So it had been, with a natty black briefcase and some trepidation,
that I went through the front doors of Hamilton House into the HEA in the first week at its brand new base, just off London’s Euston Road. One consolation was, that as I lived in Somerstown, just behind what would soon be the rapidly ascending new British Library, I was a mere five minute walk away.
As I had not come up through the ranks of a commercial advertising agency, it was initially somewhat of a surprise to me to get to grips with the process by which we would need to plan national advertising campaigns. Like the campaigns for the AIDS tombstones and the Pregnant man, the creative process was quite a complex one between the agency (in this case Boase Massimi Pollitt or ‘BMP‘ as everyone called it) and the client (us).
BMP was founded in October 1968 by Martin Boase, Gabe Massimi and Stanley Pollitt, who had previously worked at the Pritchard Wood agency. They tried to buy it out, failed, and so created their own new agency in 1968. Massimi left the firm in 1971 (due in part to an internal row about what went on to become its most famous commercial) and Stanley Pollitt died, following a heart attack in 1979, leaving just Martin Boase of the original team in the 1980s. In 1988 BMP had a very good pedigree, as ad agencies go. They had produced some very well known, even, it is fair to say, much loved work in the previous decade, from 1973 onwards for Cadbury’s Smash, a powdered mashed-potato mix with martian robots like the ‘K9’ dog in Doctor Who at that time. In fact it was voiced by Peter Hawkins, who was indeed the voice of Doctor Who’s ‘Daleks’, amongst other creations.
Martian robot 1: Humans clean, then peel -then boil and then smash up -real potatoes to make their mash! All robots: Hahaha. Robot 2: They- are- clearly- a- most- primitive -race)
followed by the jingle that will still resonate with anyone alive, in that era:
Family, all together: ‘For mash, get Smash’.
It won the advertising magazine bible ‘Campaign’s award for the ‘Advert of the century’. As a product, well, it still tasted pretty disgusting but that was the seventies for you and we all bought it. They also created the Cresta bear (‘it’s frothy, man’), the Hofmeister bear, the Humphreys for Unigate Dairy and for John Smith’s beer ‘Arkwright’. These were all the work of its most famous creative director, John Webster (1934-2006). The Independent newspaper later described him as “the best TV commercials creator in Britain, when Britain was the best in the world” and The Guardian described him as “the greatest TV advertising author of the late 20th century”.
As well as these creative gems in their portfolio, the company also had a history of having a strong relationship with the Labour Party, which had dated from the early 1970s, when it placed press advertisements for the TUC, attacking the then-Conservative government’s Industrial Relations Bill. It also created the advertising for the Labour Party in several successive general election campaigns and Chris Powell, (BMP DDB Needham’s chief executive until 2004) is the brother of Jonathon Powell, who was Tony Blair’s Chief of staff to the PM. Suffice to say none of this went down terribly well with Conservative Central Office at the time; some might even think it was a recipe for potential confrontation. Actually I knew nothing of this relationship for some time but when I realised it, my heart sank. Adverts on sex were already notoriously controversial, the government was planning section 28 to stop kids being taught about ‘gay sex’, we were planning to be doing explicit ad campaigns for young gay men. Again, what could possibly go wrong?
Given the complexity of the ideas we wanted to get across, the very targeted nature of the audience and the fact we, as a team, had no relationship whatsoever with them initially, it was likely to be an ‘interesting’ experience, to say the least. Still I was genuinely keen: enthused about the nature of getting on with it, as I always was with other projects I had developed in the last decade, although clearly this was on another scale.
At that time, such agencies were lavish affairs, with large expense accounts, lavish premises and a whole culture built up within them. If you’ve seen Mad Men you’ll have some idea, though this was a decade or so on from that and in the UK but, essentially, not a huge amount had changed. The budgets they worked with were huge, as this was the age of the ‘grand vision’, when the importance and effect of advertising a product could be almost (but not quite) budgetless. Millions of pounds were often spent creating spectacular commercials for TV and cinematic consumption. It was the age of Schweppes and of Cinzano Rosso, with Joan Collins and Leonard Rossiter on a plane, of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and of those people patterns from the air in the glitzy advertising created for British Airways. However, we were looking for something a little less glitzy but that would still potentially stand out and be effective- though not through promoting fear, as we genuinely believed the TBWA Tombstone ads had.
In terms of process, first, we would draft a creative brief for the agency to work with; this would then go over to the creative team in Paddington, at BMP’s swanky offices, who were assigned to our account. They would come up with a number of creative ideas to respond to the brief and draw up some rough representations of the advertising concept to present to us, the client. We would then be expected to choose one of the concepts and they would then develop a strap, write the body copy and create the image to go with it, which they would then present to us. We would then say ‘yes, marvellous’, they would book the space for it, in an agreed list of publications and we would all sit back, happy with a job well done. That, at least, is how it was meant to go but it was seldom quite as simple.
The issue was that there were a lot of people with their fingers in the pie. It had to go to the DoH for agreement too and often, given the sensitivity of the material and topic this would require changes with both the proposed image and the text. Added to this, we had decided that it was necessary to get the opinion from an advisory group of around ten gay & bisexual men, representing the great and good in their respective communities: from Body Positive, the Bisexual Group, Gay Switchboard, the THT and so on. They could also ask for changes or suggest additional things, which they felt would enhance the advert or equally, based on their knowledge of the target audience, suggest why it would not be appropriate and how it might be tweaked to make it so. Using all this feedback, the creative team at BMP would try and make it work and still ‘more or less’ fit the creative brief.
This tended to mean that the original concept would often be ‘watered down’ to make it fit the demands which were being made of it. Along with that, we were initially working with a Department that was often being carefully checked by others within the government to ensure that not too many feathers would be ruffled. When you are selling cat food, this doesn’t matter especially. When you are trying to affect people’s behaviour and to please a baying crowd this all becomes just a touch more difficult. Essentially, we often needed to fit a complex, rounded concept into a square hole. Without a doubt, some of the ideas we were trying to impart, were the most complex ones the agency had ever dealt with. They were trying to write body copy around methodologies for selling product, selling ideas that needed to appeal to a picky and often hostile audience, with very specific tastes. No one, at least initially, was quite sure how explicit we could be, hence often we started by being fairly explicit and then watered that down, on demand. Many hours (actually days) were spent deliberating on the construction of a single sentence, trying to use appropriate language that still conveyed the concepts we were trying to get across. It was truly the lexicon of love.
By Monday 10th October I wrote in my diary:
‘We (Derek and I) had a meeting today with the creatives from BMP. I was quite nervous and I think it must have showed. I got rather angry at one stage, with one of the creative team who seemed very resistant to our insistence that it was important to use positive images of gay men in the campaign. Nevertheless, I restrained myself as best I could’.
However, as with a lovers tiff, things blew over and by the 13th October I was writing:
..a much better creative brief in today from the agency BMP. They seem to have grasped the hang of it better now. I think they will have problems though, when it comes to finding photographers and models for the campaign. Would it be best to simply go to an experienced gay photographers agency?
But my diary from the following day, the 14th, tells a different story:
Today was busy, I had to rewrite the BMP brief yet again.Nevertheless, I feel I’m generally working quite well there now, though.
It sometimes felt like we took two steps forwards and one step back. On bad days, one step forward and two back. Quite quickly, the agency came up with the ‘strap’ that we returned to again and again: ‘Choose safer sex’. It was fairly bland and presented sex as a commodity, a kind of ‘Omo washes whiter’, something negotiable- we had not wanted to be too prescriptive, in terms of assuming or demanding monogamy, but we wanted to be clear that this action (safer sex) was the key takeaway, the key message in the advert. The ‘body copy’ (the rest of the text, usually placed underneath the visual image) then expanded on that idea, to enable a better understanding of what and why safer sex was important.
A week later on the 20th October I was meeting Nick Partridge, (now Sir Nick Partridge) from the THT for lunch. He had been on the panel at the HEA when I was interviewed. I wrote:
‘He agreed that I‘d done a bad interview but also that they had thought I was not intellectual enough for the job (my words not his, he was kinder!). I was tempted to say ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’. I held my breath.‘
The very first adverts we put together were quite simple in concept; we developed a brief to simply explain the necessity for, and practice of, safer sex with a (same sex) sexual partner. Whilst the agency knew it could not be very explicit with the text or image, however the ad was going into the gay press, so it clearly needed to show men engaging with each other together in some way.
On the 26th October, we all met the BMP creative team as they presented the ‘rough’s’ for the first MWSWM campaign. In the meeting itself I was calmer this time, having soon learnt that losing your temper was not a useful way forward. In my diary though, I don’t hold back.
Rather poor headline straps I thought. ‘They used to say masturbation was bad for you, now it could save your life’. And ‘if you thought safer sex was boring this could change your position’. Tacky in the extreme in my opinion. But our lot thought ‘it was a good stab’ (politeness wins the day). Bruce Weber’ ish photography. I just smiled and said ‘there was a lot of food for thought’.
Which there certainly was.
Sex, love and life: (The Sacrifice) 3.05 MESMAC strides out and continues..
