Can I first of all congratulate Campaign’s picture editor for their work in last week’s issue ?
The front page showed two images of Peter Mandelson - holding a bunch of bananas in one, and minus the bananas in the other.
Where did Mandelson’s bananas go ?
That’s got to be worth a Question Time in itself.
Secondly, in the piece on awards on page 13, it showed great dedication to pick 4 creatives who were all too tall for their hair.
As a result of judicious cropping, 4 world-famous creative gurus looked like a row of hard-boiled eggs.
It was worth the £3.70 for that alone.
Anyway. To business.
I can imagine that the conversation at Mother or Fallon goes a bit like this.
"We're in the running for Campaign Agency of the Decade." "Yea but look what happened to the last Agency of the Decade."
For those of you who can't remember, the last Agency of the Decade was called HHCL (and I was the 2nd "h").
And, for the benefit of any agency in the running for this most prestigious of poisoned chalices, allow me to tell you what I think did happen.
We let the original dynamic of the partners dissipate. In other words, we fought too much. This came about through politics and envy. If, in your current agency, the original partners are still working happily together, you're probably ok.
So my advice to all partners in all agencies is this – see if you can stick together.
If only for the sake of the quids.
It’s weird – there were all sorts of personality differences between us, but they got subsumed when we were young and struggling. However, as soon as success came our way, we fought like cat and dog.
One of the partners in particular was always trying to get other partners off on “sabbaticals” which effectively undermined them in the agency.
It was like Big Brother, with slightly more at stake.
In fact, it was utterly terrifying.
As a result of all these feuds, we eventually fell foul of what is known in the business as "Bogle's Dictum" - the mantra that any ad agency is only 3 telephone calls from disaster.
I.e. if your top 3 clients decide to leave at the same time, you're pretty much f*cked.
When the HHCL partnership dissipated, on a sea of squabbles, niggles and drug-fuelled Christmas parties aboard Sir Phillip Green's 60-foot yacht moored in the Shadwell Basin, (actually I retract the last item on advice from lawyers, several of whom were there at the time), we ended up getting those 3 Bogellian calls.
In fact we got about 8 of them, pretty much all together over a shortish period of time. I got one, telling us Egg had fired us, just 5 minutes before I had to address a huge conference in Kuala Lumpur.
Anybody leading an agency in the running for Campaign Poisoned Chalice of the Decade, on receiving a string of calls from their 8 biggest clients asking to review the business, would be well advised to wander down from the 34th floor of their ivory tower and start panicking.
Of course it is absolutely a client's prerogative to call a review. But once a couple of them do it to you, the sharks start circling. Sharks with sh*t-eating grins.
I can’t complain about that. It’s just the law of the jungle.
And I apologise for mixing my metaphors there. As the more observant of you will recognize, you don’t get sharks in a jungle.
I should of course have referred to lemurs with sh*t-eating grins.
But maybe this is all a result of what my old English tutor would call the "hamartia", the tragic flaw in the characters of dramatic heroes which leads to their eventual downfall.
In the case of Macbeth, it was ambition. In the case of Othello, unbearable jealousy. In our case, we were all off our t*ts in the Shadwell Basin.
Anyway.
I hope that helps.
