In which things get serious.

Alarum

(Sudden Shame Part 1)

The alarm went off at The Tower of London while I was gawping at the Crown Jewels with my mum and dad. Forget the Beefeaters, they’re just for show. Proper soldiers in camouflage fatigues appeared out of nowhere. They had machine guns and they had their game faces on. They looked like my Action Man.

It was a long time ago. I don’t recall the details. But I have a vivid, visceral memory of the sudden transition from one sense of awe to another. One moment pinching myself that this was the actual Queen’s crown. The next moment feeling like an extra in a special forces exercise.

But it was a false alarm. Ten or eleven year-old me was disappointed (afterwards) that things didn’t escalate into a Commando war comic scenario. A tourist had bumped into one of the display cases. It’s against the rules to get that close, so I expect they got a fine old bollocking in some stark sideroom. I expect they were made to feel shamed, sheepish, and somewhat shitty. It would have been a bona fide right Royal bollocking, come to think of it. There’s no such thing as a drill in The Tower.

Write-off

(Sudden Shame part 2)

About a decade after the Tower incident, it was my turn to feel shamed and sheepish. It was my turn to get a fine old bollocking.

I was a junior account manager on the Dunlop Slazenger International account (client code DSIL). We made ads for tennis racquets, squash racquets, golf clubs, and golf balls, which ran in specialist magazines in northern Europe and Scandinavia.

Sometimes they’d run a one-off insertion in a publication that wasn’t on the main media schedule, and we’d supply an ad-kit to the country in question. This was long before digital turned everything on its head. An ad-kit was a physical thing, consisting of a “mechanical” (camera-ready artwork for the layout and copy) and a set of four-colour film separations to reproduce the photographic visual. We’d a agreed a standard charge of £330 per ad kit with DSIL, a sum that is seared into my memory.

I got myself into trouble through well-intentioned naivety.

Seeing that a routine ad-kit request was coming up, I thought why not get ahead of the game? Proactivity is encouraged, right? So I ordered the ad-kit ahead of the formal client request. All part of the service, I thought. You’re welcome.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I’d have got away with this. But this time they asked for a change to the copy. Or they decided to run a different ad at the last minute. It wasn’t routine. Either way I’d committed £330 on their behalf on an ad-kit that was wrong. The agency had to write it off.

Just like the Crown Jewels episode, what I remember most is the sudden and severe change in mood.

One moment thinking I was getting the hang of this; look at me, an engineering graduate from Wigan working at the sexiest agency in London. The next I was hauled in for an inquisition at the hands of senior folk in finance, production, and account management. Bad cop, bad cop, bad cop. Big deal, big deal, big deal.

I was just lucky that there was no such thing as a stark sideroom at BBH.

It was horrible but necessary. I needed to learn that you don’t play fast and loose with money. And the hard way is the best way for this type of lesson; like a minor shunt in your twenties makes you a more cautious and more aware driver.

There’s no such thing as “only £330”, even in a multi-million Pound business. Write-offs are deadly serious, no matter the sum. You can expedite on behalf of your client, but don’t expose the agency in the process.

No fat, no flavour

I can’t overstate the influence of my BBH years. It was my kindergarten and my university. I remember my teachers fondly. The curriculum was Creativity, Culture, and Commerce. The character of any agency is determined by how it prioritises and balances these three things.

At BBH this meant that there was no contradiction between reading me the riot act for a £330 write-off and not batting an eyelid at a £330 lunch. One was reckless waste. The other was necessary extravagance, as long as it helped to make the work better or helped the work get made.

I remember Nigel Bogle saying that he looked forward to making BBH’s finance director a millionaire when they eventually sold the agency. Such was the value he placed on a finance department that understood and indulged the advertising business, at the same time as being bold with pricing and ruthless about margin.

An early edition of this newsletter was titled “No fat, no flavour”. It’s about what happens to agencies when they start treating necessary extravagance as reckless waste. It’s not as sudden as a Crown Jewels incident. But it doesn’t end well.

If things get real, promise to take me somewhere else

By the time fear takes me over, will we still be rolling and feeling oblivion?

Turin Brakes, Feeling Oblivion