User:Alastair.McVeigh

McCann London first opened its doors in London in 1927, when an overseas network was required to service the expanding Esso business.

The first London address was at 49 Old Bond Street, on the corner of Piccadilly, above what is now Watches of Switzerland. The intervening years are lost to memory, but in the post WWII era the company was to be found nearer to the heart of the media in Fetter Lane, off Fleet Street.

By then, the acquisition of the Coca-Cola business from US and Nestle from Europe was driving European network expansion well beyond the footprint even of Esso, so at some point, the London agency had become a regional HQ.

Late 1960s expansion with the arrival of clients like Unilever led to the need for more space and in 1968 the company took a lease on the building that is now Ove Arup in Howland Street, an area that was becoming a hotbed of Ad agencies.

The need for more space came from success based on both creativity and aggressive local new business pursuit. Ronnie Kirkwood, already a big name in adland, had been brought in as Creative Director and Phil Geier, later to become Chairman of IPG (Inter Public Group), was in the engine room. Phil Geier was something new to the genteel world of London ad agency leadership; more Marine Corps than Oxbridge. It was said that when the IRA exploded a bomb in the Post Office Tower above the agency in 1971, shortly after he had gone back to New York, Phil called to ask if any agency people had been injured. When told no, it was Sunday, he is supposed to have asked “Well where in hell were they all?”

Finally the Copywriter and part-time speech writer for Edward Heath, Barry Day, became Creative Director and one day in 1970 wrote the line that was to become the “I’m worth it” or “Priceless” of its day: “Martini. The right one.” But it was not just the piercing insight that young women drinking socially for the first time had no idea what it was cool to order, nor that young trendy audiences could be sold what was by then, to put it politely, a very traditional and declining aperitif, that attracted the attention of Adland, but that Barry was credited with insisting on spending 50% of the entire budget on production.

The norm in those days of commission was that 15% went to the agency and another 15% went on production, with the remaining 70% for media. But Barry wanted to create a whole world for consumers to buy into. So hot air balloons drifted over an Alpine terrace whilst the beautiful ones sipped their Martini Rossos and swamp buggies careered through the everglades to bring a touch of adventure to mundane and depressed ‘70s lives.

There had simply never been anything like it before. Commercials to that time were little 30” plays telling a story about how Brand X solved someone’s problem, or product demonstrations with repetition of the USP until even the cat could recite it. It was the opening of a new era and in a few years people came to refer to a genre of TV advertising that they called the “McCann quick cuts, slice of life” commercial.

It was also a unique era in the history of McCann in being possibly the only time when the key figures were better known than the agency itself. They were heady days, but fragile ones too and if it couldn’t last forever, at least it still had a very long way to run....

The creative success continued with another McCann innovation in the area of branding. During the fuel crisis of 1977 the cartoon tiger for Esso had run his course and Esso needed to show a responsible new attitude, so the “live tiger” was born. Quickly becoming the nation’s favourite TV campaign, the tiger became the brand symbol of the era and he was soon joined by the Lloyds Bank Black Horse, who we created as a symbol of the new freedom of banking. The Black Horse guides that we created still exist to this day and the horse remains a key branding device. The Tetley Tea Folk with their folk dances arrived and clients queued up for their own transformational brand idea.

The McCann of the day was creative, but not preciously so. It had absorbed much of the “get things done first and argue about them afterwards” attitude that Phil Geier had instilled and which typified the agency as a whole. Frugality was also something that set McCann apart. In the back of the van that came round from Fetter Lane, had been all the worn and torn old black and brown carpets, and late in the decade they were still being tripped over in Howland St. McCann earned the nickname “The Workhouse” and it was something clients appreciated at the time. Ostentatious they were not. An industry joke at the time was about the different replies that agencies gave to the client’s question “What time is it?” Whilst many gave flowery or abstruse replies, the McCann response was “What time would you like it to be, sir?”

If anyone thinks that today’s challenge is to show that we “get” digital, then the challenge as the 1970s closed was to show that we could communicate with newly affluent street-smart consumers that didn’t read long copy and rejected the world of Martini in favour of that of the Sex Pistols.