5 Minutes with... James Gordon MacIntosh

It’s been more than a decade since James Gordon-MacIntosh co-founded Hope&Glory, an agency that’s become the standard-bearer for creative PR in the UK. An early interest in journalism soon led him to public relations, where he’s since built a career rooted in making bold ideas way beyond the press release.

In this candid conversation with LBB’s Alex Reeves, James reflects on the agency’s origins — from working with mobile network O2 as a first client, through to Hope&Glory’s long-standing relationships with brands like IKEA, Airbnb and Uber.

He also discusses why client service is just as creative a discipline as coming up with the big idea, and how the loose boundaries of PR have allowed him to build a business where experimentation is part of the job, allowing exploration of football fandom or raves in kebab shops.

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LBB> How did you end up in the PR business?

James> Originally I wanted to be a journalist. I was one of those irritating 16-year-olds that had a life plan.

Then I graduated, did some journalism and (with all the greatest respect, Alex, as you are a member of said profession) I realised that it wasn’t quite as glamorous as I thought it might be. Which I suspect is still the case. But back then, it was alarmingly badly paid. So I very quickly realised that this childhood dream was probably not all it was cracked up to be.

I applied for three jobs in my university career guide. I failed the maths tests for two banking jobs – really tragically. I was a cheery English graduate among a load of engineers, and I was like, I don’t think these are my people.

I also applied for a PR job at an agency that was then called Fishburn Hedges, and by pure chance, I got it. I stumbled into it with very little idea of what PR was actually about, and spent a very happy six years learning the trade at Fishburn Hedges.

LBB> What sort of campaigns were you working on and how did they help you to establish your career?

James> Originally I was doing corporate work, then consumer services stuff. It was the heyday of the Labour government and Tony Blair, and spending excellent amounts of money on public information campaigns.

Fishburn Hedges never really did out-and-out consumer brands, certainly not when there was a product. Four of us decided it would be quite cool if we did, so we started an agency as part of Fishburn Hedges called 77, back in the day.

I spent from 2005 to 2011 building that agency in the safe confines of, ultimately, the Omnicom Group. You get to start your own agency but you don’t have to put your mortgage on the line, which was quite nice. So you sort of learn what to do and what not to do there. Built that, and learned some of the ropes of management, but also how to do proper consumer work.

Eventually Jo [Carr] joined, who is now the other partner in Hope&Glory. We worked at 77 for about three, four years, and then had a revelation that we were doing this for, frankly, for Wall Street. I’m not sure Wall Street was that grateful, if I’m honest with you. I don’t remember anyone writing us a pleasant letter thanking us for our blood, sweat and tears and their appreciation of our creation of shareholder value.

Also, to be honest with you, it just got so slow. You want to hire an intern, and you’ve got to ask someone in New York whether that’s possible.

We kind of thought, on the one hand, it would be lovely to do this for ourselves. On the other, we’d really like to get back to doing the work. Because that’s where I get the joy from this industry. So Hope&Glory was born.

LBB> You wanted to do something for yourselves, to build it your way. What sort of principles did you lay down at that point?

James> It’s a difficult one to answer because it’s changed over time. But we’ve never scorched our website, which means it’s got this sort of crazy infinite scroll of 13 years of stuff. And actually, you can still go back to the original work.

Loads of people asked us, “What’s going to make you different?” And we came up with the most confident response to that, which is: “We’re not going to be different. We’re just going to be better.” Which I still feel slightly uncomfortable saying out loud.

Way back in the day, there were a small handful of good creative PR agencies that believed PR had more to contribute than drumming out press releases, doing product placement, and sticking celebrities in front of things and photographing them. We could bring a bit more of a creative take. I think we joined a group of probably two or three agencies at the time doing that kind of work, but we always said that’s what we wanted to put at the forefront of what we did.

We could bring great creative, but also a much kinder culture. We wanted to try and balance doing great work but also being a great place to work, because a lot of those agencies back in the day were pretty wild – but they were also sweatshops.

The other bit that we wanted to bring was some of the rigour and discipline of client service. So yeah, you’d get great ideas, but it wouldn’t be painful for you as a client working with us to get those out the door. I have the lauded title of chief creative officer. But I am very mindful of the fact that I don’t think we’d ever get any work out the door if the people who lead the accounts day to day didn’t build relationships of absolute trust with our clients.

Often the industry venerates brilliant strategists or creative directors. But the reality is that none of that really matters unless you’ve got outstanding client handlers and client service directors really building relationships and understanding client businesses.

LBB> Hope&Glory has lasted and grown for 14 years now. What were the foundational projects that really showed what you were able to build?

James> We created a campaign called O2 Santa, where basically you, could send a tweet to O2 and say, “Hi guys, I'd like a message for my brother, sister, mother – their name is this – and if you could wish them Happy Christmas from me and my partner, whatever, that'd be great.”

We had a former Harrods Santa sitting in a meeting room with an autocue, a camera, an editor and a social media manager. And we did 1,200 films, which were posted to YouTube in a week. You’d get a message from Santa saying, “Ho ho ho! Hello Alex, Santa here…” and it was wild.

We did that week two or three of the agency. In the early days of an agency, where you can be quite scrappy and just do stuff. We just did stuff.

I think that said to prospective clients and to the team: we need to be an agency built for a world that has more tools, more channels. So our first campaigns were very social.

Then – and bear in mind this was 2012 – we did a massive Instagram campaign around O2 Travel, which was their European roaming, and did a huge influencer campaign, which was bonkers.

That was the foundation of the agency. It was very much a sense of: we want to be an agency that puts the idea first, and then we’ll figure out the rest of it.

Back in the day, no one was doing influencer campaigns. No one knew how to. We were randomly DMing photographers going, “Hi, do you want to go on a free holiday?” We didn’t know how it was going to work, but it was a laugh.

O2 then re-pitched their business and we were really fortunate – we won it, despite being a team of five or six people.

We were really lucky in winning IKEA as a very early client, and they remain a client, as does O2.

With O2 and IKEA in particular on the books, there was just a bit of a sense that we must be a pretty safe pair of hands.

LBB> Are there any others that maybe required something different?

James> The other big ones that stand out: we won Airbnb relatively early on, and worked with them for eight or nine years. Looking back, I think we were part of establishing that brand and that business in that category. PR and earned was absolutely at the heart of building that brand.

When we won Sony, which brought a really hard-going, primarily press office account. The agency really had to grow up and get to grips with that. It was hard – grinding stuff out, so much process and so much structure required to service that client.

Between them, IKEA and Sony were two clients that really imposed a need for rigour, structure, process. They were quite formative.

Then through the journey, I would say that winning adidas back in the day was a huge shift, just because it brought a whole load of work that was much more culture-focused – almost exclusively influencer and creator and content-led.

We learned a bunch of stuff at the same time that our clients were learning a bunch of stuff. We were all doing it together – trying new stuff, seeing what works. That became fascinating.

Then the other two big moments: winning Uber – originally the rides business, then the Eats business – has been a game-changing client in terms of scale. Sainsbury’s came along at a similar time, and all of a sudden you're just working with bigger brands and bigger budgets.

Most recently, I would say winning Pepsi and Carlsberg – both big global creative briefs, rather than just UK stuff. While we've always done some global or international or multi-market work, those two are purely global – working into their central global teams and seeing work go out in their markets around the world.

LBB> Hope&Glory has been social-focused since 2011. How has the agency grown in terms of specialisms since then?

James> I think a lot of what's happened in the PR industry is that we have never been terribly defined.

I look at the big creative agencies, and bless them, they’ve had to radically reinvent themselves – from a core skill set of strategy, account handling, and people who make 60-second films or design beautiful posters. Those people are still out there, and they’re still doing that stuff. But actually, you can’t have a floor of those people doing that work anymore. That’s why I think we see agencies like Uncommon, New Commercial Arts, and Lucky Generals – they’ve come out in a kind of post-TV-centric world and have got people who have ideas, not people who write films.

I kind of feel like that’s why those agencies have had a heyday – because you look at so much of their work and it’s kind of PR, kind of social, or kind of experiential. It doesn’t live in the traditional worlds that ad agencies used to inhabit.

PR agencies have never had that. There’s always been this sense in creative PR agencies of: ultimately, we want to drive editorial or drive social or drive influencer – like, what are all the cool things we could do to make that happen?

You look back over the campaigns and sometimes it’s making a great film. Sometimes it’s doing a piece of experiential or a pop-up or a stunt. Or doing something in social that engages editorial attention all of a sudden. So I think, weirdly, the great joy of PR – for me anyway – is that it’s just so wildly ill-defined.

And the pace of the industry we’re in means that we can try stuff. That’s the joy of the business, really – you can just try stuff. I'm a big believer in being cheap enough to fail.

LBB> What's a recent campaign that demonstrates that really well for you?

James> We did a campaign with the FA called ‘First Time Fans’. We found football fans who had never been to a football match before. We put them in the crowd at Thomas Tuchel’s first football match as England manager. We mic’d them up, and we put cameras down pitch-side and just trained cameras on them for a full 90 minutes and recorded it all. We worked with a brilliant agency called Little Thief. It basically meant we had four sets of fans – about 360 minutes of content – which we edited down into a three-minute film.

It captures this magic of going to watch live football. It presents a totally different view of what the fan experience is really like – in a bid to try and overcome people's stereotype of a football fan as probably skin-headed, tattooed and potentially violent. And actually, that is very much not the case at all.

That was a 50/50 call – are people going to love this, or is it just going to die? We were pretty certain England would win – it was an Albania game – but even that, the whole thing could have fallen flat.

It went out, got 9 million views. It actually went old-school viral. But, that gave me the heebie-jeebies – from a “Will it work? Won’t it work?” perspective.

The IKEA thing’s really interesting. You had the big bag on the hoarding. Then you had ‘The House of FRAKTA’, which was a pop-up around the FRAKTA bag. That was basically there to remind people the shop was still coming. Everyone was going to write about it. But there were a whole bunch of other things – like trying to engage with younger audiences, because there’s just more competition out there. So we did a series of five housewarming parties with Lab 54. It was based on the idea that any location could be a home. We did a pop-up rave in a library, one in a coffee shop, one in a kebab shop.

That was purely going after culture. We wanted to be in Hypebeast, Culted, Mixmag, to reach a proper young London audience – because that's who we need into these stores. They’re not going to give a shit that [mayor of London] Sadiq Khan came down and there’s a photo of him in the Evening Standard – because they're not going to read that.

So actually, the job becomes: on the one hand, guide this story and narrative over a long period of time, and do so creatively. And the second bit is: it’s great, all of this stuff is going to happen naturally – what do we commercially need to do that isn’t going to happen? And how do we fill that gap?