WHERE DID ALL THE REBELS GO? INTERVIEW
WITH STEVE HENRY.
Steve Henry was creative director and co-founder of HHCL, an agency renowned for breaking the many rules and assumptions in advertising. Campaign magazine voted it Agency Of The Decade, and Henry was named one of the forty most influential British advertising people in the last fifty years. Here, he talks about HHCL, the current state of advertising and where he sees communications heading.
BEING GOOD MEANS BEING AMBIVALENT.
“I think the best people in our industry are very ambivalent about it. They like it and they hate it at the same time.
“What interests me about advertising is the interception between commerce and creativity, and I think that’s what keeps a lot of very bright people in the industry, despite all the frustrations and all the drawbacks.
“The opportunity to use your creativity with such a fine commercial ambition is utterly fascinating. Otherwise the commercial world is pretty much bereft of creativity.
“About twelve years ago I was emailing for a while with Jelly Helm, a copywriter at Wieden + Kennedy for a long time. We were emailing each other because we both had an interest in green issues; this was back in 2001 or 2002. Jelly started seeing the immorality in advertising and said he couldn’t work in it anymore.
“His point was that if the rest of the world consumes at the rate America consumes, we would need four more planets to provide the raw materials. What that exposes is that the levels of consumption in Western society are not sustainable and not healthy. Advertising essentially encourages this consumption and desire.
“Once Jelly got that thought in his head, he couldn’t work in advertising any more. Once I got that thought in my head, I struggled. And I think a lot of people struggle to work in advertising if they know that concept.
“After all, what we want to do is increase the market. But if consumption is already excessive, what are we doing?
“At HHCL we were concerned with this, and we came up with this phrase: ‘responsible demand.’ But we couldn’t get traction with clients on it: they didn’t want to hear it. And you can understand why. It’s enough being a client in an incredibly competitive marketplace, never mind having your advertising agencies talk about the morals of what you’re doing.
“When I do talks, I do raise this question and leave it with the audience by saying: ‘What do we do about this?’ And so far I haven’t got a good answer back.”
ARE AD PEOPLE CONCERNED BY ADVERTISING’S LESS ADMIRABLE ASPECTS?
“I think they push them aside. I think the advertising industry is full of bright and nice people, but not as many radicals as I’d like. And not enough people who are genuinely troubled by it.
“Over the last few years I think society started getting better. Acceptance of climate change, recycling and a feeling of increased responsibility. I think society in general has moved in the right direction. Advertising has ended up with a bit of that, but I don’t think the industry as a whole has become more responsible.
“The credit crunch hit advertising badly. Advertising had been cut back to the bone, even before the crunch happened. There was no fat anywhere, and agencies were very lean. Clients got more and more demanding, they wanted more for less. Also, the industry is being run by people who understand the bottom line, but not creativity. Advertising used to be about making interesting stuff, now it’s about making money.
“The only interesting agencies are private ones. Mother is still interesting because Robert Saville keeps it private. If he sold it, that would be the kiss of death. I work at an agency called Albion, in Shoreditch, that I love. Partly because the partners are very bright, and partly because it’s private.
“In the UK, unfortunately, there’s a prevalent business model where agencies aim to sell within three to five years. That’s all about money and that doesn’t make the industry more responsible. Quite the opposite.”
ADVERTISING UNDERCOVER.
“There’s another issue. We’re moving into a situation in which advertising has a very different relationship with culture and content. We’re creating content, which I think is a very good thing for creativity within the industry. But that raises massive moral issues. Such as: where are the boundaries between editorial and advertising?
“Also, product placement is now being allowed in British TV programmes. Now, I’m a huge fan of that from a creative point of view. I want to be able to create culture for clients. But morally it makes advertising much more dubious, because you don’t know whether you’re being sold to or simply entertained.
“A few years ago in America there was a debate about buzz agents. These were people joining discussions online – paid to do so in order to push a particular company’s products. In an online discussion you don’t know whether people are genuinely offering their opinions or whether they’re being paid to offer their opinions.”
HHCL.
“I’d worked at two hot shops: GGT and WCRS. We started HHCL in 1987 and the key driving force was a guy called Adam Lury, who is the L of HHCL. He didn’t like advertising at all, and was very suspicious about it. He was very left wing, a great feminist and a great radical, about the most radical thinker I’ve ever come across in the industry. His attitude, which I loved, was: let’s just break the rules wherever we can.
“We put reception in the middle of the agency, so visitors found themselves amongst people working, and had to search for reception. We brought tissue meetings over from the States, where you stuck every reference and half-thought idea on a wall, and worked through them with the client. We had open-plan offices, no departments sitting together. We challenged the income structure of advertising: we moved to a fee-based structure. We challenged BARB, which was the body measuring TV ratings. We did that with a full-page ad in The Sunday Times, which ended up losing us one of our clients.
“We invented media strategy. The whole idea was really to shake things up. The best compliment I would get was people coming up to me and saying: ‘I saw this weird thing on TV last night. It had to come from HHCL.’
“HHCL had a particular structure for approaching a commercial problem. I still think it’s the best way. We would sit down and we’d look at the client’s sector, and we’d try and figure out what the underlying, unconscious rules were governing that marketplace. Every market has them. They exist because, somewhere along the line, someone’s done something that was perceived to have been a success, and when that happens everybody else follows their rules.
“Our process was very methodical: let’s find those rules. That might include how the product is portrayed, or how the consumer is portrayed. And we would map those out, we would tell the clients what those rules were. We would then show the client work that systematically broke different rules and we’d say: ‘You’re going to feel uncomfortable about this, but there’s no point in doing stuff that doesn’t break the rules because the resulting work will be invisible.’
“That’s the thing I have a real horror for in this industry. Ninety-eight percent of it just is invisible. It’s just money pissed down the gutter. Actually, the industry is a criminal waste of money.
Someone told me that the return on investment for a conventional advertisement in the UK is 56p in a pound. So that means for every pound that the client spends they only get 56 pence back. That’s worse than the banking industry. It’s a fucking scandal. And it’s because people don’t have the balls to take risks. If they took risks, then advertising would work.
“We have to do a good job for our client. But if we want to do that, we have to break the rules, which is what interests me. That’s what HHCL was about. It was about a place that just loved breaking rules with intelligence. That’s why we were successful for probably fifteen or sixteen years.
“We had a phrase, ‘professional radicals,’ which probably summed up HHCL’s thinking. That description came along seven years into the company. It wasn’t a bad description.”
HOW TO SELL CHALLENGING WORK.
“Selling work like Tango is hard, but at the same time this is an industry based on niches. The biggest ad agencies only ever have 4% of the market, so you don’t need to appeal to all clients everywhere. You only need to appeal to a minority to sustain a working business. At any one point, there are going to be only between 10% and 20% of clients interested in doing stand-out work. Once we’d defined where we were coming from, it worked very well.
“What happened was: the intermediaries would put together pitches for the client and say, ‘What do you want then?’ And the client would say: ‘We need a network, we need this or that.’ Then the intermediaries would say: ‘Why don’t you talk to HHCL as well, because you don’t know what they are going to come back with.’
“That was great. We were up against multinational networks. We hadn’t qualified to win the business but people wanted to see what we were going to bring to the party. Nothing is easy in advertising, but, still, it was relatively okay for a time because we had a reputation for doing something that we enjoyed, and a significant number of clients were interested in exploring with us.”
Fig. 18: Still from HHCL’s classic Maxell tapes ads.
Fig. 19: A scene from HHCL’s ground- breaking (and sometimes controversial) Tango ads.
WHICH JOBS GAVE HHCL CREATIVE FREEDOM?
“There were three or four projects at various stages. We did some work for Maxell tapes that won the Grand Prix at Cannes fig. 18 – even though we didn’t even enter it because we didn’t believe in awards systems. The production company entered it instead.
“We’d always, just always wanted to be outlaws. That’s what interested us. But then we did Maxell and people went: ‘Oh hang on, these guys can do stuff that wins major awards.’
“Then I think Tango was not just award- winning but phenomenally successful. Working with the client was just a dream. He wanted bold, groundbreaking work. It was a joy. fig. 19
“And then the launch of First Direct was my favourite campaign we ever did. That was completely and utterly radical in every respect. That was a phenomenally successful brand launch.
“We rebranded the AA as ‘The Fourth Emergency Service,’ which Campaign magazine called ‘the smartest bit of thinking that ever came out of an ad agency.’ I don’t think it is, but I happily quote it because it’s a nice thing to have said about you.
“So, we were doing radical work. But I think when we did Tango, First Direct and the AA people said: ‘Hang on, this radical stuff achieves commercial success.’ First Direct is still the only brand that exists in the financial marketplace. There’s no other bank that is a brand, and we did that twenty years ago. It was a phone bank when we launched it. It had no high-street profile to it, but it became a very successful bank.
“The AA went from 8 million to 11 million subscribers on the back of our rebrand. Tango went from selling 1 million cans a day to 1.3 million cans a day, because we did some outstanding advertising for them.”
THE INTERNET ON TV.
“A lot of our work was TV-based but worked more like Internet advertising today. It involved people. That was right at the heart of it, and it was a very Adam Lury thing. Adam really got that brand building meant making communities for clients. People felt more part of that community because it was interactive. We asked people to switch channels during ads. We loved to turn the volume up and down, or we asked people to video our commercials. We put phone lines on the end of our Tango ads. We sold products for Tango. It was all about trying to generate communities around a sense of bold work, work that stood for something.
“Our brands were about making the world a better place, one in which brands were on the side of consumers, where we broke rules and engaged people. That was it in a nutshell.”
AFTER HHCL.
“Mother’s creative director Robert Saville once gave us a big compliment, saying that the people at Mother were only in advertising because of HHCL. I think at one point we were a beacon for mavericks. People realized: ‘Oh hang on, you can actually have fun and break the rules.’
“But we sold out, which was our big mistake. It was doomed after that.
“The climate of advertising now is really unhealthy, but the future of advertising is interesting.
“I’m involved in various product and brand launches at the moment. I don’t want to use conventional advertising, I don’t want to use conventional ad agencies.
“The model that I think works best is an online community site like Netmums. The founder is Siobhan Freegard, who launched Netmums because after she had a baby she felt lonely and she wanted to connect with other mums. She began it without any commercial ambition at all. Today, she’s got a million mums online around the country.
“Any brand manager will tell you that mums are the key decision-makers in virtually every commercial household judgment, from the holiday to the car to getting a new house. Mums make the decisions. They are incredibly powerful and ridiculously overlooked by the male-dominated ad industry.
“Siobhan was telling me about three projects she had done with clients. One was the Sainsbury’s marketing department, which wanted more people to go online. Another was a brand manager for a soft drink company – the drink had been criticized for its content, was it healthy for kids or not? Then there was someone who wanted to launch a green washing powder.
“So all of those product launches had to do with negative perceptions and the clients wanted to change consumer behaviour. Those are exactly the problems that ad agencies are supposed to solve. In all three of those cases, the clients just talked to Siobhan instead. She took them online to discuss these topics, and consumers shared their problems. Together, you co-create an answer to the problem.
“The Sainsbury’s marketing director ended up with a lot of people who were willing to try online shopping, which was exactly what he wanted. He was able to incentivize them in the right way, so he wins.
“The soft drinks guy was able to change perceptions about his drink by explaining exactly what the contents of his drink were, and how they weren’t unhealthy.
“And the guy launching the green washing powder was able to launch his product with consumers, to try it with them. They tried it, they fed back.
“The cost in all three cases was practically nothing. Siobhan wanted to get involved because these are interesting topics for her mums. The mums who liked these projects self-selected and came aboard. They became advocates and co-creators of that brand, and it’s all free.
“It’s also how Albion launched Giffgaff, which is a new phone carrier from O2. Here again, it’s all about subscribers helping each other. Not relying on a parent organization, but a peer-to-peer support system. Building a community. And that’s the future.
“But you’ve got to do it with integrity, and you’ve got to do it in a way that interests people.
“What we’re discussing screws the old advertising model. It doesn’t fit. If I’m being optimistic, I still think that there will be a role for advertising agencies. I’m hoping that the industry will see that what they really need is brave creative thinking.
“At the minute, this isn’t happening. The industry is just full of people who service clients, who are desperate to hang on to clients for the income that they give. They don’t challenge clients and they produce crap. Alex Bogusky said this: ‘It has become a service industry.’
“We need to be a product industry. We need to be an industry that actually makes interesting stuff for our clients. Advertising needs to get its confidence back and say: ‘We can do this.’ We have to make work that enters culture, that tells you a story in an interesting way. I think the industry desperately needs to get back to cherishing and celebrating creativity.”
TEACH US REBELLION.
“I have two kids, twenty-one and eighteen. The twenty-one-year-old is studying to be a vet, and the eighteen-year-old has been offered a place at Oxford. So they’re both very bright.
“But that generation has been tested and examined remorselessly since they were tiny kids. I fucking hate it, but it’s the system. And they’ve had to play that system.
“The education development expert Ken Robinson talks a lot about failure, that you have to fail, and that you have to allow and encourage failure. If you talk to the former creatives at HHCL, they’ll say that this was the greatest freedom I gave them, this sense that they could experiment and even fail.
“We’re stuck in a culture that worships money and worships success, in a really dangerously narrow way. I just hope there’s a backlash. Once something has been in place for a while, the next generation will rebel against it, will go: ‘Fuck that!’
“I hope we will see a rebellion against blind consumerism. I hope we will see a rebellion against this remorseless bottom- line success ethic and choose exactly what Ken Robinson mentions: choose exploration, failure and experimentation. That’s what being alive is about.”