Percival Perspectives

Great account people/suits are like gold-dust these days, but I really want to find another one. 2 or 3 years experience, an ad or design background (must be mainstream agency) but ideally confident with both, fun, engaging, a team player, super organised – we’re not asking for much!! Must have a really strong empathy with creative work, and enjoy working on material aimed at high net-worth consumers. The accounts are fantastic!

Just mail jobs@percival-agency.com with your CV. 

As occasional readers will know, I’ve been writing a book with a sport/sneakers/track&field background over the last few years.

I was totally blown away by Bolt’s amazing win the Olympic 100 metres today, and it surely marks the return of track as a major sport. Really since Carl Lewis it’s been in the doldrums, but at the end of the day the raw challenge of the sport – to be the fastest woman/man, the highest jumper in the world, etc – is so fundamental, and so compelling.

Anyway I feel inspired, and as my train flashes through the Norfolk countryside, it’s time to get back to the page and make the story happen. 

Elin Sjursen, a former Electrician (employee of our old company Electric) and generally great person – and currently frequent Percival photographer - is joining the very leading-edge digital company Made By Many. Congratulations to the copper-haired Norwegian – you deserve it! 

So ‘The Sunday Times is The Sunday Papers’ is no more. After nearly two decades, my most famous one-liner sails off into the sunset. (I’m thinking a Caribbean sunset with Art Deco sun-rays – something spectacular.)

I already blogged here about it’s creation, so I won’t repeat that, but I do think it’s replacement as The Sunday Times’ strapline is a tad dull.

‘For all you are’.

It sounds like the title of a Gary Barlow song, but without the killer melody to follow.

It’s accompanied by a ham-fisted set of graphic icons to denote the paper’s many bits.

The new line is obviously to the same brief as TSTITSP, which is to push the Sunday Thunderer’s multi-section format and comprehensiveness.

Oh, a planner would say, it’s about YOU now though, we’ve redirected the sentiment at the consumer. For all YOU ARE. But it’s also really, really dull.

Volvo did ‘For all of your life’ years ago and least that carried the extra message of durability.

Great straplines are memorable sonic hand grenades: Hello Tosh, Gotta Toshiba.  Finger-lickin’ good. You’ve been Tango’d.

I remember the incredibly serious planner, Richard Huntington (who blogs here about counter intuitive thinking and planning in general, in a very intellektchual stylie), now at Saatchis, telling me years back on a GNER pitch in Chime that straplines were dead. He said they ought to be simple statements like ‘Go. The low cost airline from British Airways.’ Errr…the airline was great, the strapline perhaps not.

(I ignored him and won the pitch with ‘GNER. We love trains’, which given they’d just had the Hatfield crash shows that really genuine counter-intuitive thinking is not the preserve of spanners, sorry planners.)

There are fantastic planners and strategists around, but more and more I see ads based on byzantine towers of tortured and over-intellectualized strategic thinking, They’re so over-thought that any value or colour is washed out of the creative. The telecoms companies are some of the worst protagonists, particularly in the straplines that are supposedly the summation of the whole message:

Vodafone. How are you?  (Actually I’m really well but the coverage in my building could do with improving and I’m worried the Chelsea squad is too old.) What does that actually mean?

02 (cue man in a faux Yorkshire accent and bizarrely odd phrasing) See what you can do.

And finally, Orange. I am. (‘I am’ was also Earth Wind and Fire’s best studio album – Maurice White’s production was years ahead of its time. Serpentine Fire is a standout track but they’re all classics, check it out on iTunes). Actually the Orange ads that go with it do strike a chord, so we’ll let them off.

Bland, bland, bland. For all you are. And for the new ST commercial we’ll wheel out an ACT-OR to say some cosmic stuff I really can’t remember. Peter O’Toole is exhumed and rambles to camera but really does it have anything to do with the Sunday Murdoch?

I’m proud of my old line. It had bad grammar. It survived many changes of agency because Murdoch liked it. It was sticky and succinct and I wish I’d had royalties on it.

Farewell old friend, for all you were.

Part of the raison d’etre of this blog was not just to let myself write a few words about creativity, but also to share some of my very own photography with you.

Of late, I’ve been shooting some commissioned stuff for clients. Hands up, I confess it’s so much more stressful than my day job! 

I’m the son of pro lensman, and the brother of another (check out http://www.percival.se  if you want to see the work of a real professional, my brother Glen) but shooting for commercial purposes, even in the digital age when you can fix everything in the mix, has stresses all its own.

So I've retired! But here literally is a parting shot. A Ritz 100 Cocktail from the hotel's famous Rivoli Bar, gold leaf and all. 

From now on I’m leaving commissioned stuff to the real pros. All hail to you!

To the Cork street gallery, for an exhibition of art by Rob and Nick Carter, ‘Travelling Stills’. http://www.robandnick.com  It's sponsored by our long-term client, Ascot Underwriting.

Ascot’s one of the leading lights in Lloyd’s of London, and underwrites all sorts from Formula One teams to skyscrapers to jewellery at the Oscars.

When we met them 5 years ago, the first thing we noticed was their City lair was lined with unbelievably vibrant – nay, kaleidoscopic – modern art.

Martin Reith, the CEO, hosts the event. It’s his vision that’s driven Ascot, and its unique association with modern art.

I love it, I really do, when a company in a defined sector takes on a personality that is so different from those around it. Insurance is a secret art with a history and language all its own, yet Ascot constantly breaks new ground. ‘Terrorism, we’ll insure against it.’ Etc. And they were the first company to embrace that kind of 21^st century challenge.

Creative, market-making, winning, and utterly individual, that’s what a great brand is all about. We are thrilled to have helped create their identity, and their appropriately vibrant new web site, http://ascotuw.com

And also to have helped them prove that finance doesn’t have to be black and white.

What brand used the great copy line : ‘One instinctively knows when something is right’? 

I suppose it can't actually have been a great line as I don’t remember which brand, but hey-ho, I thought it was time to let my good friend 'intuition' take a bow.

When it comes to developing great marketing, how much should we respect the I-word?

Old friends will know I’m no great fan of towering structures of ornate marketing strategy – I instinctively believe (yes, my intuition tells me) that the best marketing ideas are really very very simple. And sometimes intuition should take the lead.

To illustrate my point, I thought I’d call on two ancient case histories of creative development around two big brands: Nike and The Sunday Times. Both involve the creation of a central communications idea, and both are very much alive today after two decades.

The former I had nothing whatsoever to do with, other than that I worked in Nike’s European agency (suprisingly, Grey Advertising in those days), while the latter I helped create.

It was '87 or thereabouts (does anyone really remember the 80s clearly?!) and Nike were looking for a new global theme or line. ‘There is no finish line’ had been their mantra, but it was inextricably linked to their running heritage, and the handful of Oregon guys who’d sold Japanese running trainers out of the back of a Volkswagen Bug.

Nike had got bigger and diversified into tennis, basketball, cricket, football and beyond, and the new line had to be comfortable in new sporting arenas.

Nb: This and other anecdotes are brilliantly detailed in “Swoosh, the unauthorised biography of Nike and the men who played there“, a superb read: (http://www.amazon.com/Swoosh-Unauthorized-Story-Played-There/dp/0887306225/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205331322&sr=8-1)

All Nike agencies worldwide were put on alert to come up with the new thought, so yours truly and myriad others had a go at cracking an unbelievable challenge. I wish I still had the Creative Brief, but the idea was to capture the essence of rebellion and kick-butt ‘can-do-ness’ the brand symbolised. Its ambassadors then were gung-ho characters like Botham and McEnroe – it was a much less sanitised Nike than the one of Sampras and now Tiger.

We all spectacularly failed – I wish I still had my hopeless efforts so we could laugh at them – and the search became ever more desperate.

Finally, Messrs Wieden & Kennedy of Nike’s Oregon agency (now a world player and still Nike’s core agency) were sitting in the office of the late and great Rob Strasser, Nike’s original Marketing Director, all 300 lbs of him - many of the early Nike types were nothing like the buff stereotypes you might expect.

Strasser hated whingers and negativity, and he’d had post-it notes printed up to give to staffers whose faith in their ideas wavered or lacked conviction. ‘Just Do It’ said the post-its.

W&K knew that that ethos was the very essence of Nike, and soon recommended it become the rallying call for the brand.

No research, no shillyshallying, no soul-searching and no debate. Pure intuition.

And so perhaps the greatest of all straplines took wing.

A year or so later, David White and I were squeezed into our little cubicle at Arc Advertising on Euston Road. Each of us had an A3 pad in front of us. There was the usual banter and lots of scratching heads. David was doodling his fine art cartoons. (Usually involving square headed men with Hulk-like physiques, Hmm. Not what you’d expect from a Doncaster Boy.)

We’d had the brief to create a new theme for The Sunday Times, now that it was going all multi-faceted like its New York counterpart, with all kinds of sections and supplements. ‘The definitive Sunday read’ might have been the brief, although I’m not sure we actually had one. Arc wasn’t big on planning.

It didn’t take an Olympian creative leap. After the usual empty hours of procrastination, I wrote down ‘The Sunday Times are The Sunday Papers’, and then wondered about the grammar. ‘It’s like it IS The Sunday Papers’ I said. Still the grammar sounded wrong.

But David and I just had this feeling that the ‘is’ version was The One. The Sunday Times is The Sunday Papers. Somehow it just felt right.

We asked the account man in, an urbane fellow called Chris Harrald who was also an award-winning copywriter in his own right. ‘I like it, I’ll take it down to Fortress Wapping’ he said.

He went down to see the Editor, Andrew Neil ('Brillo Pad' of Private Eye fame, and an engaging guy I sat next to at a couple of ST dinners) and Neil loved it.

The rest is history. Unbelievably, the line has been retained through at least 5 changes of agency, maybe more, because Murdoch and his crew are keen on it. It’s become an inherent part of the brand itself. 

Now with those ideas, Nike and Sunday Times, would a sophisticated planning department, and a rigorous process of consumer research, have led to two such single-minded and enduring concepts?

I have my doubts. Reebok have always been far more willing than Nike to embrace traditional FMCG strategy, and – the great belly ad notwithstanding – have rarely got near Nike’s brilliant strategic and creative levels.  Nike and its legendary leader Buck Knight have always been big on intuition.

I’m not against powerful planning – many of the great campaigns of all time result from it – and research of course has a vital place in our understanding of consumers.

But sometimes Intuition rules the day. And long may it last.

(ps: Thanks to Mr Google, I can tell you that 'One instinctively knows when something is right' was Croft Original Sherry!)

So we went to Barcelona for a long weekend, and I’d imagineered my blog entry even before our plane had left Heathrow.

I was going to take panoramic pictures and write a passionate love missive to the capital of Catalunya, and wax lyrical about the Gaudi, the swanky shopping, the energy of The Ramblas, the iconic museums. But none of that ever happened.

It all that got derailed by The Snails.

Or Los Caracoles as they’re known locally. Given my lack of a Christmas break, a long weekend somewhere fun was always likely to turn into something sybaritic, indulgent, lazy even.

Culture went out the window, we did a gastro tour of the City, and I have to say we probably lowered the national reserves of Cava. (And, as Bill Haley would say, we drank Rioja round the clock.)

Above all, we fell in love with aforementioned bar, Los Caracoles.

Impossibly authentic, the bar is backed onto by frenetic kitchens, the place is always packed, and the atmosphere is utter electricity. You sit perched at the bar, sampling to-die-for Pimientos and awesome prawns, while supping the nectar that is Marques de Caceres.

Your host is the world’s most engaging barman ever – do you know, we never asked his name as he served, entertained, teased and cajoled us? Lord knows why not. He did a fantastic Charlie Chaplin, not surprising given his Doppelganger resemblance.

His English was the rude side of rudimentary, but he still managed to make himself understood to two Philistines who could muster hardly a word of Spanish. A genuine character.

‘Had he ever been to England?’ we asked.

Well yes. He'd visited his brother who worked in a hotel here. His first full English day was July 1st 2006. The day Stevie Gerrard, Fat Frank, Super JT and the others wimpily surrendered our World Cup existence to Portugal.

He described how he visited a pub in Portobello Road to see the game, and initially sat at a round table of six with five random Englishmen. It all seemed quite calm and engaging, friendly even. As the game progressed, and a victory started to seem distant, the Englishmen disappeared.

As our penalties lamely failed, he felt a tap on a shoulder, then in a couple of seconds of extreme staccato violence he got an elbow to the face, a kick in the groin, and a sickening punch to the jaw. He woke up in hospital, where the attention was so basic his family got him flown back to Spain for the superior care.

And that was his experience of England.

He wrote on a sheet of paper the number of customers annually in his restaurant and bar – hundreds of thousands – and he said there’d never been a single incident like that. Ever.

He bore no resent – his fabulous attitude to us showed that – but it just made us soooooo unbearably sad to think what halfwits us English can be. He literally bears the physical scars too, and we both felt quite ashamed.

Here he is. Would you really elbow this guy in the face for the crime of looking like he might be Portugese, even though he isn’t? And all because we lost a football match.

(Oh, and I do love Barcelona. Next time we’ll actually see it.)

This week, I had dinner with Ken Forbes, the former MD of SsangYong, a client at my old agency, Electric.

SsangYong make huge SUVs much derided by Jeremy Clarkson but actually offering insane value for money – besides which, I’m very proud of the work and really it deserves to be in the LP Greatest Hits section of this site. Any ad that invents a word – ‘bigness’ – deserves to be here!

I was caught slightly off guard. He starts to tell me how fantastic Electric was. ‘You walked in off Gresse Street and you could feel the energy in the room. It was electricity, it was electric. You felt the tangible collective zeal of all these young minds – well except yours, of course! – thinking about your brand and your challenges. "

He remembers the funky L-shaped space with the wooden floors, the banter with the receptionist, the laughter in the meetings with too many of us crammed into that tiny Board Room around the oval table that actually came from Ikea.

You know, I’ve hardly thought about Electric since I sold it in 2006 – you don’t, you live in the current challenges, you live in The Now. But hearing my friend Ken’s words as we power through a veritable banquet of Turkish food and not a small amount of Sauvignon Blanc (at Ozer in Langham Place - a great restaurant), I feel genuinely proud.

Yes Percival has a better website, a more cool identity, a more targeted offering, and has probably done as much sound work in six months as Electric did in four years. But as I sat in the taxi, zipping me home from a really fun dinner with The Scotsman, I indulged in a bit of tipsy reminscence about my long-gone offspring.

Thanks Ken. Yes, Electric was electric.