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Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence Into Magic

John Hegarty

At the public lecture hosted by the Victoria and Albert Museum to launch this book in June, veteran adman John Hegarty repeatedly advocated telling ‘the truth’ as the most powerful weapon in his professional armory. A reader prejudicially entrenched in the opinion that the methods of the ‘hidden persuaders’ constitute a dark art may yet remain unconvinced by Hegarty’s mantra. For the informed, dispassionate, general reader, interested in the conduct of this most ubiquitous of modern phenomena, and for the enthusiastic student of advertising, Hegarty’s account proves entertaining and often illuminating.

The book, in part personal memoir, in part professional survey, is broadly divided into two sections. The first covers industry procedures and strategies linking business, personnel management and creative activity, manifesting certain principles Hegarty has come to hold true. The second showcases accounts secured (and, sometimes, lost) and notable campaigns executed for, for instance, Audi, the Whitbread brand Boddingtons, and Levi-Strauss. An unforeseen consequence of the award-winning Nick Kamen ‘Launderette’ ad, it is noted, was an increase in the sale of boxer shorts.

As one would expect with a Thames & Hudson publication, the book is lavishly illustrated throughout. Although Hegarty insists at the outset that ‘this isn’t a “how to” book. There are too many of them for our own good’,  the layout – shifts in size and weight of font; underlinings and highlightings – emphatically conveys gobbets of text. The reader may feel bombarded with advice, and indeed, unsurprisingly, that he or she is being ‘pitched at’ in the reductive manner here promoted as a key to success. Nonetheless, given that Hegarty has survived in a notoriously competitive industry (he admits that the average career of a ‘creative’ spans no more than a decade) for 45 years – 28 years 7 months and 3 days as creative director of the agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty – the reader may well feel that such retrospective advice is worthy of attention.

Hegarty acknowledges that he was auspiciously born at the right time and in the right place. Not only did the post-war generation of ‘baby-boomers’ provide a vast market of consumers but also an audience for advertising. 1960s London art schools fostered attitudes of ‘irreverence’ and ‘humour’ to which Hegarty remains fondly attached. The formative influence of American agencies – especially DDB’s famous work for Volkswagen – is cited, but distinctions between American and European tastes in advertising are also intimated. The longevity of Hegarty’s career allows him to comment on the introduction of commercial television in Britain in the 1950s and on current alarmist predictions concerning Internet advertising. He is adamantly and robustly up-beat:

the only space worth buying is the space between someone’s ears. How you get your idea there is, to a certain extent, irrelevant. Technology is a delivery system – you just have to make sure what you’re delivering is memorable and motivating.

Obsessing about one medium versus another is a waste of energy – it is the cultivation and management of ideas, and the people who generate them, that is the crucial factor.

Readers with some knowledge of the history of advertising will be amused by Hegarty’s comments on the demise of Unilever’s in-house agency; those familiar with current screen ads will readily identify the sources of his ‘spoof’ perfume ad, in its pretentious, posing, style and content.

The publication of a book on advertising by Thames & Hudson comes as no surprise. Charles Holmes, founder of the art journal The Studio, lauded a public gallery of posters produced by Abram Games and E. McKnight-Kauffer, maintaining an exemplary status as ‘good’ advertising until the 1950s. In 2009, Phaidon published My Name Is Charles Saatchi and I Am an Artoholic, which corroborates Hegarty’s account of the rise and fall of Saatchi’s agency in the 1970s. Hegarty is generous in his citation of equally influential figures in the British advertising landscape, confirming the exchange of ideas and personnel between fashion, art, advertising and entertainment.

Art historians may find the handling of certain precedents glib and cursory; the religious may find the reference to the success of the Roman Catholic Church as a ‘brand’ not just irreverent but offensive. Hegarty himself objects to the branding of such institutions as hospitals and the Metropolitan Police Force – and not just because the slogans employed are ‘naff’. But this is, of course, the world we inhabit – one of choice, for some readers, between hospitals and between schools touting for trade – a ‘360°’ saturated environment to which Hegarty has contributed, in no small measure and in no single sense, across various public and private concerns. The book ends with commentary on the launch of a wine, branded with the familiar BBH black sheep logo, produced by Hegarty’s vineyard in France.

Hegarty asserts that successful advertising campaigns emerge from ideas drawn from outside the advertising industry. Ultimately, this begs a question that remains unanswered: once advertising has become so ubiquitous and voraciously predatory, to what outside the remit of advertising can the aspirant creative now look?

Hegarty on Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic by John Hegarty is published by Thames & Hudson 2011. 224 pp., 84 colour and 21 mono illus. ISBN 978-0-500-51556-3