Flitting from flower to flower in adland

I went to see my cousin and godfather, L Graham Browne  ‒ ‘Uncle Bill’ ‒ in the Birmingham office of his ad agency, to ask him to give me a job. I was nineteen, in awe of him, and fundamentally unemployable in the opinion of both me and my father.

‘You need to leave home,’ he told me. ‘Go to London. If you really want to work in advertising, I’ll give you the addresses of the leading agencies there. You’ll need to apply for the mailroom.’

A few weeks later I found myself in an interview with the head of traffic control at J Walter Thompson in Berkeley Square, Harry Garnell. It seemed to be going quite well.

‘Do you have any questions?’ he asked me.

‘What do you particularly have to have, to be successful in advertising?’ I enquired.

‘Well, you need more than anything to have a butterfly mind,’ he responded, ‘able to shift from one thing to another in an instant.’

How right he was.

 

Is this the worst logo in the history of marketing?

Who created it?

What was the brief?

Who approved it?

How much did it cost us?

And how could they have wrecked possibly the finest logo of all, the Olympic rings?

Getting to grips with Art

Walking through the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (with its fabulous collection of Monets (above), Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses, Derains, Picassos etc) together with a friend some years ago, I was astonished when he completed his inspection in less than five minutes. “Oh, yes,” he announced. “Seen 'em all.”

Recent research confirms that visitors to art museums spend just a few seconds looking at each painting. Most people then take considerably longer reading the information labels. Not my friend.

I wonder why it is that people really don’t take the time to look at the works of art themselves.

The process that I use started when I began to teach myself something about art history some four decades ago. I was working at the time at Saatchi & Saatchi in Charlotte Street and could interrupt my twenty minute walk back to Charing Cross Station (on my way home) by dropping into the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. This I did most working days.

Each visit I would look at just three paintings: the one I had studied yesterday, the one which was to be the main focus for today, and the one that I would turn to tomorrow. So, over time, each painting presented three substantial opportunities for me to look (and to think) – about composition, colour, light, brushwork, subject, idea, intention, context and so on.

It gave me the possibility of beginning to understand, accompanied (it goes without saying) by one of the finest collections of Western art in the world. And it was the start of a lifetime of looking at paintings.

Not sure one can achieve that with just a glance.

London’s burning

The marriage of the internet and the mobile phone has helped to organise and mobilise revolutionary movements in a wide variety of countries with autocratic and repressive regimes – in Tunisia, Egypt, Serbia, Burma, North Korea and many more. That’s the upside.

Of course, at the same time it has facilitated all the looting and burning in London and around the UK in recent days, mobilising and directing large groups of people at a moment’s notice.

Right now the police appear to be operating totally in the past, always behind the play.

Where will it go next? And how quickly can the authorities catch up, if at all?

Helena Rubinstein and the Sheep of Australia

I have recently been discussing with Facebook friends the apparent shortage of women innovators. Among the many contributory factors, one is that so many of the trained engineers and scientists in the western world have always been men.

But innovation comes in many forms and one woman that I find fascinating is the legendary Helena Rubinstein.

Born in 1870 in Krakow, Poland, she moved to Australia in 1902. She had very little English and no money. But she did have family there – her uncle was a shopkeeper in Coleraine, a small town some 350 kilometres west of Melbourne. This was Big Sheep country and there was an unending supply of lanolin, the grease secreted by the sheep to keep their woolly coats in good condition. Rubinstein used the lanolin as the basis of her own skin creams, disguising its unpleasant odour with lavender and other fragrances.

Later she moved to set up business in Collins Street, still the smartest place for shopping in Melbourne, then Sydney, then London, Paris and New York. She was a brilliant marketer of her products, creating the whole concept of “problem skin” and discovering that, if sales were flagging, raising prices was a good way to get things moving again. Her pushy mantra was: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”

She was to become the first self-made female millionaire.

(I see that there’s a new book out by Ruth Brandon about Rubinstein and the founder of L’Oréal, Eugène Schueller, which I’ve not yet seen.)

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.