salaries, and soon we were being headhunted by other reputable agencies.
We only moved twice though, once to J. Walter Thompson, then to Saatchi & Saatchi, as it was then called. After that, with quite a bit of soul-searching, some sleepless nights and earnest debates (with Oliver as the prime mover in this new and risky plan), we took the plunge and started up our own outfit.
We were lucky. The economy was healthy, house prices were booming, and a lot of money was coming in from abroad. Bank managers (as they still were at the time) were not quite throwing money at businessmen who wanted to expand or start up new companies but, encouraged by their own banking grandees, were generous towards new ventures that had legs. Oliver and I gave a polished presentation to our friendly city bank manager, as if we were pitching for a new account, with my copywriter doing most of the talking while I showed some of our better award-winning work (yep, we were that good) and the manager bought it all.
We approached an excellent account director we knew from another agency and poached a good fresh junior copywriter and art director from Saatchi’s. Oliver had a girlfriend at that time (foolishly, I’d introduced her to him at the old agency) who was a rep for a high-blown and high-priced photographer whose food and product stills were as good as his people work. She was a clever, beautiful brunette, fashionable, and keen with big brown eyes and a slim, leggy body most women would die for and most men would kill for. Her name was Andrea Dodds and eventually I married her. But now’s not the time to go into that. We hired Andrea to be our office manager and second to Sydney Presswell, our financial manager and third partner, who looked alter the business side of things (he was the account director we picked up from another agency). She was presentable, good at handling clients (I used to be one of her clients), and stood no bullshit. Did I say she was beautiful? Well, she was—and still is.
We took on just one secretary, Lynda, to begin with, who also acted as receptionist and telephone operator; a run-around junior, a young kid named Raymond who aspired to be an art director, but who’d had no art school training; a typographer called Peter and the young creative team I mentioned, Paul and Mark. Finding the right premises wasn’t that easy, but after a lot of searching and a lot of rejections, we stumbled upon premises with two vacant floors slap in the middle of Covent Garden. It had just come on the market and it was pricey—actually, too pricey for us—but we knew instantly it was exactly what we were looking for.
We set about the hardest part of the whole venture: acquiring clients. Legally we had contracts with our ex- employers which forbade Oliver and I approaching our existing clients for the next three years. Of course, that did not prevent those clients approaching us once the news got out that we were quitting and branching out on our own. So one or two who trusted our abilities solicited us instead. We gained two quite big accounts that way, but we needed a third large one to make us viable.
We went after new business with a passion, toiling day and night to come up with outstanding presentations and better marketing strategies than the companies already had. Media buying was handled by Sydney for a while, until we were established enough to bring someone in on a full-time basis. We ruthlessly targeted any business that we felt was right for us and whom we considered was receiving less than perfect service—mediocre advertising, poor media choices, etc.—from their existing agency, and we failed to win them over more times than we succeeded. Nevertheless, through sheer nerve, perseverance and, I like to think, talent, we gained three new clients, one medium-sized and two smaller, but easily making up for the third biggie we thought we needed. Heady days, and you know what? I miss them. Yeah, I miss a lot of things… We called it gtp in the fashion of the day, the acronym for Guinane, True, Presswell, of course, set in Baskerville lower case, letters touching. It looked pretty cool.
The agency did take off. Around town we became known as a creative hot shop and we began pitching for and acquiring more and more accounts, some blue chip but mainly clients who wanted that little bit of extra creativity in selling their products, clients who were not afraid to take fresh marketing leaps that would not go unnoticed by the public or the trade. You’d be surprised how many big budget spenders could only live with the known, concepts without risk, strategies that dared not stray from formula or jeopardize the marketing manager’s position. Internal politics are always rife in both small corporations and big ones (the bigger the worse, in fact) and they’re third only to advertising, which, as I’ve said, is second only to politics itself.
The companies that came to us were already aware of our reputation for risk taking and they were usually primed for something different. Maybe nothing truly off the wall, but at least something individual. We didn’t win everything we pitched for by any means—easy to say you’re looking for something “different”, but not always easy to go with it once it’s presented—but we acquired enough business to expand our offices and staff. We even managed to win a few advertising awards along the way, all voted for by our peers in the industry itself.*
*Interestingly, now that Oliver and I were joint bosses, we actually felt more responsibility towards our clients. A long-standing joke in advertising circles is how an art director is constantly devising ways of including a palm tree in the left-hand corner of his layout no matter what the product might be because it meant a photo-shoot somewhere in the Bahamas, a beautiful excursion for himself (and possibly, but not necessarily, for the copywriter) accompanied by glamorous models, plus photographer and his assistants (you couldn’t sell dog food this way, you might insist, but don’t think it hasn’t been tried). Another and even more heavily disguised objective is the D&AD award for best advertising, when fabulous—and very expensive—film or TV commercials (or brilliantly smart ones, but a little oblique as far as selling the product is concerned) are proposed by the agency. These litter the whole media range, great concepts that fail to do their job because the brand name either goes unnoticed, or is never remembered (I’m sure you could mention one or two wonderful TV commercials without recalling the brand they were selling).
It’s a vanity that reveals a lack of respect for the client, but then, more fool the client who allows it to happen. The answer is simple, although often not easy: the truly great advertising always combines a clever (and often amusing) idea with distinct branding (and I don’t mean a large company logo); GREAT COPY, GREAT VISUAL, CLEAR PRODUCT IDENTIFICATION, is the legend that should be pinned to every marketing manager or company advertising director’s office wall, and creative teams should constantly be reminded of it. So, this was our company philosophy and no headlined layout or storyboard ever left our office for client presentation without it being fulfilled. Okay, I won’t pretend we did it every time. Rush or panic jobs, copy deadlines, overnight work, client procrastination, together with their insecurity and occasional inability to recognize a superb concept, all are inherent and expected in the advertising business, so we could not always deliver of our best, but hell, we tried, oh how we tried.
Oliver and I were in our element, working like dogs, our enthusiasm never diminishing. Often we’d book a hotel suite for a weekend and work day and night to produce a fresh and sometimes even original advertising campaign. We used hotel rooms because now and again we needed new surroundings, different venues somehow helping with an objective approach to the brief. Frankly, it’s not unknown in the business for some agencies to lock their creative team away in a five-star hotel for a couple of nights and feed them cocaine for inspiration and to keep them going. It isn’t standard practice, but it does happen sometimes when agencies are desperate, out of time, and the great ideas aren’t coming. We didn’t do that though, because I for one just couldn’t get into drugs of any sort. Sure, I did some hash at art college, and later, when finances started to allow, I tried coke, but it never seemed to work for me, only made me hyper-tense. Same with alcohol to some extent; it took a lot to get me smashed. I don’t know why—something in my metabolism, I suppose—but I was glad. Drugs are bad news, as I later found out. Besides, I didn’t need any chemical substances to stimulate my imagination; that could take care of itself, and anyway, there’s nothing quite like the high you get through creative brainstorms.
Maybe we worked too hard in those early years, took too much on, but Oliver and I, and to some extent Sydney, were overly ambitious and we ran on adrenaline. We seemed to have unlimited energy—although when we crashed we really crashed—which great to begin with, but too much of it could easily have led to early burn-out. As well as producing the creative work, we had the responsibility—the burden—of running our own company even though Sydney took much of the administration side of things onto his own shoulders. We still had to attend too many meetings, many with clients—oh God, those bloody long lunches—but we always made important decisions as a threesome.
So, we worked hard and we played hard, and possibly it was the pressure of both that instigated the first cracks in the partnership. The fact that I stole Oliver’s live-in lover didn’t help either.
9
I’d known Andrea Dodds for several months before I introduced her to Oliver, because I’d worked with two of her lensmen on a couple of jobs. She was tallish, slim and, as I told you earlier, had fantastic legs. At that time she wore her dark-brown hair long and straight so that it fell over her narrow shoulders (these days she has it cut short,
