Category Archives: Uncategorized

 

Once upon a time, I had an agency. And on Wednesday mornings, nobody worked there.

 

Instead, teams were sent to muck out the gibbons at London Zoo. Decorate cakes. Clean cars. Tour cancer wards. Shadow bakers. Stand on an opera stage. And the rest.

 

In short, discover.

 

The difference between discovering and being informed. It’s what differentiates an inspiring writer from one who just writes.

 

It’s what makes consumers read editorial and not your copy. The journalist has seen, felt and smelt it. Not just seen it in a blog.

 

It’s what tells your audience that you’ve shared their fear, malady, yearning, joy or fantasy rather than read about it at the briefing.

 

That in mind, my first advice to any writer, embryonic or mature, digital or less so, is not just to read. But do.

 

Go to the opera. Walk Niagara Falls. Keep pigs. Keep bees. Feed the homeless. Meet some mental patients. Ice skate. Look round a prison. Dig graves. Train falcons. Go backstage at the opera. Or Radio City Music Hall. Or the Moulin Rouge. Or a Tom Misch concert. Go up a tower crane. Go down a sewer. Or a coal mine. Risk your life. Date a circus performer. Drive a stock car. Rock climb. March for a cause.

 

Talk to an astronaut. Hug a dying man. Live on a drilling rig for a week. Gatecrash a royal garden party. Join an army squadron. Or the crew of a banana boat. Do Burning Man. Get to know a surgeon and watch a heart transplant. Gut fish on a boat all night in the middle of nowhere. Visit a nunnery. Sing Mozart. Sit cross-legged next to a busker for a day. Learn the tuba. Deep-sea dive. Join a demolition team. Volunteer for a medical experiment. Eat bear. Bribe a security guard to get close to a president. Go to concerts you’ll think you’ll hate. Learn to weld. Or change a clutch. Shadow a news team. Or a mine-clearing team. Get on the news. Break up a brawl in a bar. Eat insects. Get arrested.

Anything but stare at a screen.

 

Only then you can sit in a swivel-chair, stare at a screen and get informed on how to put it all in context.

 

To successfully influence consumer’s lives in any way, a copywriter must live. I repeat live. One step ahead of them.

 

 

Around the corner from Ogilvy Paris in the 8th, there’s an eatery that doesn’t just serve the best food and drink I can afford. Inspiration comes free of charge.

 

Café l’Estel isn’t chic. No linen tablecloths. No candles. No sommelier. The wall-clock, a saver-store circle of twelve spoons with knife-and-fork hands, said four-fifty-five for about five years. Or three creative directors’ reigns, whichever you like. You never quite get your arse behind the table by the breadboard. The 70’s photo of a radio star at the mike, Galouises Bleu in one hand, script in the other and lust in both eyes, looks more jaundiced than the star ever was. A glowing testimony to the absence of change.

 

And it’s Heaven.

 

There’s no air in l’Estel. Only the smell of heaven’s own food, garnished with words and kindness. Here’s where I got asked in for a free lunch when a waiter spotted me on a bike on a furnace of a Sunday afternoon. Where I get twenty-four kisses on two cheeks after a cruel day. Where we all met when I left Ogilvy. Where I got the news that my Danish girlfriend had died and the owner Jean-Marc closed up, poured the first of a few killer cognacs and heard me out, grief and all, till midnight.

 

Everyone I see there also lives there. Rooted to their bar stools, like pines growing up from a forest floor. Maybe their parents went there for a Pastis and a natural birth. A lift attendant from the Hotel Franklin Roosevelt, silk-suited, ink-black, greased-back Presley hair, women on both arms. Accountants with bellies. Plumbers with chips on shoulders. A royally-charm luminous-bow-tie salesman in a real bow tie and oversize checked jacket. A dancer from Crazy Horse, brown muscled arms like fresh baguettes. A steely-eyed Neapolitan builder in his fifties who retired here 30 years ago.

I love them all. Nestle down here for lunch and you’ll get no pretentions, hang-ups or cross-criticism. Just a love of French things. Confit de canard. 1666. The French coast. Husbands and wives, past, present and future. Gainsbourg. Ravel. Paris Saint Germain FC. Social justice.  Europe and why anyone would ever want to leave. One night in Toulouse. Pride. People, life and each other. Nobody talks money. You don’t. You start doing that when you reach Dover.

 

Lunchtime at l’Estel is a nourishing soup of human subjects served in quips, phrases, attitudes and points-of-view. Things that in an agency would take two hours, two trips to the gents and a dozen artificial coffees.

 

This is the only place in the world where you get a filet mignon, gratin dauphinoise, rosé, kisses, handshakes that mean something, a freshly-restored faith in humanity and five fresh perspectives for 23 euros.

 

So, next time I pass by in an evening, I’m going to drop Jean-Marc a couple of hundred euros. Thanks, everyone, for being you. Drinks for all, on me, now please.

 

For what I get out of it, it’s the least I can do.

 

 

But before, another thank you.

Thank you, George.

Today, copy king George Tannenbaum’s brilliantly illustrious blog ad aged talked about diversity.

Or rather, the lack of it.

Like George, I love diversity. It’s why I don’t belong to any particular social set. I hate cliques. My friends range from craftsmen to homeless folk to doctors to MPs to carers to evangelists and I adore them all. I believe nobody should be excluded on grounds of anything. We all have the same DNA, so we are all one and all capable.

And today, we should all be acting as one. More than ever. The future of the human race demands it.

So, somebody tell me this. Why are so many excluded on grounds of experience? Not the lack of it. The richness of it. Not just a richness of professional experience, but life itself.

I don’t get it. Because in a business like ours, real-life experiences are the real seeds of ideas. The richer your past life, the richer your mental bank of images, phrases, sights, smells, human traits, stupid stuff. Stuff you actually have to search for online, use and forget. Come across it for real and it sticks around till the right brief can make use of it.

So, I’m very glad I did other things before becoming a copywriter and still do other things other than copywriting. It’s an insurance policy against going stale. It’s protected me so far, I’ve made plenty of claims, and I’m busy.

Advertising is my third career. I left school at 16 with five poor o-levels and first learned to build organs. Like any apprentice I started with tea-making, floor-sweeping, daily bollockings and an initiation ritual of having a pint of animal glue poured down my y-fronts.  But I ended up tuning the organ in St. Paul’s for Prince Charles’s wedding, winning the industry’s only national award, becoming a foreman and eventually fleeing to Italy.

Italy was a joy. The factory was in a mini-heaven fringing the Italian Alps, alongside a restaurant run by an old lady who collected stuffed lambs. Work took me to Naples, Cassino, Rome, Venice and Amalfi, where I learned to foxtrot. I ate in silence with the monks of Montecassino. I sang plainchant and bought a pig.

They egged me to stay. I was too young to settle. Back in London, I met up with an old mate who put on firework shows for horsey nouveau-riche weddings and tagged along with him.

The shows were fun but spectacularly unimaginative, so I bought his business. Over six years, Fox Fireworks worked for Microsoft, Budweiser, BMW, Ogilvy (the move to the wharf), Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Queen, Sir Terence Conran and Prince Charles. We worked in Dubai, Bahrain, the West Indies, Ankara, Lagos and Seoul and designed the shows for Disneyland Paris.

Foreign jobs were a challenge. Fireworks had to go by sea, though our shippers did screw up once and put half a ton of large-calibre star shells on a tourist plane to St. Lucia. And then our Dubai agent shafted us for £35,000.

A week later came a nasty bang. At Eton College, a shell caught a freak air current, hit the crowd and three Dutch models left with third-degree burns. It’s why a firework company’s biggest expense is insurance. But I could hardly live with it. I sold up.

Where now? Thinking back, the bit I’d enjoyed most about the fireworks business was designing the shows and wowing people. Advertising, I thought, might be like that.

I wrote to fifty creative directors and three got back. Axel Chaldicott told me to buy a pad and pens and write some ads. Simon Kershaw said I was nuts but so was he. And Patrick Collister sent a copy test. I described a stapler, invented a barcode-reader for nut allergy sufferers and tried to write an ad for a cattery.

Patrick gave me a month’s try and a daily bollocking, pairing me up with a Scottish lad whose vocabulary extended to “uh”, “aye” and “och”. I was a rag-arsed apprentice again. But because I was so clueless, many a soul took heart and showed me the way. That was Ogilvy. And two years later came my first award. In New York, for an ad for vaccines.

Ogilvy gave me five years. Then came a stretch at BBH under Will Awdry, thankfully as merciless a man as Collister. I freelanced, was CD of a small place that went belly-up and started my own agency, called just Andrew Jolliffe. It grew 700% in two years.

But alas, cancer stopped it all. The thing was like a rugby ball. It had obviously grown faster than my agency. I sold up, and mercifully in the same week, Ogilvy rang.

Days after, I was a group head on American Express under the genteel Colin Nimick. But a year later left for Paris, city of tradition, romance, cheese, curiosity and bureaucracy, for three weeks at Ogilvy to freelance on IBM.

Eleven years later I was still there. I worked on a thousand things, helped win almost as many pitches and, above all, met as many people, some of whom I’ll love forever.

I won Lions and other things there, too. My best prize, though, is a BAFTA for a short film made with the animator Darren Price. BAFTAs are honours.

Finally freelance, I’m just as much a chameleon. I conceive and execute. Write major brand strategies. Set tones of voice. Write pitch manifestos that win. Plan. Oversee. Craft. Lecture Students. Help young teams. Buy them champagne when they’ve won and I’ve helped.

And above all, I’m a writer. A writer-writer. A wordsmith. In an age where concepts and data use cast shadows over craft, it’s a reason to be proud.

Right, some wisdom for newcomers. First, do stuff. I’ve written classical music, been in TV cookery shows, helped MPs get to power, been a film extra, cooked for lords, played in orchestras, sung under Leonard Bernstein and André Previn, kept bees, studied glassblowing, reviewed bars for Tatler, ballroom danced, learnt the cello, eloped with an actress and met the Queen Mother. I feed Paris’s homeless, support new musicians and sing at the Sorbonne. Experiences turn into ideas that can go down on paper straight from the head.

Never underestimate craft. Craft makes ideas live. A brilliant concept is dull without it. Craft says that brands care. Polish with passion till your eyes glaze over. Let no-one say “that’ll do” before you do.

Don’t arse-lick, suck up to your superiors, screw the boss or do politics to get ahead. That all stinks. You’ll get found out. Just be great.

Speak what you think. Today, people say something’s great because their colleagues do. If it’s brilliant, say so. When it’s crap. Say it’s crap. Make people wince. Nobody will fire you.

Let life take you places. I’ve worked in deserts, cathedrals, temples, ice rinks, glaciers, coral reefs, paddy fields, palaces and the DMZ between the two Koreas as well as agencies. I’ve had a Kalashnikov stuck in my back. You’ve got to do these things.

So, here’s a message to the majority of agencies the world over. I’m not unique. I’m just a jobbing copywriter who happens to have lived. All creatives have. Very probably much, much more than me. They are your savings accounts of inspiration, where life itself has deposited experience that’s gained interest over time. What can be more precious?

In the name of true diversity, never discriminate. Especially against an asset.

Thank you, George.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My career path has been stratospheric. At the tender age of ten, I was spotted by a talent scout. At eleven, I had a recording contract with EMI. At thirteen, I had three gold discs, four BAFTAS and a Golden Globe. At fifteen, I launched two global fashion labels and wrote a bestseller, now a major feature film and translated into forty-eight and a half languages. I’m a regular guest on NBC, the BBC and Channel Plus, up for a knighthood and tipped for a Legion d’ Honneur. Just like that.

 

Not really. I am but a humble copywriter, though I did get a BAFTA aged forty-five. But that’s irrelevant. Here’s why I wrote the paragraph. Look at a plethora of posts, and you’d believe that everyone else on Earth has rocketed to immortal stardom. Even advertising people. The worldwide senior global somethings.

 

Don’t mistake me. I’m not driven by envy and I love success stories. I love the way Richard Branson drove a rusty old van full of old vinyl LPs and went bust a few times along the way. I love how Bob Geldof worked in a pea canning factory. And started a strike, and rotted a few tons of peas. I love how the writer of “Alien” slept on his cohort’s sofa for a year. I love how a creative director I know lived under his desk for two years, sustained by stale boardroom sandwiches, lemonade and a kindly cleaner.

 

What I hate is seeing success stories that forget to mention two things. Hardship and hard work.

 

Most populist meteoric career stories never talk about the months sealed in bedrooms with a notepad and an imagination for company. The weeks of practice. The letters saying no from the yes men. The unwashed bedclothes. The missed meals, the no meals at all and the even less cash. The bins full of reject lyrics. The cynical parents wanting an accountant or an actuary.

 

It’s not a new phenomenon. Contrary to the film “Amadeus”, young Mozart didn’t spend his time getting hammered and bedding women. Most nights, he probably never went to bed. He was at the keyboard.

 

Not to mention the first-time failures. It’s a fact. Most of the world’s most glittering entrepreneurs have first gone down the tubes. Not just once.

 

Right, here’s a thing. Instant-rise-to-fame stories make millions believe they haven’t got it in them. Gossip-mag make-believe roads to success only discourage others from taking real ones.

 

If more stories told the bitter truth, more would try.

 

More would try, fail, try again and win.

 

More would know they can.

 

More would encourage.

 

Here’s to the grim and bitter truth. May it unlock the untapped talents of millions. Here’s to every one of them.

 

 

Every Monday night in winter, I stand outside in the cold. Not waiting for a train, or a lover, or for a dare. No. It’s because three hundred others need me to.

 

La Soupe, the charitable kitchen at Paris’s Eglise St. Eustache, feeds that number every night between December and March. I’m honoured to be one of its volunteers. I am neither Christian nor Catholic. Something much stronger draws me here.

 

As the great bell strikes 6, we’re hard at it behind the cast-iron west gates, shielded from curiosity by sheets of rain-washed chipboard, bathed in a miasma of steam, integrity and the smell of food. Here, we all have a task. Stirring industrial-scale pans of boiling pasta. Hand-carving two thousand croutons from yesterday’s baguettes. Filling 300 goody-bags with clementines, chocolate and tins of sardines. Spreading pâté, or just putting sugar in 300 plastic coffee-cups. Crucial nonetheless.

 

Outside, the darkness sets in and the queue grows. Some of us, in blue gilets and thick scarves, join it with water jugs, trays of pâté, brie and three hundred bonsoirs. Three hundred come back. Here, giving and gratitude are one. Behind us, the Les Halles shopping complex, the unofficial blue-glass checkpoint between having and needing, remind us that, more often than not, we are sadly two.

 

The bell strikes 7. Gates screech apart, the friction of steel on stone, revealing a table, a Mount Etna of scalding soup and an avalanche of bread. Like soldiers we take up our stations, at the table, the ladle, the queue, serving, shaking hands, meeting eyes, still warm in the chill. Soup in hand, it’s down to the concourse for croutons, salt, pepper. The wind often gets the salt ahead of the soup, but anecdotes and thanks travel even faster.

 

Being in the front-line of something like this is the most potent reminder that collective efforts bear bigger fruit. Whether we want to make a great ad, build a mean brand strategy, tackle social divides or save ourselves from extinction, we must be more than online groups.

 

We have to roll up our sleeves, and act like real ones.

 

 

Starting in 2019, I will be offering some of my time to new agency start-ups, at half my normal rate.

 

It makes a load of sense.

 

To begin, start-ups are freelancers’ future big clients. The future of this game we all love is largely in their hands.

 

Starting up is hard. Bastard hard. In France, social charges hit you before clients do. Renting workspace is like bribing a king. Hiring talent? Like buying the crown jewels.

 

All the reason to offer start-ups my quarter-century of experience, without them having to work as long to buy it.

 

So, here’s the deal.

 

Every month, I’ll offer three days of my time, at half my usual rate, to an agency of two years or younger.

 

First come, first served. If I’m free and if I feel I can genuinely make a difference to your project, my time is yours. If not, good luck next time. Simple.

 

Looking forward to it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I loved David Ogilvy. I met him only once, but he might have shown me the way more than my father or other halves.  His mottos steer my days. “Committees can criticize, but they cannot create” reminds me that my job is harder than that of my critics. They know that. There again, “Where people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good work” is my daily prompt to go somewhere fun to write. If I’m not in an agency, I’ll use my girlfriend’s balcony with its birdsong, fat cat, blueberry smoothies  and 24-hour David Bowie.  Or a co-working space among like minds. Almost never at home.

 

The most pertinent of all, though, is “Tolerate Genius”. Not just because I think writers should misbehave. Of course, they should. Creatives are at their best when they’re themselves. At Ogilvy, I sang in corridors, bought the CD’s unwearable shirts and threw profiteroles in meetings. When I needed a new computer, I poured coffee in my old one.

 

But Ogilvy’s sentiment runs deeper. Original brains push aside other things in order to flourish. Armed with influences from the most unlikely places, they process them with a one-stop, almost autistic, single-mindedness, often at the expense of so-called normality. Social lives. Daily routines. Friendships. Appearances. Even hygiene. Creating occupies a disproportionate amount of mind-space compared to, say, walking, eating, washing or politely chatting.

Creative abnormality has been with us since the dawn of time. James Joyce wrote in blue pencil lying face-down in bed. Tennyson kept a bear in his room at Cambridge. Steinbeck only bought round pencils: he held hexagonal ones so tightly, his hands were covered in warts. Oscar Wilde took lobsters for walks. Victor Hugo locked away his clothes. He had to write, not wander off. The electrical pioneer Tesla only rented rooms with numbers divisible by three, while Prince has been interviewed with his head in a bag. The list is infinite.

 

All successful. All original. All famous. None of them stereotypical, but all just themselves. And all proof that, providing you do no harm, to display your original self, warts and all, is to effectively open the door to your originality. Keep it under lock and key, and you do the same to your best work.

 

In short, it’s better to be great at just one thing than grey at everything.

 

Incredibly, some agencies don’t get that. Yes, we should all turn up on time. Be nice. Be polite. Listen. Empathise. Sympathise. Contribute. Encourage. Be ladies or gents. Of course. That’s primeval, human respect. But in the last few years, I’ve been berated for  politely disagreeing. Slapped for putting my hand up. Sworn at for writing lines without the word “great”. Hissed at for singing in a corridor. Rapped for bringing my birthday cake to a review and getting cream on the CD’s special edition 70’s Noguchi pressed glass coffee table.

 

Come on.

 

Here’s a personal plea. In fact, one from all dedicated copywriters. To take full advantage of what we can offer you, please, please take us as we are.

 

As for me, I argue. I press my point. I never just say yes. I look like a long skinny line. In fact, if I stood next to a pillar, you’d think I was one. I escape from meetings without warning and come back with ice-creams for all. I stare at walls. I eat garlic in public. I call people My Dear, Mucker and You Old Sod, even if they aren’t. I cry. My hair looks like a haystack. Yes, I sing in corridors. Mozart, Berlioz, Brian Eno. I play the cello for my pleasure. Just mine. My dress sense doesn’t make sense. My driving is a form of terrorism. But at least I can write.

 

So please, next time any new writer turns up at your agency with a nervous tick, or a twitchy eye, or a blue moustache, or a cat on a leash, in fuchsia flares, a sheepskin waistcoat and high heels, smelling of lavender, don’t take cover. Rub your hands. They’re going to be good.

 

Or as David Ogilvy would say, very, very, very good.

 

 

 

 

I’ve lived for 57 years, but copywritten for just 25. I’m a youngster. I can’t see any age gaps big enough to fall down. I’m still learning and still admit it. But that’s fine. I’ve just realised it’s OK not to know everything.  I sit up in bed and wonder what 2060 will bring me. I can barely wait. I don’t yet have a career. Just a job I reinvent every day. Every brief is my first. I devour it like a werewolf and hug it till sunrise. My mentors are still legends, colleagues, students, even cleaners. Age immaterial. Immortality is my middle name, and criticism my daily bread. Rather than open my stupid mouth, I listen. Most of my friends are still looking for Mr. or Mrs. Perfect. I say “Please, may I have…?” and “Thank you for having me.” My dad critiques my haircuts, dress sense, common sense, choice of girl and, yes, I call him dad. I giggle. I eat gummy bears. My four jokes all have words of four letters. To me, the word “veteran” simply means polite and helpful. I’m still an undergraduate at the renowned University of Life. Its students are perpetual. No wonder. Before I write, I doodle. Matchstick men, robots, sci-fi flowers, two-headed fish, apparitions, stuff. I eat cookies at midnight. I play the cello with folk a quarter my height and with four times the talent. I wear fancy dress. At least, that’s what my sister calls it. I’m up for a trip to Mars. But this world will be forever my oyster, my playground and my mine of new ways to write for you. Forever yours, Andrew.

 

I am a grown man. Yet sometimes I still cry.

 

Not that I’m jilted or bereaved. Just overwhelmed. By friendship. Success. Relief. A re-found companion. Colour. A delicious chord of minor thirds and flat sevenths. A gesture, scene, present, grin, flash of news. An I Love You. A win.

 

And relieved, too. That my catalogue of emotions is still there, on the table, open at any page and ready-to-read.

 

That joy, delight, trust, tenderness, anticipation, expectancy, surprise, disgust, fear, fury, anguish, lust, anxiety, vigilance, panic, passion, disappointment, unbridled cheer, intimacy, aggression, indifference, are there for the asking.

 

A veritable buffet. Help yourselves.

 

File away my feelings, and I’d let down everyone I write for. I wouldn’t expect to get paid.

 

After all, super-brands have emotional states as deep as our own. Ones that comprehend, challenge, reinforce, comfort and empathise with those of their followers.

 

Yet others wallow in a vacuum. Emotionless as puffballs. As neutral as a craniotomy or the lift music in a Holiday Inn.

 

Lesser brands love vacuums. Cotton-wool safe-states that don’t scare off what’s left of market shares. Aware that their targets really do laugh, rejoice, grieve, stare in awe, fantasise, worship, fall in love, fret, worry and sympathise as well as staring like guppies at Twitter feeds. But too terrified to go there.

 

Pity. Touch a target’s emotions with one of yours, and you’re theirs. Like wooing the girl of your dreams. Gorgeous.

 

So, when working with an emotional brand, love it like your sister.  De-clutter, find the mood. From here on, it’s a personal thing.

 

Here’s one. I once wrote some labels for a tiny tea-producer. The big thought (even micro-brands must have one) was Tea and Philosophy. To her, the two went hand-in-hand. They do.

 

Peace Tea was my brief. A cup, a sit-down and a minute of respite from the ringtones, brats, car horns, naggers, presidential blunders, pop-ups and pests of the everyday.

 

But to evoke peace, I first had to find it myself. That month I was fielding briefs, churning 200 headlines a day and fending off insanity with industrial Bordeaux at one AM.

 

I faked a sick day and ambled the park. Willows belly-danced to the band of the birds. Statues looked at me open-eyed, saying nothing. An oak leaf kissed me on the nose. No phone, no prams. But there I was. At five PM I had a lemon sorbet, large cone, headed home and wrote.

A day in peace, and the tea and I could say the same thing. Peace.

 

Ok, a quick note for brands. Just own an emotion. It needn’t be off-the-shelf cheery-positivity. There’s everything from vigilance to rebellious anger. Consumers can cry and love you.

 

And one for copywriters. Own that emotion, too. If your brands don’t own one, suggest one. There are millions in you. Why be a puffball rather than who you are? A human being.