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In the book
Rewind
(Jeremy Myerson and Graham Vickers, 2002), Parker is praised for introducing a ‘new, more “realistic” style of TV commercials: engaging mini-dramas that brought a touch of wit and credibility to even the most contrived scenarios'. With his hit musical
Bugsy Malone
(1976), Parker became one of the first British commercials directors to cross over into feature films. But others were hot on his heels.

Lowe and beyond

CDP not only attracted talented copywriters, photographers and film-makers, but also the people who nurtured them. Take account man David Puttnam for instance. As Parker recalls, ‘He believed so strongly in the photographers he commissioned to shoot his ads that he finally decided to devote his time exclusively to promoting them. People tend to forget this, but he was the first truly professional photographers' agent in London.'

Puttnam later went on to produce
Bugsy Malone
, as well as Parker's antithetically gritty second feature film,
Midnight Express
(1978). Puttnam also produced
The Duellists
, the big-screen debut of another commercials director, Ridley Scott. For CDP, Scott made a series of nostalgia-bathed commercials for Hovis bread, set in the cobbled streets of an archetypal English village.

‘Ridley went into films just after me, but he continued to make commercials, which I didn't,' says Parker. ‘I was stung by an early review that said something like, “Alan Parker comes from advertising, which gives us a useful stick to hit him with”. Directors who came out of advertising were considered crass – we were not real filmmakers. Ridley said the critics were just jealous because we made more money than them.'

The pair had occasionally talked about going into business together. ‘Ridley made the pretty films and I made the ones with dialogue, so between us we reckoned we had it sewn up. But we kept arguing over whether it should be called Scott Parker or Parker Scott, so it never happened.'

Instead, in 1968, Scott formed the production company RSA Films with his brother Tony. It remains one of the world's leading commercial production companies, with offices in London, New York and Los Angeles.

As a commercials director, Scott's work had been championed by another account man at CDP – Frank Lowe. While account executives were under orders not to interfere with the creative department, the ‘suits' were in fact the agency's secret weapons, as they had been charged with selling even the oddest, most challenging work to clients. According to Parker, Lowe not only defended but
demanded
outrageous creative work.

‘When he joined the agency I was told I wouldn't like him, because he had opinions,' chuckles Parker. ‘I said, “He won't get away with that here.” On the day I met him he was dressed entirely in black, because it was the anniversary of the plane crash that had killed the Manchester United team [on 6 February 1958]. Of course we hit it off straight away, and he's been one of my closest friends ever since. He was a passionate advocate of great creative work.'

By the early 1970s, CDP was no longer a small agency. Outgrowing its cramped Howland Street offices, it had moved to larger premises on Euston Road. It had also developed global reach, thanks to a partnership with Paris agency FCA and subsequent similar deals with shops in Brussels, Amsterdam, Milan and Tokyo. Colin Millward's creative role had broadened, with John Salmon taking over the creative direction of the London office. Fortunately, Salmon's standards were every bit as high as those of his colleague.

John Pearce suffered a heart attack in 1971 – and although he returned to the agency when he recovered, it was in a more consultative role. Eventually, Frank Lowe was installed at the helm. ‘To most creative people at the agency, Frank was simply the best account man they'd ever met,' recount Salmon and Ritchie in
Inside CDP
. ‘He cared passionately about the work and would only present the agency's clients with advertising that he believed to be outstanding.'

In his own contribution to the book, Lowe reaffirms the inspiration provided by the uncompromising Colin Millward and the galaxy of talents that swirled around the agency. But Lowe also takes time to praise CDP's clients. He writes pointedly: ‘[They] seemed to value the opinion of their agency and, on balance, would go along with it. They didn't argue about money all day long trying to get things cheaper, they just wanted the best because they knew it would work for them. They always found a little extra time if the agency didn't feel they had cracked the problem. This, in turn, always seemed to pay off.'

After a golden decade, the 1980s began gloomily for CDP. Frank Lowe left the agency to set up his own operation with planner Geoff Howard-Spink and several members of the creative department (including Alfredo Marcantonio). Among many other achievements, Lowe's agency went on to create a popular and enduring campaign for that ‘reassuringly expensive' lager brand, Stella Artois.

On 10 September 1981, at the age of 68, John Pearce had a second heart attack – this time fatal. The story was not over, but an era had ended.

As with every other hot shop in advertising history, CDP could not maintain its creative dominance forever. Though it continued to produce some excellent work throughout the 1980s, the spotlight moved slowly away from the agency to illuminate other areas of the London advertising scene.

The master planner

Although it was no slouch on the creative front, the other British hot shop of the 1970s made its mark on adland history with the development of a rather more esoteric craft. Stanley Pollitt, of the agency Boase Massimi Pollitt, is generally considered the father of planning.

In fact, to be fair, he shares that honour with Stephen King of JWT. To complicate matters, the term ‘account planning' was conceived by a third man, Tony Stead, at a JWT brainstorming session in 1968. This led to the merger of the agency's marketing, media planning and research departments into a single unit under the heading of account planning. For the purposes of concision, however, we'll concentrate on Pollitt – an appealingly colourful character – and the remarkable agency he co-founded with Martin Boase and Gabe Massimi.

Physically, Stanley Pollitt resembled a cross between the British comic Eric Morecambe and the American journalist AJ Liebling (he even shared Liebling's passion for boxing). Donnish, balding, overweight, scruffy and bespectacled, he was rarely seen without a cigarette and enjoyed a glass of wine with lunch. His wayward dress sense and lack of presentation skills (he is described as ‘inarticulate and boffin-like') could not disguise his acute intelligence, however. A colleague summed him up as ‘an orderly mind in a chaotic body'. He had a rather raffish background:
the son of an artist, he was born in Paris in 1930. He attended St Paul's College and then Cambridge, intending to become a barrister. Instead, through a family contact, he ended up working at the London advertising agency Pritchard Wood & Partners. It was here that he developed the concept of account planning.

Fortunately for us, account planning is more interesting than it sounds. It concerns bringing the voice and the desires of the consumer into the advertising process. In the sixties, this meant taking researchers out of the ‘back rooms' of agencies and putting them next to the account teams as campaigns were being developed. In the book
Pollitt on Planning
, edited by Paul Feldwick in 2000, it is described as ‘the greatest innovation in agency working practice since Bill Bernbach put art directors and copywriters together in the 1950s'.

To précis Pollitt's own description, the planner is a research expert who relies on first-hand interviews as well as data to develop an in-depth understanding of consumers. The planner forms a ‘threesome' with the account manager and the creative and is expected to express a clear point of view on the direction of the campaign, rather than merely supplying useful statistics. An insight from a planner can inspire a creative team. The planner also analyses the effectiveness of campaigns.

In the 1950s, advertising agencies had their own research departments or worked with closely held research subsidiaries. This changed in the 1960s, when consumer goods companies began developing their own, in-house research departments, or paying for detailed studies of target consumers. To reflect this shift, agencies began to reduce their research staff. Rather in the way that their media departments would become separate entities later on (see
Chapter 10
, Media spins off), some agencies saw their research departments break away to form independent companies competing for business in the open market. At the same time, research methods and the means of analysing data were becoming more sophisticated. This created a paradox. Pollitt wrote: ‘[As] more data relevant to sharper advertising planning were coming in, more and more people qualified to handle it were leaving the agencies.'

Working on accounts at Pritchard Wood, Pollitt felt there was a danger that agencies would begin to pick and choose data, bending it to suit the direction of their thinking rather than the other way around. ‘I decided therefore that a trained researcher should be put alongside the account man on every account. He should be there as of right, with
equal status as a working partner.' Pollitt referred to this new type of researcher as ‘the account man's conscience'.

When he set up the agency BMP with two colleagues in 1968, it was structured from the very start on an account manager/account planner team basis. ‘From the outset at BMP we added an important new dimension to the planner's role, which has almost come to be the dominant one… we started to involve [them] more closely in the development of creative ideas.'

A smashing agency

Boase Massimi Pollitt started in true late-sixties style. In order to advertise the new agency, a fleet of chocolate-brown Mini Coopers emblazoned with the initials BMP was driven around London. Account man Martin Boase, creative Gabe Massimi and, of course, planner Stanley Pollitt left Pritchard Wood & Partners with seven other members of staff. All 10 were shareholders in the new operation.

Martin Boase says, ‘We were determined to produce not only original creative work, but also soundly-based advertising, which had provoked the whole account planning idea. In those days there was an awful lot of formulaic, soundly-based advertising and a great deal of original yet highly indulgent work. Pollitt realized that by introducing the planner into the creative process you could be original yet strategic. Most start-ups are about people wanting to run things themselves or simply make money. We were actually rather more crusading: we wanted to create an entirely new type of agency.'

Gabe Massimi left the agency about two years into its existence. He was replaced as creative director by John Webster, who had also come over from Pritchard Wood. Webster, it transpired, was an advertising genius – particularly in the field of TV commercials – and he became one of the industry's most revered creatives. (Sadly, he died shortly before I began researching this book.)

As with the work of CDP, anybody who was a kid in Britain in the 1970s is likely to have Webster's TV spots engraved on their memories. He created an animated, sunglasses-wearing polar bear for the soft drink Cresta, a large yet benign orange-haired Yeti called The Honey Monster for Sugar Puffs breakfast cereal and – best of all – the Smash Martians.
These animated tin men would roll around laughing as they watched films of earthlings washing, peeling and boiling potatoes. The Martians, of course, used Cadbury's instant Smash mashed potato – just pour on boiling water and give it a stir.

The irony and self-deprecation of Webster's TV spots – laced with a subtle dose of surrealism – combined the key ingredients of classic British advertising. In Webster's heyday people really did claim that the adverts were the best thing on the telly. Many British commercials still put entertainment first – and often succeed in looking as if there's nothing being sold at all.

In the late 1970s, BMP set up an outpost in Paris. It was unsuccessful, but the Paris link persisted and in 1977 French communications conglomerate Havas bought 50 per cent of BMP. Two years later, Stanley Pollitt died of a heart attack at the age of 49. This shock forced the agency's remaining founders to rethink its future direction. Boase says, ‘We wanted to spread the shareholding to the generation who had come into the agency after us.' BMP bought itself out of Havas for £1.2 million and went public. After two years, it had a stock market capitalization of £50 million.

In the 1980s, BMP became embroiled in a tempestuous round of negotiations with another French agency, BDDP (see
Chapter 8
, The French connection), which had been busily buying up its shares. Boase fought off the hostile takeover by selling to the company that had once been Doyle Dane Bernbach. It is now the London outpost of DDB Worldwide. It remains one of the most awarded London agencies.

The Saatchi saga begins

The agency with the intriguing double surname came later: in the beginning it was Cramer Saatchi. Charles Saatchi and Ross Cramer met at the London outpost of the US agency Benton & Bowles, which Saatchi joined in 1965. Charles was the copywriter of the duo. Having left school at 17 and hot-footed it to the States, Charles, like all the advertising stars of his generation, was electrified by the work being done there by the likes of Bill Bernbach. When he got back, he was ready to give the London scene a similar shot in the arm. Saatchi was 22 when he arrived at Benton & Bowles – one year older than another future star, John Hegarty, who was already working at the agency. Hegarty at first
assumed Saatchi was an Italian name. (‘I expected some bloke who couldn't spell and still lived with his mother,' he chuckles today.) In reality, Charles and Maurice Saatchi and their older brother David were born in Baghdad to an Iraqi Jewish couple, Nathan and Daisy. Forced out of an increasingly anti-Semitic Iraq after the Second World War, the family moved to the UK, where Nathan had started a textile business. Thus the brothers grew up in leafy Hampstead, a perfectly English childhood.