The Work That Made Me: Matt Charlton

Matt has 25 years of experience at the very top of the industry. He has helped build some of the worlds great brands like Johnnie Walker, PlayStation and Coke and lead the best agencies in the UK, the US and Europe. He has been CEO of London based Brothers & Sisters for a decade. 

The ad/music video from my childhood that stays with me…

Matt> Levi’s Laundrette. It changed the way I did my hair, the way I dressed, opened my mind to soul music and inspired me to try the most uncomfortable underwear ever, boxers. I realised advertising could be cheeky, sexy, cool and funny all at the same time. 

The ad/music video/game/web platform that made me want to get into the industry

Matt> My great love was music. I spent most of my teenage years locked in my bedroom playing guitar. As my dreams of being a rock star faded like my jeans, I thought advertising was a close second. I loved the music on ads and how it introduced me to new tunes that could sweep up the nation. I’ve already mentioned Levi’s, but it is impossible to underestimate how the music on all those famous ads in the '80s inspired me. I didn’t have MTV but I had Levi’s ads. 

Every few months seemingly a new one would come out and BLOW MY MIND. When I went to work for BBH in the '90s I felt like I was in the fame game not the ad game. 

Can I pick another one? Ok, Levi’s Spaceman by Babylon Zoo in 1995. That remixed part was epic. I went and bought the single (on tape) and the rest of the track was rubbish. 

That’s ads for you, you only need 30 seconds of brilliance. 

The creative work that I keep revisiting…

Matt> I’m going to say Live Aid. It’s regarded as the event of the decade and I’d say that is true. The sheer scale of ambition and idea. It’s one of those ideas that people have in brainstorms before they realise it’s impossible. Except it wasn’t. It changed TV, music, culture and business; I still love watching it. 

We talk about big ideas. Most of them are small ideas. This was a proper big one. 

My first professional project…

Matt> My first job in advertising was working at an agency called WWAV on Legal & General Investments, selling PEP’s. The ads were all DR press ads. Hundreds of them every week. But just seeing something I’d been involved in making actually appearing in all the newspapers at the weekend was brilliant. 

The piece of work that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*…

Matt> Nothing in adland makes me that angry that I can be bothered to remember it. 

I used to be an idea snob. I hated Specsavers because the idea of 'Should have gone' was so generic. I didn’t much care for Meerkats either, which is in the end just a pun on the word market. But the great British public taught me a lesson. Entertainment sticks in the mind way more than cleverness does.

The piece of work that still makes me jealous…

Matt> There are many so I’m going to cheat and say a few. 

Cadburys Gorilla. That was like the nuke finally going off. The whole office stopped to watch it and it ushered in a new era where brands could just make entertainment.  

Red Bull, when that Felix bloke jumped from space. That is as close as marketing has got to a Live Aid type sized idea. 

Channel 4 'Meet the Superhumans' rewired in my mind what being someone with a disability is. They flipped it from the misconception of being less of a human to being a superhuman. Incredible. 

The creative project that changed my career…

Matt> Johnnie Walker Keep Walking. I spent nearly seven years just working on that across the globe. Nurturing and obsessing about it. It was ultimately an exercise in extraordinary client confidence to back an idea born from a brand insight not a product one.

It was also the most amazing relationship between client and agency. They trusted us completely, allowed us to screw up creatively sometimes, and never quibbled about money. They backed us 100% the whole time and set us free to be the best for them we could be. That is how clients get the best out of an agency. 

The work that I’m proudest of…

Matt> I’d say the PlayStation / Nissan GT Academy. It came out of an experimental team I had back in 2008 at TBWA where instead of briefing the creative department we would all jam on the brief as a group of cross discipline thinkers together. It was a brilliant team of thinkers who wanted to make ideas beyond ads. 

The PlayStation idea was to hold a pan-European competition to find the fastest virtual driver and then put them in a real race with professional racing drivers. It was a massive hit across Europe, ran for six or seven years and had six million entrants. The winners did indeed hold their own and some actually became professional racing drivers. The story of one of the winning drivers, Jann Mardenborough, has just been made into a movie called Gran Turismo starring Orlando Bloom. It did a great job for the clients, won content and media awards galore, as well as becoming a Hollywood movie. 

I was involved in this and it makes me cringe…

Matt> Ooh when I was President of an agency called Modernista! in the US I inherited a campaign in production for the launch of the Palm Pre, which was a big deal. It was supposed to be the iPhone killer and was backed by ex-Apple exec Jon Rubinstein, the guy who developed the iPod and iMac, and Elevation Investments, which was a big pile of U2 cash. Bono even came and spent the day at the agency and would call in to sign the ads off. 

In the end the ads cost a fortune and finished up with way too many inputs from everyone, the agency lost control and clarity on the creative idea along the way and the ads were just plain confusing and unlikable. Nobody in the real world liked them at all and the whole project was a massive flop. It made me realise whoever your client is, however famous and rich they are, you have to stand up and say if it’s not working or it will come back to haunt you. 

The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most…

Matt> I’d have to say We Buy Any Car because it is so famous and built from remixing a massive TikTok trend with Mufasa. It’s got the hookiest track ever but it also has real authenticity in the world of social and TikTok. It’s now been adopted by school kids everywhere, with people making their own versions - even West Ham fans chanting it. Golf fans were even chanting it at the Ryder Cup last month. It reminds me of the feeling I had when I first started at BBH where it felt like I worked in the fame industry, not just the ad industry.