About a year ago I was listening to a podcast called The Plot Thickens. The subject was the messy production of the movie The Bonfire of the Vanities. As the story unfolded I realised that the format – a documentary of a subject told over several episodes, with interviews featuring the participants – might lend itself to something in the world of advertising.

About ten seconds later I knew that ‘something’ ought to be David Abbott.

For those of you unfamiliar with his work and legacy, David was arguably the greatest advertising person the UK has ever produced. He is without doubt the greatest British copywriter of all time, and that achievement alone would make him a worthy subject of a retrospective, but he was also one of the founders (and subsequent Chairman) of one of Britain’s best ad agencies, which is still going strong. He’s a former President of D&AD, and the recipient of its President’s Award, and he managed to produce a ridiculous 247 pieces of work worthy of inclusion in its annuals. He gave us JR Hartley looking for his book on fly fishing, Bob Hoskins reminding us that it’s good to talk, and The Economist poster campaign, still the gold standard for both copywriting and billboard advertising, despite ending in 2005.

But if you listen to these episodes, you’ll discover that he was also a brilliant account person, strategist, leader, friend, and, improbably, comedian.

He really deserves a biography, and if anyone reading this would like to take the subject on, perhaps here is a good place to start. However, in the absence of a 500-page book, I suppose this podcast series is the next best thing.

My plan was to speak to people as possible who had worked with him and build up a portrait of David over a few episodes, so I started with my version of the ‘low hanging fruit’, by which I mean people whose email addresses I had to hand: Peter Souter, Dave Dye and Paul Burke. I hadn’t really intended to go much beyond them, but as they offered their thoughts, feelings and opinions of David, I soon realised I’d have to find others.

Next was Mike Griffin, a friend of mine who worked for David for many years. He mentioned other possible interviewees and the ball was well and truly rolling: Brian Byfield (David’s former art director); John Field (David’s head of production for over twenty-five years); John O’Driscoll (a creative who worked for David at both DDB and AMV, and the co-creator of the website David Abbott Said, from which I took the first two episodes); John Kelley (John O’Driscoll’s former creative partner, who worked at AMV through most of the 1980s); Cathy Heng (a great art director who began as a junior under David at French Gold Abbott); Jeremy Miles (former Vice-Chairman as AMV, who started there as a junior account person on Sainsbury’s); Mary Wear (a senior creative hired by David in the mid-1990s); Ken New (head of media at AMV and a close friend of David’s); Alfredo Marcantonio (former client, then creative colleague and friend) and Tim Delaney (another of the UK’s greatest copywriters and creative directors, who was almost contemporaneous with David).

I also spoke to Peter Mead and Adrian Vickers, the M and the V of AMV. Their telling of the early days of the UK’s best agency is worth the non-existent ticket price alone.

I’d like to thank them all for the kind gift of their time.

We begin with two episodes of David in his own words, all taken from Davidabbotsaid.com, a site I urge you to visit because it contains exactly the same interview, but alongside footage of David. I hadn’t planned to include it, after all, it already exists and is easily accessible, but during the edit I felt that there was an enormous David-shaped hole amongst all the excellent testimony. That hole has been filled, and you can now hear David’s voice in convenient podcast form.

Although I started this in December 2021, the process of tracking people down and interviewing them, along with lots and lots of editing, all while spending a great deal of time on my day job, took longer than I expected. I tried to collect the words into themes, giving us the opportunity to spot threads and patterns that might inspire further impressions. They are loose and imperfect, but they basically hang together to form discrete narratives.

I added my own thoughts in one episode because I crossed over with David for six months as a very junior copywriter back in 1998. I won’t repeat here what I said there, but I just wanted to make one thing clear: no matter how completely I managed to do this, I could never really convey the totality of David Abbott. Next month my Creative Review column will act as a companion piece to this post and the podcast episodes, offering a 900-word primer for the uninitiated, but it still won’t be enough.

Mary Wear said it best when she pointed out that the truly wonderful thing that David did was to encourage us to aspire, but not in the current advertising sense of wishing you had the latest phone or a six-pack beach body. Instead David gently, intelligently and brilliantly encouraged us to aspire to be better people. Better spouses, better parents, better kids, better pet owners, better cooks, better friends… and all in the service of improving our own lives and the lives of those around us. It was purpose-based advertising before that became an excuse for chocolate bars to save whales, and every word he wrote was linked to the commercial improvement of a product or service.

But just because it’s impossible to entirely capture David, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. If you listen to these episodes you should get a much greater sense of who he was and how he contributed to us all, especially those of us who have worked in advertising.

If you’ve ever felt The Economist could make you a bit more interesting, BT could help you stay in touch with an old friend, or Sainsbury’s could provide the ingredients and inspiration to create an excellent meal, you now know who to thank.

I hope you enjoy listening to the episodes as much as I enjoyed putting them together.

I have done my best to add them in chronological order, so here’s the last of the seven, called Final Thoughts. If you have trouble with iTunes or this site, you can also find the whole series on Soundcloud.

This is the sixth episode of my series of podcasts about the great David Abbott.

This one is called ‘David’s Department’ and explores what it was like to be a creative working under David.

I’ll link to the episode here, but you can also find the whole series on Soundcloud.

Good morning.

Apologies for the recent silence of this blog. WordPress lost all my data recently, so that had to be sorted out. We got most of it back, but if you’re wondering where a few of the more recent posts have gone, they have vanished into the digishpere, never to return. A shame, as they took a while to write, and I had a couple more cued up, but First World Problems and all that…

Moving swiftly forward, I have a new podcast episode for you. Paul Burke and I discussed the subject of ageism, during which we went off on various tangents, but eventually returned to the subject in hand.

It still requires further explanation, so I shall endeavour to find a ‘younger’ powerful ECD-type, to see what they think of the issue. Stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, here’s my chat with Paul on iTunes, Soundcloud and the play button just below these words.

Anthony is many things: comedian, journalist, DJ, presenter, author, pilot, maker of excellent roast potatoes, and, of course my next-door neighbour (find out all about him/hire him here).

But he is also a top-level voiceover artist, who has lent his vocal cords to such clients as Nike, Lego, Samsung, Kellog’s and Disney. Here’s his Nike one (he’s the newsreader):

So I thought it might be a good idea to ask him what it’s like on the other side of the recording booth glass. What’s he thinking when you’re going through those fifty menus, trying to decide between the Yaki Soba and the American Hot? What advice most effectively improves his read? Should you ask him to do an impression of Michael Caine?

We also find out which branch of Pret all the VO artists used as a hangout, how many voices routinely audition for a gig these days, and the difference between actors and professional VOs.

Unsurprisingly it is the best recorded episode I have ever done, and has the most mellifluous voice that isn’t mine.

Here’s the iTunes link, the Soundcloud link and the direct play button.:

So I was watching this video the other day:

…and I found myself in violent agreement with everything Tim Lindsay was saying.

There are lots of questions advertising has to ask itself right now. The industry is in a state of disrepair: financially straitened, endlessly splintered and trying to find its place at a time of climate crisis, pandemic and global political upheaval.

So I got in touch with Tim and suggested we drill down into those topics, especially from his position as Chairman of D&AD (apologies for referring to him as CEO during the chat) – the pre-eminent body of advertising creativity. Are these creative topics? Financial? Business? You could even ask whether or not they are within advertising’s remit at all.

So we chatted about all of that, and I didn’t even ask about whether there should be a printed annual, or how Chinese jurors judge English advertising copy (and vice versa). Frankly, there are bigger things to discuss…

Here’s the iTunes link, the Soundcloud link and the direct play button:

The second part of my chat with Paul.

iTunes link, Soundcloud link, direct play button:

Paul would be far too modes to say this, but if you watched a brilliant ad from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, there’s a decent chance he had something to do with it.

As one of the founders of Gorgeous (2.0 – Chris Palmer had already been running a pre-Paul Gorgeous for a few years before he asked Frank Budgen and Paul to join him), he oversaw a peerless run of commercial brilliance that took in Cannes Grands Prix (plural), dozens of D&AD Pencils and a couple of DGA awards.

By 2009 Gorgeous had the unique distinction of having topped the Gunn Report Consolidated League Table of Most Awarded Commercials Production Company in The World every single year since the awards’ inception (1999-2009).

And in 2012 Gorgeous, now 15 years old,  was ranked as the Most Awarded Commercials Production Company of the last 50 years, by D&AD.

Paul was also awarded the Fellowship of The British Arrows:

But they also made the ads the we all loved, admired, and made many of us want to get into the business.

We discuss all that, along with his earlier years producing on the agency side at BMP, where he first met Frank, and his time with Frank at The Paul Weiland Film Company, and a year running RSA, where he took on Chris Cunningham.

There was so much to discuss, we had to do it in two parts: the years up to Gorgeous, then the Gorgeous years.

If you want to see the work we discussed, most of it can be found on the Gorgeous site, where Frank still has an archive. Meanwhile, here are a few pictures from his own personal collection (including Frank Budgen’s storyboard for Playstation Mountain):

He’s a lovely bloke. We had a lovely chat. Enjoy…

iTunes link, Soundcloud link, and button you can press right here (Because of the fun weirdness of WordPress, if you like the direct play button, there will be a separate post just above this one with the second part of our chat. iTunes and Soundcloud will have both parts):

I used to collect movie posters. I still have a few favourites, but in the end I ran out of wall space and it seemed a shame to keep so much great stuff rolled up in a cupboard, especially if someone, somewhere might really want that foiled Kill Bill One-Sheet I tracked down, or the UK Quad of Goodfellas.

Anyway, now that I live in LA, I can’t drive anywhere without seeing hundreds of them (fewer recently for obvious reasons), so I still keep an eye out for the good ones.

The very best tend to be done by my friend Kenny Gravillis at Gravillis Inc.:

See? He’s damn good.

So we ended up meeting because his daughter babysat for me a few years ago. We then realised that we had a lot in common – a love of music, movies and frustrating football teams (he supports West Ham) – and now we’re just two ex-Brit mates in LA.

But I always love his work, so I’m always keen to discuss it, hence this podcast.

The other reason to chat is his career story, which goes from the Isle of Dogs to late-80s New York, to designing record sleeves for some of Def Jam’s biggest artists…

…to expanding that role into other labels…

…to pivoting from music to movies, and the surprising hurdles of making that change.

There’s a lot to learn here, all told in Kenny’s East London, NY, LA accent. And if you want to know more, here’s a Creative Review profile (£/$), and a short documentary on how he collaborated with Black Panther designer Emory Douglas on the artwork for Da 5 Bloods:

iTunes link, Soundcloud link, direct link:

This is the third and final ‘people who were heavily involved in the Blackcurrant Tango ad’ series: my chat with the client, David Atter. (Episode 1 with director Colin Gregg can be found here. Episode 2 with copywriter Chas Bayfield can be found here.)

Just in case you’re popping by at some random point in the future, here’s the beloved ad:

And a couple of the other Tango ads we discuss:

David discusses many fascinating elements of the job of ‘client’ but also gives us some great insights to the BCT/Tango process.

He currently has his own business model development and marketing strategy consultancy, providing advice, workshops & direction to help organisations use marketing as a force for good – for people, the planet, and profit

Here’s the iTunes link, the Soundcloud link and the direct play button:

This is the second in my series of three posts/podcasts about Blackcurrant Tango, apparently one of the most beloved ads of the last thirty years:

You could read the Colin Gregg post, or read this repeat of what I said there: I put this up on LinkedIn and it caused a massive, affectionate response. So I thought I might do 20 mins each with Chas, Colin and the client, David Atter. But the calls went on too long for that to be a viable option, so here are three individual episodes, one with each of them.

As a former mid-90s creative, I was delighted to be able to ask Chas about what it was like being a young creative at HHCL. The stories of what happened before, during and after the phenomenon of BCT are as fascinating as you might hope.

Here are the first ads he ever made (they got in The Book):

Then these (they won a Silver Pencil):

Here’s his site. Enjoy our chat…

Here’s the iTunes link, the Soundcloud link, and the play button.