Percival Perspectives

So it’s off to SW6 for us, after our launch period in W1.

We were more than a tad compressed in the Media Village, and it’s great to to have our own place with our own front door. It’s also a stone’s throw from The Bridge, so becomes a sea of blue on match nights.

West Brompton isn’t as homogeneised in terms of stores and cafes as most of London, and the slightly higgeldy-piggeldy vibe is actually quite engaging.

The Atlas a few yards away is one of London’s best gastropubs, chocca with local professionals on most weeknights.

Perhaps it’s time for a tiny bit of reflection. We set out on day one a few short months ago to create advertising, design and web in one space, under one system of creative direction.

In the last two months alone, we’ve done a national advertising campaign for a market leader, created a brand identity for a major charitable initiative, and have just been hired to re-engineer a large travel website. It’s satisfying to come good on your own business plan.

But – and a big but -  we know it’s a tough market ahead, and we have to be even better. No room for complacency.

Anyway, to all our clients and friends, we’d love to welcome you to Rickett Street very soon.

To Dinner at the House of Commons (as you do) to celebrate the launch of the Health and Fitness Foundation, a charitable initiative set up by Britain’s Fitness Industry.

Percival created the new logo, an elegant mix of minimal typography and a stylised ‘barbell’. We also created the identity last year for the HFF’s sister organisation, the FIA – the trade association of Britain’s gyms. (Read about that here.)

I hadn’t been to Parliament before, amazingly, and walking through the various halls I felt my jaw dropping again and again. The ancient Westiminster Hall, literally smelling of antiquity, the vibrant friezes of the galleries, the statues of PMs past, and the unmistakable aura of power that infuses the place. You can see how politicians get addicted.

Met some very nice people at the dinner. The HFF’s remit - part of which is to get disadvantaged youngsters trained up as personal trainers or through fitness-related higher education – is a really useful part of the UK’s wider fitness agenda.

That would have been a great headline if Elle John had been a Designer. But she’s not, she’s our latest Account Manager. But she has a Mac so it’s sort of OK!

Elle’s previously worked for Provenance, the luxury division of M&C Saatchi, so has the perfect background for our growing roster of high net worth clients.

She’s also been client side with bespoke shirtmaker Frank Rostron, so is very much au fait with the luxury sector.

‘Ello, El!

Savills is Britain’s No.1 estate agent, a global player, and we have joined their roster of agencies with a new national advertising campaign.

Our strategy was very simple: everyone’s worried by the market – to make something of an understatement – but Savills has a great combination of national scale/resource and local knowledge.

We felt the message had to be unerringly positive and came up with the campaign theme ‘We have the power to move you.’

The photography was equally ‘up’ in the usual Percivalian style, with unusually cropped shots of jaunty movement. The words were by yours truly, the art direction by the creative (and life) team of Gideon van Lill and Maryke Olivier, our resident Springboks.

The campaign featured in national press, local press, in-store posters, digital advertising and direct mail.

We’re thrilled to be working with a professional services company of this calibre, and we strongly believe that the hardness of the market, if you can inject some positivity, creates the perfect environment for winning market share.

We spend a fabulous couple of days at The Palace in New York, and I sneak a Sunday off to spend a day with friends Ujwala and Pascal Samant out in Princeton. Suburban heaven and a total break from the bizzyness of the last few weeks.

Great food (as always), turbocharged mojitos, and lots of banter. Ujwala is the former director of our client Learning For Life, the charity whose West Brompton offices will soon be our home.

James gets some fantastic shots at the Palace – the rooftop suite has a unique panorama with the Manhattan Skyline bracketed by The Chrysler Building and The Empire State Building. (I adore New York, as per my previous blog here.)

Then it’s off to LA to capture two of LA’s most elevated properties, The Beverly Hills Hotel and Hotel Bel-Air.

I’m ashamed to say I haven’t been to LA since Starsky and Hutch was still in production (The TV series, not the recent movie!), and I was shocked by the change……and it’s all for the better. OK, we were staying in pretty incredible neighbourhoods, but some taxi rides and a small shopping expedition show the city has changed almost beyond recognition. A very similar transformation to what Giuliani achieved in New York.

I steal an hour off and hit tennis balls with David Olmedo, brother of 1959 Wimbledon champion Alex, at the Beverly Hills. He’s even older than me (!) but still effortless on the court. I have to play more often, I really do. I love the game and the way every stress and worry just disappear when you drop into the rhythm of hitting.

The shoot is a dream – I can’t say too much about it but we’ll post the shots when it goes live into the public domain – but we feel proud and just very, very lucky to have been tasked with the capturing the personality of The Dorchester Collection. (Beverly Hills copped in the pic on the right by James Bedford.)

It was one of those shoots where you feel a sense of loss when the final wrap is called. But some great memories, and lensman James Bedford and client Jade Galston were the best trip companions you could possibly have.

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. 

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!)