Download Word format - Rita Clifton

A mad mad mad mad world…
Except it’s not. Rita Clifton, the brand expert and a former Vice
Chairman at Saatchi & Saatchi, looks at 50 years of
advertising.
I’m going to sit in the middle of the last 50 years of
advertising to talk about this subject - ie circa 1989 – for a
number of reasons. Not because I harbour a secret desire to
return to big hair and padded shoulders, but because it was
a pivotal time for the advertising business as well as the
wider world and it's a good time from which to look back
and forward.
Even Time magazine said that 1989 was ‘the year that
changed the world’. It was also the same year The New York
Times featured a front cover proclaiming ‘”Brits buy up the
ad business”. That was the news about British agency groups
like WPP taking over major US agencies like Ogilvy &
Mather. Their illustrious founder, David Ogilvy, infamously
called Martin Sorrell an ‘odious little shit’. He hasn’t done
too badly over the best part of 40 years.
Advertising may feel like a parochial and self-reverential
business sometimes, but it has also become increasingly
professional and accountable. It has had to be. Despite the
image of ‘wacky’ creative types (and there have been many
over the years, some with monstrous egos, cars and pay
packages to match their rock star status), the advertising
business was, and is, a generator of hard economic value and
influence. It symbolises the social and economic times and it
generates real wealth. So here’s the commercial break for
the advertising business. A study by Deloitte last year
credited advertising with generating £100bn impact on total
UK GDP. That £1 in advertising spend generates £6 for the
UK economy. And that 550,000 jobs are supported by annual
ad revenues.
Britain’s good at advertising. Really good.
The company that was particularly good by 1989 was
Saatchi & Saatchi, and in 1989 I was working there as a
strategist. My main account was British Airways and that
year we produced an ad that was hailed as the ‘ad of the
decade’ – the one where hundreds of people came together
to form a face in the desert, to the Malcolm McLarenarranged rock-opera soundtrack of Lakme. It ran around the
world, and caught the zeitgeist as well as people’s
imagination at a time when the Berlin Wall was coming
down and people were protesting to be free even in
unexpected places.
Saatchi & Saatchi was the first household name in
advertising, largely as a result of being seen to have helped
Margaret Thatcher into power with iconic ads like ‘Labour
isn’t Working’. They also handled many of the newly
confident and ambitious British companies in the 1980s, like
BP (‘Britain at its best’), ICI (‘World Class’ ) and BT (Stephen
Hawking), and Saatchi’s was seen as a great British business
success story in its own right – with its own right to be in the
boardroom and in No.10.
British advertising style actually had a lot to thank New York
for in the early days. The Madison Avenue Mad Men era of
the 50s and 60s (and particularly the late, great Bill
Bernbach) inspired a generation of copywriters and art
directors in London, but with added British wit and humour.
London was having its own creative flourishing from the 60s
with fashion, photography and graphic design, and one
agency, Collett Dickenson Pearce, dominated the era with
surreal ads for Benson & Hedges and iconic campaigns like
‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet ‘. A host of later stars
were involved in the creation of those campaigns, including
Lord Puttnam, Sir Alan Parker and Ridley Scott; the
advertising business was a creative talent magnet and
incubator.
Charles Saatchi was at that agency for a while, and took the
profile and drive of creativity to a new level with his own
first consultancy ‘Cramer Saatchi’….where the famous
‘Pregnant Man’ ad was created, and where he was joined for
a while by a young creative guy called John Hegarty…who
later set up his own agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty…which
produced what for many was the iconic ad of the 80s, the
Levi’s ‘Launderette’ ad. (And coincidentally, BBH have the
British Airways ad account these days. It’s a tough old
competitive world).
One way in which British advertising was also different was
in its invention of ‘account planning’, where the agency
strategist (like I was) conducted deep and meaningful
research into consumer behaviour, both qualitatively and
quantitatively, and helped the agencies produce advertising
that was highly relevant, engaging and demonstrably
effective. Boase Massimi Pollitt epitomised this, and
produced some of the most charming advertising of the
1970s like the Cadbury’s Smash ‘Martians’ and the Sugar
Puffs ‘Honey Monster’. The culture of British advertising was
to entertain and engage, something that works in any age
and time.
But back to the future from 1989. It was also the year when
media planning and buying got split from the creative
element of ad agencies. Whereas up until the late 80s, the
dominant forces had been ‘full service agencies’ like
Saatchi’s, J Walter Thompson and McCann Erickson, the
opportunity for buying scale tempted agencies to spin off
their ‘media’ functions – which, with delicious irony, were
later viewed as more influential with clients than the
creative elements, as they were better at demonstrating
hard value and cost efficiencies. This was divine revenge for
those media specialists who had been consigned to the back
end of the agency pitching process (I can well remember
how many times the creative section of a pitch would run
over time, and the poor media executives were relegated
either to ‘can you do your bit in 5 minutes’ or worse ‘don’t
worry, the media plan is in the document’…)
The ad business became both more consolidated at one end
(WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic and others buying up well
known agencies, setting up media conglomerates and
acquiring broader marketing services businesses), and more
fragmented at the other, to reflect the burgeoning media
channels and the digital revolution. Terms like ‘360 degree
marketing’ and ‘integrated communications’ meant a new
generation of agencies, who promised that they were ‘media
neutral’ vs the old ad agencies which seemed obsessed with
traditional media like TV, posters and press. As though to
signal a new era, rather than collections of founders’ names
(which could get ridiculously long in mergers), agencies
appeared with names like ‘Naked’, ‘Mother’ and
‘Karmarama’.
And the seeds for change were there in 1989; Tim BernersLee produced the proposal that led to the worldwide
web…and we know where that went.
Today, all the world’s a screen, and advertising has taken on
a broader meaning. In today’s digital, e- and m-commerce
world, there’s a complete blurring of above, below and
anything in- between lines – and around the world.
But critically, the thing that matters, that has always
mattered, across the past 50 years and many more, is the
brand.
It’s particularly important to recognise all this today,
because, for any organisation, everything you do and make is
your communication – and can either build or damage your
brand (which is after all your most valuable and sustainable
asset if you look after it properly).
When people ask me to talk about ‘branding in the digital
age’, they might well expect sexy Youtube videos, interesting
‘branded content’ and social media campaigns. Which I’m
obviously happy to show, and there are some wonderful
examples like Volvo Trucks (OK, it’s not British, but check
out Jean Claude Van Damme doing the splits with over 70
million viewings …) and the Lego Movie is probably the best
example of branded content I’ve seen. Back to Britain, and
even a Meerkat has a Twitter account these days.
However, here’s the, er, killer insight about branding in the
digital age. You’ve got to be a bloody good business, where
all your people are clear and motivated about what you
stand for, and know what they need to do to deliver a
distinctive and special experience right across everything
they do for customers. Because if you don’t live up to your
promises as a business, if you don’t treat and train your own
people in the way you want them to behave towards
customers, if you’re not producing good or distinctive
enough products, then no amount of expensive, paid-for
advertising is going to save you.
And that is, and has always been, the best advertising insight
of all.
Rita Clifton has been called the ‘doyenne of branding’ by Campaign magazine.
She was a Vice Chairman at Saatchi & Saatchi and former London CEO and
Chairman of Interbrand. She now has a portfolio of directorships, including as
Chairman of BrandCap, the brand consultancy for the boardroom.
Selection of ads to feature:-
British Airways ‘Face’ commercial (Saatchi & Saatchi)
Election ad for Conservatives (Saatchi & Saatchi)
‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’ Photo Booth ad (Collett
Dickenson Pearce)
Pregnant Man. (Health Education Council/Cramer Saatchi)
Levi’s Launderette (Bartle Bogle Hegarty)
Cadbury’s Smash Martians (Boase Massimi Pollitt)
Sugar Puffs Honey Monster (Boase Massimi Pollitt)
Aleksandr the Meerkat on TV…
…and on Twitter.