In which doggedness is next to did-it-ness.

The dogged stories of one documentary and two TV commercials.

Varoufakis was a wanted man

In May 2019 I helped to make a documentary in Athens. We were there for a week in the run-up to the European Parliament elections. The Ancient Athenians were the original practitioners of true democracy (people power), and our aim was to contrast their radical ideals with the circus of modern politics. I got an Exec Producer credit on the film, but I was a dogsbody on the shoot.

On election night, Yanis Varoufakis gave one exclusive film interview and he gave it to us. He stepped out of the raucous drinks reception at his party’s headquarters to talk to us about the state of modern democracy. Meanwhile, the scrum of pissed-off Greek television crews across the street was giving us the evil eye. They didn’t know who we were, but they knew they’d been scooped.

Varoufakis is most famous for his time as the Finance Minister of Greece, and his failed stand-off with the EU over draconian austerity measures (“fiscal waterboarding” as he described it). On this election night, he was busy representing his independent party, MeRA 25. Getting him to talk to us as the results came in was a coup.

The documentary would have worked just fine without Varoufakis, but his outspoken eloquence added “seasoning”. We knew that his profile and charisma would boost our credibility when the time came to promote the film.

We didn’t need the interview but we wanted it badly.

Here’s a clip from the interview. What he says is even more pertinent today than it was seven years ago:

Stalking Yanis

We got the interview because my film-making partner in crime (Patrick) is a journalist who knows how to work a source. And he worked this source for five days, using a combination of charm, an interesting angle, and a whole lot of dogged persistence.

It meant that instead of enjoying a beer at the end of our first day of shooting, we rocked up to Santaroza Square for a MeRA25 rally at which Varoufakis was speaking. We shot some perfunctory B-roll footage, but we were mainly there to be seen by Varoufakis and his team, and to give ourselves a chance of getting lucky.

Patrick gets lucky by putting himself about. I once mentioned to him the Geordie expression, “shy bairns get nowt,” and he immediately adopted it as his mantra. At the rally he studied the Varoufakis team, identifying the inner circle and the hangers-on. Then he engineered a series of conversations, working his way up the food chain until he was introduced to Varoufakis’s lieutenant in Greece: the gatekeeper.

Patrick got the gatekeeper’s attention by explaining our interest in first-principles democracy, a subject close to Varoufakis’s heart, and one that he likes to talk about. Patrick pitched an interview with us as a welcome relief from the superficial political questions Varoufakis would be fielding the rest of the time. It worked. It was enough for Patrick to get the gatekeeper’s number. This was crucial. From that moment we could be proactive stalkers rather than being on the wrong end of a don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you power imbalance.

So, while we filmed grassroots democratic movements in various locations around the city, Patrick was continually charming and chivvying the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper was sympathetic but kept playing down our chances of an interview. Gatekeeper, yes. Controller, no.

Nothing was certain, right up until the last minute. Along with the Greek TV crews, we waited on the street outside MeRA25 HQ, on full alert and ready to shoot at a moment’s notice. It was tantalising. We could see Varoufakis doing small-talk with the fizz-sipping politicos inside. And we tried to will him into taking a break from the glad-handing to speak to us.

Eventually the telepathy paid off and we were beckoned across the street by the gatekeeper. Varoufakis came out, shook hands with Patrick, invited his first question, and snapped into his trademark style of affable authority.

Shy bairns get nowt. Dogged bairns get interviews.

Doggedness gets the work out

Doggedness is a superpower for journalists. The Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Robert Caro, writes about doggedness repeatedly in his book, Working, which I reviewed in a previous post. The blurb for the book talks about the “staggering lengths” he goes to in his research.

Doggedness is also an underrated superpower for ad agencies. John Bartle (the first B in BBH) once said to me that the greatest value of ad agencies isn’t creativity, it’s their willingness and ability to move mountains to get creativity out into the world, to get stuff made. Saatchi & Saatchi had this idea literally set in stone in their doorstep:

Saatchi’s schtick was Nothing is Impossible. BBH was about fame, but it had that Saatchi attitude. The creative department’s job was to have ideas that made brands famous. It was the job of everyone else to get those ideas made. And it’s the nature of boundary-pushing, fame-making ideas that they meet a lot of resistance. They don’t happen without doggedness.

Dogged bairns get work made.

Doggedness doesn’t sell

As a whippersnapper ad agency account manager I was told that my job was to sell the work. I soon decided that this is bullshit. If you do your job right, you shouldn’t meet with resistance from your client. You make damn sure that you see eye to eye on brand strategy and the creative brief. You make double-damn sure that there’s a shared vision for the kind of work that will do the needful for their brand.

Creating this kind of conducive environment is easier said than done - and it’s why they used to pay me the biggish bucks - but you only have to “sell” the work if something has gone awry in the process. The right work should sell itself.

Doggedness empathises.

Doggedness creates elegant, win-win outcomes.

Doggedness is proactive and does the groundwork.

Neither ceasing nor desisting

Resistance can come from within. I led The Leith Agency team that pitched for the Beat 106 account. Beat 106 was a new FM radio station, dedicated to dance and indie music, that launched on the back of airwave deregulation.

The pitch was a slog. We went through round after round of presentations; none of the competing agencies quite cracking it for the client. In the end it was down to us and a tiny, previously unheard-of, design agency in Glasgow.

By this time, the Leith Agency board had had enough. We were wasting our time in their view. The resource was needed elsewhere. Slugging it out with an unknown agency was beneath our dignity.

I wasn’t exactly told to cease and desist, but it was made clear that to proceed would be against the better judgement of the board. Hint hint.

We carried on. We carried on because the client was pushing us to go further rather than trying to hold us back. The client believed that their brand deserved better than we’d shown them, and they were backing us to deliver. They were as dogged as us in their pursuit of great work.

So we carried on, we cracked it, and we won. The client was right. We could do better. The campaign won both creative and effectiveness Grands Prix in Scotland, after which everyone wanted their name on it.

Doggedness doesn’t take the hint.

“The cartoon route went down badly”

Watching a brilliant idea go into pre-testing research is like your child’s first day at school. You hope they’ll find friends. You pray that they won’t get bullied and rejected. Sadly it’s kids who stand out in some way who get targeted for nastiness. The same goes for ideas.

The Pintlings script for Tennent’s Lager stood out. The script was based on the saying, “I could murder a pint,” and it was set in a world of walking, talking pints who were being terrorised by a human serial killer. We knew it would be a brilliant film. We had aardman lined up to animate it. They were on board because they knew it would be brilliant too. We “just” needed a bunch of punters in focus groups to agree with us, for them to see what we could see.

Back then, an ad script was presented in focus groups as a hand-drawn storyboard. This was a worry because hand-drawn pints of beer with arms, legs, and mouths look like cartoon characters. And cartoons have a hard time in research. They get dismissed as childish.

So we went overboard in briefing the researcher that THIS WOULD NOT BE A CARTOON.

We talked them through aardman’s treatment. THIS WOULD NOT BE A CARTOON.

It didn’t work. I’ll never forget being told in the debrief that “the cartoon route went down badly.”

We once had to take someone off the Tennents account for facepalming in a meeting. I had no sympathy with them at the time, but I understood the impulse in this moment. We watched, hapless and helpless, as belief in the script visibly drained from a thoroughly spooked client.

Clients pre-test ads to avoid costly mistakes, which is fair enough. They also pre-test ads to justify and, if necessary, defend a decision to go ahead. Given how corporate culture loves a scapegoat, this is also fair enough. So it’s a rare client who’ll back their creative judgement against a negative pre-testing research result. Taking a flyer is career management anti-matter.

So, on this occasion, we either had to let the script go, or get all dogged behind an idea that, according to the research, was an indefensible costly mistake waiting to happen.

We went back a long way with this client. We’d made a few forgettable ads, for sure, but no disasters. And together, in a proper partnership, we’d enjoyed a long streak of creative and commercial home-runs.

The short story is that we cashed that track record in. We treated the accumulated trust like a mountain of casino chips and made a big show of putting them all on this script. We went all in.

We’d never done this before and it would have appeared out of character to our client. We weren’t confrontational people but this probably felt like a confrontation. It put the client in a tight spot for sure. They had to explicitly choose who to trust: their long-standing agency or a piece of research. It probably felt unfair. But for us to do any less would have been unfair on the script, the brand, and the agency. This wasn’t creative preciousness on our part. We knew we were on the cusp of something special. And we weren’t selling the work. Our client loved the script going into research. We were selling confidence and staking our reputations to do so.

To the client’s credit, they went with us. When the ad launched, the founder of a rival agency said that it was the most important piece of advertising to ever come out of Scotland.

Doggedness goes out on a limb when the work is worth it.

It’s not a cartoon:

Doggedness rocks the boat

Talking of cartoons, I once saw a newspaper cartoon that I wish I’d cut out and kept. There were three panels with an identical scene in each: a bald-headed man in suit, tie, and glasses, sitting behind a tidy desk. In the first panel the man is just sitting there, staring straight ahead. In the second panel a lightbulb appears above his head. In the third panel the lightbulb is replaced by a thought cloud with the words, “Nah, why rock the boat?” The man’s impassive expression never changes.

The most effective agency people are boat-rockers by nature, and the boat only gets rocked if boat-rocking work gets made and published into the world. That seldom happens without doggedness.

The difference between an artist and someone who dreams of being an artist is finished work.

Kae Tempest, On Connection

Doggedness is finished work.

Doggedness is next to did-it-ness.

Postscript: a political aside

I’m drafting this post the day after local elections in England, and national elections in Wales and Scotland. However you choose to interpret the results, it’s clear that the UK is now a multi-party state. The Conservative/Labour duopoly that props up (and is propped up by) the first-past-the-post electoral system has been fracked by high-pressure opposition from the Left and the Right, and by spineless stupidity in the Centre. Again, Varoufakis was on the money seven years ago when he told us that we don’t have democracy, we have “oligarchy with elections”. The man gives good quote. He’s worth being dogged for.