he wouldn’t be able to rehearse with us. Just too busy. And he didn’t.

So on the morning of the pitch, the clients settled in the meeting room (led by the redoubtable Keith Holloway), I went to pick up Tim from his office.

“Tell me about it,” he said. I briefed him in about forty-five seconds, the time it took to walk to the meeting room. And we walked in.

The presentation went like clockwork – and Tim blew them away with his deep grasp of the strategy, his understanding of the power of the creative concepts, his empathy and his insights. We won by a country mile.

Rehearsals? Not for Tim.

Persil washes whiter – and what?

One of JWT’s biggest clients was and is Unilever. And when I was working in the mailroom of the agency forty plus years ago, there seemed to be a major kerfuffle over developing a new tag-line for Persil washing powder. “Persil washes whiter” had done duty, it seemed, for ever, but the company was demanding something new, something better.

All the front-line creative teams had had a go at it, but the client continuously knocked back every submission as inadequate. What to do next?

Well, there was always Bernard. Bernard Gutteridge was by quite a way the oldest copywriter at the agency. You can still find his poems in anthologies of 1930s verse, alongside WH Auden and Cecil Day Lewis and Stephen Spender. That’s how old he was.

The only problem was that, from opening time on, Bernard was to be found in the hostelry over the road in Hill Street Mayfair, the Coach and Horses. And he could be quite cantankerous when interrupted: "Not just the whole face mutinous," as he put it in his poem, "Private".

“B-B-Bernard…” the delegated young account executive opened.

“What?”

“W-W-Well, you’ll have heard that we’re looking for a new tag-line for Persil, and we wondered if you had some ideas?”

Pause…

“Persil washes whiter – AND IT SHOWS! Now piss off.”

It ran and ran.

I sense that this little story has several messages for us…

Poker and the Creatives

At the same time as my day job in the mail-room of JWT at 40 Berkeley Square in the mid-1960s, and playing rock music with the Idle Hands, my main source of income came from poker. Four hours a day, five days a week. I did two shifts – over lunchtime and early evening.

Initially I played with the school in the media department. They were far too good for me. Cautious. Analytical. Poker-faced. And in my youthful, impoverished state, I certainly could not afford to lose. What I gained, though, was a good working knowledge of both strategy and tactics.

Luckily, one day I was invited to sit in with the creative department school. This was the life. Not great at the game, all of them earned substantially more than me, and I could walk away from the table with winnings regularly.

As a bonus, they were such a joy to be with. Open, talented, witty. I don’t remember all their names forty-five years later. Two that vividly remain with me are the outstanding Australian artist and designer, Ken Done (above), and the delightful young writer Llewellyn Thomas, son of Dylan Thomas.

It’s not that I learned much about poker from that school. What I did begin to appreciate was something much more important - the way that highly creative people are, how they function.

Starting out at Grand Hotel

Quite often I get asked about playing as a rock musician at the start of my working life.

Of course I did have a day job as well – as a mailboy at 40 Berkeley Square in the middle of London’s Mayfair district, the home of the leading ad agency in Britain at that time, J Walter Thompson. Coming as I did from a Midland town, I thought Mayfair was clearly the epicentre of the universe. These were the early days of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Mary Quant and all that.

Initially I played in a not-so-great band on the South Coast. I was nineteen years old and the most memorable thing about it was that over weekends I would stay with the manager of our band, also nineteen, who just happened to be the son of the manager of the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne. So of a Saturday and Sunday morning, following a gig, we would eat a sumptuous late breakfast, served by the head butler. Then I would take a leisurely morning by the pool, chatting with whichever celebrity guests happened to be staying at the Grand. These were the first celebs I ever met. They must have been thrilled.

Later I was invited to play with a much better outfit, The Idle Hands, based nearer home in London – in heavenly Hampstead. But that’s another story.

There is no doubt that I learned three big things from those early performing experiences: the paramount importance of good product, constantly evolving; the value of good presentation; and the need to negotiate what the market will bear. Not more, not less.

What was your first job and what did you learn from it?

My first (fairly successful) innovation and a flop

When I left JWT, where I’d had a very menial series of jobs starting with the mail room, I was lucky enough to land my first real break in “adland”, as Assistant Account Executive on what was then the UK’s largest single TV advertiser, Rowntree’s. I was twenty-three.

It shows the subservient role that innovation had then, that while the experienced folk were managing the main established brands, I was immediately assigned to the two new ones in the pipeline, a carbonated soft drink brand called POP (that sank without trace), and a small round fruity sweetie in a bag aimed at young children and their concerned mums.

That one, Jellytots, passed its fortieth birthday two years ago. Tightly targeted, it was never going to be a major player, but the fact that it still holds the stage is testament to the clarity of thinking and creative expression, in both company and agency, that went into the brand’s initial strategy, product, packaging and advertising.

Rather extraordinarily, Jellytots was the favourite of my now seven year-old when she was around four.

There is no doubt that I learned massive amounts about what works and what doesn’t in innovation from that seminal experience long ago.

What was your first innovation?