5 Minutes With… Neil Dawson
On BETC London's roof terrace: L-R: BETC London Head of Brand, Grace Wright; LBB's Laura Swinton; BETC London ECD Neil Dawson
He’s the man behind one of the most awarded commercials in advertising history. He turned Philips from the awkward nerd of electronics to a creative contender, and he won two Cannes Grand Prix in the process. With such an impressive CV, it’s hardly surprising that when BETC Paris Founder and Chairman, Rémi Babinet decidedto set up in London he turned to ECD Neil Dawson. For the past two years Dawson has being doing his bit for Anglo-French relations. As BETC London goes from strength to strength, LBB’s Laura Swinton caught up with him to discuss the reincarnation of the Diet Coke Hunk, problems surrounding the arts in education and she discovers who the mysterious ‘Betsy’ is…
LBB> BETC London has just celebrated its 2nd birthday – how has the agency evolved since you launched?
ND>That’s a big question because it feels like in the last two years we’ve almost established five different agencies. Fundamentally it has changed as it’s developed. When we started it was just me and Matthew (Charlton – CEO & joint-founder)… it was the most exciting thing in the world. The moment I left DDB I could hear the clock ticking.
The summer of 2011 was possibly the quietest summer I’ve ever experienced. I remember walking out on a Friday lunchtime and it felt like it was a Sunday because everyone had thought ‘it’s going to be a terribly shit year, I may as well go on holiday’. Clients were on holiday, the phone didn’t ring for the first month… and although it gave us a lot of time to get the office together and to figure out what we wanted to say about ourselves and BETC, it was great when, on the first of September the phone rang and it rang again. And again.
That period was frighteningly quiet, but most decision makers are at an age when they’ve got kids, which means that when it’s the summer they will be away on holiday. As soon as they come back, it all starts to happen.
From then until we got the first tranche of people, we spent a lot of time working with freelancers. That got us going, but you can’t build a culture on freelancers. You need to find the right people, the right characters to build the type of agency that you want. We’ve got a lovely group of people here now. There’s a no-nonsense attitude to our place and we all have a healthy sense of humour that’s coupled with a strong desire to make the best work possible. I think it’s a great combination to have.
There are certain phases you have to go through to gain the respect of pitch consultants and the wider world. You’ve got to win stuff on your own and do it for yourself. It didn’t matter that Matthew ran Johnnie Walker for almost a decade, the most successful drinks brand in the world. We couldn’t get on the list for alcoholic brands with pitch consultants until we had proven ourselves.
Once you’ve done that, you’ve got to get the first big piece of work out the way. For us, that was Cow & Gate. It was a landmark moment for the agency. The day after it went out, one client called, and the next day another. Every piece of work has to punch above its weight because we’re not churning out at the volume of somewhere like BBH. Every piece has got to establish us. I think it’s a massive mistake to believe that anyone gives a shit about what you’re doing or what you’re trying to do. You’ve got to keep banging that drum.
LBB> BETC Paris is one of the most respected French agencies within France and the rest of the world… how have you found the coming together of English and French culture?
ND> When we had our ribbon cutting, Rémi Babinet came over to London and I actually asked him that question. A lot of people said to him that putting the English and French together wasn’t going to work. But, his opinion – and is mine - is that there are a lot of commonalities between our cultures in our desire to create the best work. That BETC culture can transcend any nationality. The understated sense of humour and the lack of arrogance… that’s what Rémi’s about and that’s why I had such a great connection with him.
LBB> The Diet Coke work then has been quite a nice piece of work to be marking your second anniversary with. Did that feel like a watershed project?
ND> Every piece of work has to make some kind of statement about you. Cow & Gate was the first piece of work where everybody sat up and took notice. I was at a christening and somebody said to me ‘oh you work in advertising? Well, look if you did that one for Cow & Gate then you’re the best person in the world’. And I turned round and said ‘do you know what? I did!’ That was great, but it was UK only. Coke is a big organisation and we look after Diet Coke for Northern Europe and to get involved in something that’s going to be broadcast in all of these different markets is trickier than doing something that’s just for the UK.
We had to decide what to do on Diet Coke’s 30th birthday. Do we bring the Diet Coke hunk back? Who is that guy going to be? And how do you represent women in a current and up-to-date way? There were rather big calls to make.
We made it for Northern Europe… but the day after Andrew Cooper [the hunk] hit computer screens he was on ‘Good Morning America’. The commercial was broadcast during the Oscars, which, in the US is second only to the Super Bowl, and probably, in this case, more appropriate. It’s just been aired in Australia… When you create something for one market and other markets pick it up, that’s a big deal.
LBB> Throughout the interview you’ve been pronouncing BETC as ‘Betsy’ – and there’s a big Betsy pin up girl in the office. Where did that come from?
ND> When BETC launched in London it came from an office in Paris which was not terribly well known in the UK. Part of our job was to explain to people the great creative work that has come out of BETC Paris over the last 17 years. There are a lot of agencies with a lot of initials, but very quickly someone said ‘Betsy!’. We realised that was catchy and it worked so we built on that and created our own UK-version of the BETC logo, with a Vargas girl sitting on top of it. Even the BETC is punctuated by one of her legs – it’s ‘Bet’ and ‘C’.
Paris is a 700-people agency, the most famous agency in France and they’re incredibly well known, but over here they weren’t as recognised.
LBB> What was it that led you into advertising in the first place?
ND> I feel extremely passionate about how we educate kids about getting into creative industries. It is a massive issue and Michael Gove [UK Secretary of State for Education] has recently tried to downgrade these subjects to some sort of second division. It makes me really angry. It was difficult enough when I was at school and I left in 1983. Creativity is always at the bottom of the list. It goes: maths, science, humanities and then the arts are always at the bottom. There’s a brilliant speech on TED by Ken Robinson in which he explains that what we need to solve the world’s problems is creativity and if our schools are not teaching creative thinking, then what the fuck are we doing?
The only reason I give such a big build up to it is that I went to the same school as my Dad. My Father was an engineer and our school was very good at maths and science. When I went there the the building right at the back of the campus was used for art. It was lovely because it was also the oldest building, but it was there because it wasn’t the most important subject.
When I was choosing my A-Levels an old family friend asked me what my choices were. He’d seen me grow up, and seen that I was always drawing and stuff. I told him what I planned to do at A-Level, I didn’t include art. He response was to say ‘you are doing art, aren’t you?’ It was the way he asked me. I thought, ‘fucking hell, no I’m not, I’ve done it all my life, I should’. I hadn’t even done it at O-Level. I changed my A-Levels after that Sunday. Sadly he passed away but I was with his widow recently and I had to tell her ‘you do understand that Colin made a massive difference to my life?’ Maybe I would have found my way here anyway, but the way he asked me made me take it seriously. Art’s not thought of as a ‘proper’ subject, it’s seen as a past time, but once you get into the creative industries you realise that there are thousands of opportunities.
It’s a way of thinking which can be used in any sphere of business, even if you didn’t want to get into 3D, fashion, textiles, photography, advertising, graphic design… you can take that lateral thinking into all sorts of directions.
After school I went to college and did graphic design – which is also when I realised that I didn’t want to do graphic design. I wanted to do something next to it – advertising. I thought they were both the same thing, and in some parts of the country they are, bt I suddenly realised that our industry’s about ideas and that’s what really excited me – not the minutiae of typography.
LBB> You went out to work in South Africa early in your career, which you’ve said was seen as a big risk at the time. What led to that?
ND> It was the pre-Internet days and you’ve got to remember people didn’t really travel that much in the advertising industry. If you were going to travel you’d go to a safe hub like New York, the West Coast, Singapore or Hong Kong. I opened the D&AD annual and there was an amazing ad for BMW from an agency in South Africa. [Pickering, Neil’s long-term creative partner and Head of Copy at BETC London] were at an agency in London who weren’t giving us the opportunities that we felt we could deliver on. He and I had a conversation and we decided that even if we only came out with half a dozen good ads it would be the experience of a lifetime.
During our time out there we saw the country change - we arrived just two months before the elections! Witnessing the spirit of optimism was life-changing. People were surprised to see us. The only other English people who had been there had gone to become creative directors so they could get the pool and the staff; we had gone there to do work. We were a bit of an anomaly and we were known as ‘the poms’. When we arrived we went to the bar and we met these South Africans who, it turned out, were a creative team. They said ‘who are you? We’re about to have a fucking civil war, what are you doing here?’ My mother was still crying at home at this point… But the surge of optimism once they left the apartheid system and realised that all the wheels didn’t fall off; that was amazing. The year after that South Africa held the Rugby World Cup, the film Invictus was based on this. I was there at that time. I wasn’t at the match where Mandela stepped out wearing the Springbok shirt - I’m a big rugby fan and I believe that even if someone had offered me a ticket I don’t think I could have taken it. It needed to be a South African who witnessed that moment. It still gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.
When we resigned from Leo Burnett in London and had our leaving lunch, my senior art director just went ‘you’ll never work in London again’. That was the kind of attitude that was prevalent at the time. It was thought that you were stepping off the first world merry-go-round where great advertising happens and that if you do that, you’ll never come back.
LBB> And in terms of your work, how do you think that experience changed or influenced the way you work and think about advertising?
ND> I get into work earlier. In South Africa you start at 8.30. When Clive and I got back to London we decided to carry on doing that. It made a huge difference actually. When we got a job at BMP (later BMP DDB), we’d get in at 8.30 and all the other teams would rock up at 10.30 – and we’d already cracked the brief that they were working on. That’s how we managed to grab all the great VW briefs at the time.
It helped hugely with international work. When Clive and I went to BBH to work on Johnnie Walker, we wrote ‘Fish’. While we were in South Africa, ‘Rainbow Nation’ happened and there were suddenly 13 official languages. You can try a clever wordplay if you want, but that probably won’t work with 12 of the 13 languages. You’ve got to think visually and Clive is the most visual copywriter I’ve ever worked with. When we were working on a Johnnie Walker ad that had to run in 110 markets, an English play on words was probably not going to work.
LBB> And any interview with you wouldn’t be complete without talking about some of your most phenomenally successful work – VW’s ‘Surprisingly Ordinary Prices’ [the most awarded British print ad of all time] and your Philips work [ Carousel took home the 2009 Film Grand Prix at Cannes and Parallel Lines took the Film Craft Grand Prix in 2010].
ND> Surprisingly Ordinary Prices was one of the first briefs we were given when we went to work at DDB during our three month trial there. It was such a great honour to be working at such an amazing agency on such an amazing account, that every brief was like gold dust to us. We didn’t have a full-time job and we were trying to impress Tony Cox which meant we had to make a piece of work that would be head and shoulders above the other work at DDB. A mighty task… I didn’t know it was going to be that one.
We appreciated every single opportunity. Even things that didn’t seem like an opportunity we tried to turn into one. Anything that slipped through our fingers hurt because we had come from a place where opportunities were few and far between. It was the same as our decision to come in at 8.30 – we were at our sharpest at 8.30 and by the end of it they couldn’t give us any of their dodgy brands because we were always so busy.
We annoyed some of the other teams who thought that we got preferential treatment – we didn’t, we just wrote something before they did. Getting a job there was special moment. We had counted the days and we wanted to tell Tony that our three months was up. We went to his PA and handed in a memo that said ‘Tony, the three months are up, we’re delighted to tell you that you passed’.
In terms of Carousel it wasn’t that I felt ‘something great could come out of this’ when I saw the brief. I had done the creative director thing at Ogilvy and Jeremy Craigen called me to tell me they were looking for someone to head up Philips. Going back to DDB was a no-brainer. I’d be doing the lead from London and I’d be working with my best mate, who would be somebody who would support me and help me.
The only factor standing in the way was the brand. Bob (Scarpelli, ex Global Chief Creative Officer DDB) had worked really hard with the head of Philips. They had said that the agency won awards for all their other accounts, but not for Philips and Bob had replied, ‘… what do you take from that?’ In due course I had interviews with the brands senior bods. I had to go in and be bullish with them. I said, ‘if you want great work, we can do great work but don’t run away the minute I show you something that makes you slightly nervous’.
It’s about the people you work with. It’s the same here at BETC; it’s about Rémi and having the same understanding about what we want and how to achieve that. I met Andrea Ragnetti who was the Phillips Global CMO and I thought ‘this is going to be beautiful, it’s going to be so unexpected, I have found a guy who wants to create great creative work’. It wasn’t about any particular brief. I’m most proud of the transvestites piece (‘Karis’) . That was the first script I showed him - I thought, ‘this will test their mettle’. And he loved it. So did I.
Then the opportunity to create Carousel came along. (Cannes Lions Grand Prix Film 2009). What must never be forgotten about that piece of work is that Stink and Adam Berg took what was a simple script from our Amsterdam office and turned it into a blockbuster. For the money that we had to make that ad they delivered a script that was above and beyond – Adam Berg said he had a way of doing it and we mustn’t forget how important he was in its success.
As is said, it’s about the people you work with!
