Vincent Nolan RIP

I first met Vincent Nolan some forty years ago. He came to teach Synectics to a group of us at Garland-Compton (shortly before it morphed into Saatchi and Saatchi). I was in my late twenties and had risen quickly in the advertising business, but learning from Vincent undoubtedly transformed my life.

It dawned on me that one of my main skills up to that point was in identifying weaknesses in other people’s thinking and wielding the scalpel, and that this approach, while it had helped me to be successful, was of very limited value in promoting real creativity and innovation (the lifeblood of marketing communications). Vincent taught us that a better approach was first to articulate the value in emerging ideas, then going on to identify the key issues and problem-solve them.

This may seem simple, even obvious, but it required some complete personal rewiring in myself, changes that have lived at the heart of my life and work ever since.

Following that early encounter, I brought Vincent into each successive new role I found myself in – training my new teams in the whole Synectics bag of tricks. Perhaps most powerfully this was achieved at Lintas in Sydney, where, in a succession of visits from him, most colleagues in the agency were given the treatment. This was a major factor in enabling us to work together more effectively and creatively – and as a consequence we were able to rise from eighth in the local league table to second in just five years, quadrupling profits in the process.

Eventually I joined Synectics myself, as Vincent gradually wound down his life's work, concentrating more on his cello and his golf.  

At 85, Vincent Nolan died last Sunday, 17 August.

Birth of the FIIBI Club

On Facebook Joy Clark reports a reunion of Lintas Sydney Ladies at the Yum Yum Eatery in beautiful Killcare ‒ and it reminded me of the first stirrings of a Ladies’ Dining Club at the agency in the mid-1980s.

The problem getting started was not in signing up members, but rather in deciding where to go. One restaurant would be proposed and rejected. Then another. And another.

Until, one day, I think it was the somewhat proper Susannah Throsby (as she was) who announced: “Fuck it, I’ll book it.”

And so was born the FIIBI Club.

Big Steel Bird flies in

I was asked recently when was the last time I played in public. Well, I think it was in 1984 or 1985.

An office band at Lintas Sydney was formed for a party and I was asked to sit in on bass guitar. Since I was the Chairman/CEO at the time and my past as a rock musician was not generally known, I asked that my participation was kept secret until the performance. In the event, it was not that I played well that surprised (I didn’t), but that I played at all.

Sad to say, I don’t remember who all the band-members were. I think creative director Al Crew was there. And Tracey Harbutt (now Tilda Bostwick) sang with great élan. But at the heart of it all was a bright young copywriter, Dugald McDonald.

Now, nearly three decades later, Doogie’s new CD has lobbed in from Africa: Big Steel Bird. It’s a total delight. He wrote all the songs, plays guitar and sings.

Here’s a nice commercial he made in 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpYBhUYJcqY

But here’s where you can find that Big Steel Bird: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/dugaldmcdonald

Remembering Bryce Courtenay

Bryce was a rock for me before he became Australia’s best-selling author of all time. He as partner and creative director at his own agency in Sydney, me as chairman of Lintas there. We lunched together regularly. While in public he could roar, in private he was a source of great kindness, calm and wisdom.

When I was coming back to live and work in London, he gently mocked my attempts to express my love of Australia at my leaving party. I only saw him once after that. And by then he had become the famous writer ‒ of his first best-seller, The Power of One. He told me that he had sold the film rights in New York for “a million dollars”.

I asked him how he had got started as a real writer (as opposed to a copywriter), and he told me that he had been out with some mates one evening and mentioned the novel he’d been thinking about. “Bryce, I’m sick to death of hearing about this book,” responded one of his friends. “Just shut up and write it.”

“So what did you do?” I asked him.

“I went home, got out a sheet of paper, and started.”

It’s one of the most simple and vibrant openings in literature: “This is what happened... ”

Bryce Courtenay died on 22^nd November 2012.

Don’t know that they don’t know?

So far as I could tell, Bill Weithas had scarcely been out of America when he was appointed worldwide CEO of Lintas.

So, during the lengthy handover, his predecessor in the post, Tim Green, took every opportunity to give Bill the benefit of his long years in international management. Especially the crucial but subtle differences between different ethnic groups. “The Flemish are very xxxx, but the Walloons are totally yyyy”. Ah!

When it came to New Zealand (had Tim actually been there?), he pronounced: “The problem with the Kiwis is that they don’t know that they don’t know.”

By this stage, Bill just looked terminally bored.

Sometime later, walking down Orchard Road in Singapore with him (on his first trip there), he stopped me and pointed at a neon sign.

“What do you see there, Rog?” he asked.

It was a Johnnie Walker logo. “And there… and there… and there…” McDonald’s, Fuji, Coca-Cola.

“It’s a global village,” he opined. “You just don’t need to know all that stuff about cultural difference anymore.”

Well, he certainly didn’t.

Adland and collective memory

Things always seemed to be so urgent and important in the advertising business. It never occurred to me that adland’s collective memory was virtually non-existent.

I was to teach creative problem-solving to a group of young admen and women at Lintas in Melbourne. At the start of the first day, getting to know each other, one of the women asked me a series of questions.

“Have you been to Australia before?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“And to Melbourne?”
“Oh yes.”
“What do you think of it?”
“Great city. Love it.”
“Ah… Have you worked with ad agencies here before?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, have you been to this agency?”
Pause.
“I started this agency some ten years ago.”
Longer pause.
Was I bullshitting?
Apparently not.

Alyque at Shakespeare’s Globe

All that Shakespeare in the air at the moment reminds me of the day when I took my friend Alyque Padamsee to see the nearly-completed Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside in London.

Alyque is a colleague who led Lintas in India and was also founder, director and leading actor with the Theatre Group of Bombay. He’s best known in the English-speaking world for playing Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the film Gandhi. He was on a trip to London with his wife, the actress and singer, Sharon Prabhakar, and wanted to see how the project was progressing.

This was in mid-1996, the year before the theatre was opened, and Alyque was accorded a VIP tour. It so happened that the stage had just been installed – the great apron reaching out, to be surrounded by the groundlings.

Alyque enquired as to whether the stage had yet been performed on. “No, not yet,” was the reply. So without further ado, Alyque stepped forward and, to the amazement of the hordes of tourist groups also there at the time, he declaimed Jaques’s speech from As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…

So, rather extraordinarily, whatever the books will say, Alyque was first.

Keith Vaughan exhibition in Chichester

Congratulations to Simon Martin, curator of the excellent exhibition of the work of Keith Vaughan at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. Is it the first collected showing of Vaughan’s work in a public space? Vaughan was born at nearby Selsey.

I’ve been interested in him for many years. He was the major figure in an exhibition that I commissioned in 1988 of artists who had worked at the Lintas advertising agency (where I spent ten happy and productive years). It ran at Agnew’s gallery in Mayfair.

And I have a set of three ballet-based gouaches from 1936 – when the young artist was working as a designer at the agency.

At that time, Lintas was Unilever’s in-house advertising business, and the boss, Ivor Cooper, was that rare combination – a good artist and a fine businessman. These were the days before television, and most print advertising was art-based, with very little photography in use.

Cooper hired the best artists he could find and encouraged them to develop their gifts, even to the extent of allowing them to do their own work at the office.

Among Vaughan’s colleagues there were the Australian John Passmore, New Zealander Felix Kelly and Englishman Roy Hobdell. The last two were both deeply involved in the transformation of Buscot House for Lord Faringdon.

But, even though he was younger than most of them, Keith Vaughan was always looked on by colleagues as the leader of the pack.

Keith Vaughan: Romanticisnm to Abstraction runs at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 10 June.

Freedom and strategy

“Give me the freedom of a tightly defined strategy,” wrote legendary British creative adman, Norman Berry.

How few seem to grasp this powerful paradox. In fact many creatives seem to resent it.

Truth is, many of them then flounder.

Norman Berry (1931-2010) was a copywriter at Lintas initially (where his father had worked as an art director before him), then at Young & Rubicam, becoming creative director. In 1964 he founded Davidson Pearce Berry and Spottiswoode, an agency that created the famous and long-running “Chimps” campaign for PG Tips. The agency was acquired by Ogilvy & Mather, where he became creative director in New York.

His aim always was to create a climate where creativity would flourish.

He died two years ago and his daughter, the poet Lucy Berry, has written about how “wonderfully bloody-minded, funny, and difficult my father was – and how loving he could be.”

On being interviewed in Australia

I was sent to Sydney in 1980 to see the Unilever Ice Cream client and review the work of our agency. I was responsible at that time for Lintas’s Unilever ice cream portfolio around the world.

I was there for about two and a half days. All went well. The people in the agency seemed terrific. And, of course, I loved Sydney and thought how great it would be to live there.

On the final afternoon, the bar opened around five, and a party of us moved on to dinner. Then to bar one, bar two and so on.

At something like five in the morning, all that was left of us was the brilliant and witty Jeff Seldon, and myself.

When I got home, the boss of the network said, “Well they liked you. Do you want the job?”

And that’s how I became chairman of Lintas Australia. I had the time of my life there.

Best language for brainstorming?

I have found over the years that brainstorming is best done in local language.

Quite simply, the freshest ideas seem to come into our heads most readily in whatever vernacular we learn in childhood. And they are most easily expressed verbally in that language too.

This is not so easy when, as is usually the case in workshops with multinational companies, the common tongue is second-language English.

My Lintas colleague, Eleanor Modesto, discovered this vividly when she went from Manila to be managing director of the agency in Indonesia. She quickly discovered that the language of business in Jakarta is Bahasa Indonesia, so she got down to learning it, becoming expert enough in the language to pass as a local.

Yet it remained clear to her that being able to speak a language is one thing, whereas thinking in it, having ideas in it, is another thing altogether.

“Sometimes, it’s better to think conceptually in Tagalog [the major Filipino language],” Eleanor has said. “I would ask them ‘Do you have an idiom like this?’” And instead of generating ideas from “Man of Steel,” she would throw Filipino idioms like “tibay ng loob” [loosely translated as strength of character] into the mix, enriching the whole process.

Of course, I’ve discovered over the years that the facilitation of workshops in local language(s) brings greater complexity and requires special skills…

To explore this and much more, come to my Brand Renovation Masterclass in Manila, 8 November:

http://www.yeheydigitalgroup.com/repo/adobomasterclass/masterclass_edm.html

Hemming and hawing over Diet Coke

Here is another example of fast-following being better than leading.

Twenty years ago, it became clear that there was a really major market out there for diet cola. And regular Coke had the reputation for being stuffed with calories.

The Coca-Cola Company had sold for many years a brand called TAB – and the reason that the company gave it a separate name, far from Coke, was that it tasted foul.

So the challenge was to produce a good-tasting product with zero calories. First to market was a local US brand, Royal Crown. It tasted good and consumers liked it. But the truth was that they were faced with a powerful global competitor who could obliterate them quite easily.

So after much hemming and hawing – it seemed to take years – Coca-Cola finally launched Diet-Coke (Coca-Cola Lite in many markets), which built massive sales everywhere, including in Australia, where my ad agency, Lintas, handled the launch.

I think the lesson is not to go up against a much bigger competitor with your new product if they can blow you out of the water so easily.

In that case, you’ll need an important aspect of your product or brand that’s either hard to copy, or, better still, has some IP protection.

Sixty-seven better than one?

While I was living and working in Sydney, I took the worldwide boss of Lintas to visit our office in Auckland. I don’t think such a thing had ever happened before.

He was impressed with the people and their work. Flying back together to Australia, he was in reflective mood.

“You know, Rog,” he said, “these people in Auckland. They handle the same number of clients that we handle in New York. And same number of brands. And they do all the things we do in New York. They plan strategy. They plan and buy media. They write and produce ads in all media. They create sales promotions and help clients to innovate. And I reckon their work overall is just as good as ours in New York.”

“Just one thing,” he went on. “In New York we have six hundred people, but in Auckland they have nine. That’s… sixty-seven to one”

So when people nowadays say that it’s totally impossible to cut staff numbers any more, or to be substantially more productive, I always think of Auckland.

M&A – respect and contempt

Why are some mergers and acquisitions brilliantly successful, while most under-perform miserably?

In my experience, it has nothing to do with the numbers – critical mass, cost-savings etc.

It’s something to do with mutual fit. But it’s much more to do with mutual respect.

When Saatchi & Saatchi merged with Garland-Compton - the hottest creative ad agency in the world (but with a somewhat iffy reputation for strategic thinking) went to bed with an excellent strategic agency, who served Procter & Gamble and Rowntree, two of the most demanding and professional clients. So certainly there was a good fit, but, more than that, the people inside the merged business respected and valued each other for their complementary skills and talents from day one.

The result was an inexorable rise to number one, first in the UK, then worldwide.

More recently, when the Interpublic holding company merged two of its global networks, Lowe and Lintas, there were apparently the same ingredients. A leading creative agency with a strong strategic one. But there the comparison ends. Contempt, “sharper than a serpent’s tooth” (as King Lear puts it), was the order of the day. Particularly on the side of the dominant partner, Lowe.

The result? Two plus two equals one. Mass exodus of clients and staff, and a slump in all key markets around the world. (The agency I had chaired in Sydney went from Top 5 to bottom of the Top 50 inside two years.)

It’s never struck me that M&A marriage brokers know this, focused as they are on the numbers (and in particular their own bonuses).

Artists in the workplace

When I was working at the ad agency Lintas in London, I stumbled upon the fact that in an earlier generation (in the 1930s and 40s), long before the arrival of TV advertising, there had been a coterie of outstanding young artists employed there. Lintas was originally set up as the house agency for the consumer goods giant, Unilever.

Perhaps the most significant of them was the painter, Keith Vaughan (above, “Landscape with figure”, 1959). A good Vaughan will go for upwards of £150,000 in today’s market. Others included the Australian, John Passmore, much of whose work is now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, the New Zealand-born painter of English country houses, Felix Kelly, and the brilliant trompe l’oeil artist, Roy Hobdell. Having discovered their existence, I was lucky enough to commission an exhibition of their work at Agnew’s in Old Bond Street some fifty years later in 1988.

How was it that they all congregated at Lintas? Certainly it was not by accident. In fact, the dynamic boss of the business at that time, Ivor Cooper, understood that if the agency was to shine creatively, it had to have the most talented people – and for him that meant hiring the finest young artists. Of course, this was not the tokenistic artist-in-residence that some contemporary organisations employ. It was artists at the heart of the company's creative product.

But hiring the artists was just a start. An artist himself, Cooper encouraged them to develop their talents, giving them time off for study and even allowing them to do their own work at the office when time permitted. And the respect that the boss was held in meant that this freedom was not abused.

While not every business needs outstanding artists, all organisations need some highly creative people in their ranks. Yet research shows that currently less than one third have any reference to creativity or innovativeness in their recruitment or appraisal processes.

How is it where you are?

Down at the Old Bull and Bush

It’s over two years since my friend and colleague, Tom Tracey, died. I went to the ceremony at Golders Green Crematorium on a wet day in June.

I’d first got to know him when he was the brilliant and iconoclastic creative director of Lintas in New Zealand in the 80s.

There were eight of us in all there at the service. For someone so interesting and engaging and creative, it was strange that there were so few. But then Liverpudlian Tom had lived his adult life all over the world, everywhere it seemed except London. The lady who led the ceremony read out loving remembrances and tributes from Tom's friends in far off lands.

It struck me that Tom made relationships with people wherever he happened to be. And that he tended to move on, appreciating each place, and his colleagues and friends there, without needing to hold on to the past.

At the ceremony I told the story of Tom's campaign for Unilever's Rinso, one that he was intensely proud of. Following orders from HQ, the brand name was dropped in favour of one of those international brands, although Rinso was right up there among the most trusted, even loved, products in New Zealand. It had been patiently renovated by Kiwi marketers over the best part of a century. Tom thought it right and proper that there should be a proper goodbye to such a constant friend, even if it was only a washing powder. What a paradox that he himself should leave us so quietly, without fuss.

Afterwards we repaired to the Old Bull and Bush in Hampstead. Somewhat embarrassed, we sang the chorus of Florrie Forde’s hit song from the early 1900s in the saloon bar - “Come, come, come and make eyes at me, down at...”, and we raised a glass to him.

Me and My Shadow

Even today, with the benefit of psychological profiling tools like Myers-Briggs, I notice that so often managers hire people in their own image. This can be comfortable, but it’s unlikely to be very potent in terms of innovation or leadership.

In my own case, I noticed quite early on that the partnership I had with Jennifer Laing at Saatchi and Saatchi was extraordinarily effective. Yet in personality type we were quite different. Somehow or other her strengths mirrored my weaknesses and vice-versa. Everything we touched turned to business.

And I’ve been lucky enough to have had a number of these symbiotic relationships later in my “career” – with Max Gosling at Lintas, with David Walker at Synectics, and now with Alison Duffy at Per Diem. In each case these partnerships have been associated with periods of major innovation and of sustained business success.

Of course, there is a great elephant trap involved in this. As polarised personalities it’s quite likely that you’ll not appreciate each other, maybe even disliking each other. So unless there is genuine mutual admiration, a real appreciation of the value of the other, and a shared sense of direction, success is unlikely to follow.

Knowing which is me and which is shadow in any given situation can be tricky. Flexibility as to who leads and who follows can be a moment by moment thing.

Do you have a terrific shadow?