This week we are very pleased that Billy Mawhinney, Executive Creative Director at BJL and D&AD exec member is sharing his thoughts on how things have changed in the industry....or how they haven't!
"I’ve just seen
a great Poster" is not something you hear very often now, but I did. Last
week.
It’s a black and
white photograph of a young boy in a wheelchair.
The hand written
headline above him reads, "He’d love to walk away from this poster
too." It raises awareness and money for muscular dystrophy in a very
challenging, interactive, bold and wonderfully simple way.
It’s also about
thirty years old. It was done by a really great art Director, at J Walter
Thompson, called John Knight.
We all knew him as J
F K because as an East End London boy, John would regularly break up words and
sentences with an expletive.
It was just after I’d
joined JWT as a trainee art director that I met John. His girlfriend was
Lorraine Chase and she was always coming in to meet her “Johnny” in our
Berkeley Square office. She too was very cockney and as beautiful as John was
handsome. (No really. If you walked into a bar with John, every woman in the
place looked at him.)
Terry Howard was a
writer in the next door office and after hearing Rainey’s distinct voice coming
from someone so gorgeous he wrote the famous Campari Ad: “Were you truly wafted
here from paradise?” she was asked. “Nah, Luton airport” came the reply.
Terry was also
writing sitcoms at the time with Mitch Walker. They were doing Hollywood
movie trailers that were being researched to see which way the scripts should
go.
Berkeley Square was
like a big old club full of rich and varied creatives. Even Dylan Thomas’s
grandson was working as a copywriter alongside David Jones, later Bowie, in The
Post Room.
We had a home
economics group that would create products for our clients.
Mr Kipling was born,
bred and baked at number 40.
After Eight mints
were a slim invention for Rowntree Macintosh as was its chunky counterpart, the
Yorkie bar.
Our shop at the back,
which was just like a corner shop selling everything you seemed to need, was
the first shop in the UK to go decimal.
When JWT were
pitching for the business of telling the country about decimalisation, they did
the pitch in the shop where they had converted every price from pounds
shillings and pence. Or, knowing JWT, from guineas.
We even had a
reference library where Jeanette McDonald spent every Monday morning going
through the weekend’s magazines to cut out photographic and any other reference
for a quite unrivalled support system for art directors. At that time it was
our Google which no art director could do without now.
But there we were at an old fashioned advertising agency doing social marketing, creating TV programming, working with Hollywood, creating new products, using McGoggle and, when I started, all during a recession that was so bad most people were on a four day week.
So I’m glad John
Knight’s poster is as good today as it’s always been and that thankfully what
we do hasn’t changed much.
As Bill Bernbach said
when asked in the early 60s what advertising would be like in 20 years time, he
replied, "It’ll be the same in 20 years as it was 20 years ago. People
with the power to touch people will be successful and people without that power
won’t."
Or as Eric Cantona
might say to the seagulls "Plus ca change plus la meme chose."
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