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The reign of Spain

To find out about Spanish advertising, I turned to Manuel Valmorisco, a friendly bear of a man and one of the country's leading creative talents (who made his mark at the head of his own agency and as executive creative director at Lowe in Madrid and Paris). He confirmed my tentative theory that there was a Hispanic advertising culture, with links as far-flung as Argentina, Miami and Cuba.

‘Many Cuban creatives arrived here after the revolution and brought an American marketing style with them. But we have also had a long relationship with Argentina. During the dictatorship and the various financial crises that followed, a steady tide of Argentine talent flowed across the Atlantic to nourish Spanish creative work.'

Domestically, the history of Spanish advertising has centred on the battle for creative supremacy between Barcelona and Madrid. ‘There's no doubt that in the seventies, eighties and even the early nineties, Barcelona was more innovative than Madrid,' Valmorisco opines. ‘It had developed a film production industry with many good directors. Lots of people started their own hot shops. The style was freer than in Madrid, which was where all the multinational agencies [and clients] were based. The Barcelona agencies had a closer relationship with cutting-edge designers and art directors. But today the size of billings in Madrid is perhaps twice that of Barcelona – and the creative work has caught up.'

Spain's creative revolution is associated with the Barcelona agency MMLB. Founded in the mid-1970s by Marçal Moliné, Miguel Montfort, Joaquín Lorente and Eddy Borsten, MMLB was to Spain what DDB had been to the United States and what CDP was becoming – at roughly the same time – to London. In a newly democratic market with a flourishing media, it was the first purely creative boutique, operating without a media department. ‘MMLB was an agency with a distinct positioning, a different image,' recalled Marçal Moliné. ‘In all those years we never had to chase clients or struggle to get on pitch lists. They came on their own and growth was continuous' (
Anuncios Online
, 11 December 2001).

MMLB devised its media plans with an independent shop called Tecnimedia. This outsourced approach is said to have inspired the creation of Spain's successful Media Planning group in 1978. Later one of
Europe's largest media planning and buying concerns, it eventually merged with the media arm of France's Havas in 1999.

On the creative front, MMLB copywriter Joaquin Lorenté is the father (as we've established, every country needs one) of modern Spanish advertising. He provided a contemporary link back to figures such as Pedro Prat Gaballí, who had developed scientific theories of advertising akin to those of Claude Hopkins in the 1930s. ‘Lorente
is
advertising,' said the publicity blurb for an exhibition devoted to him at the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2006. ‘MMLB was the school and Lorente was the teacher, gathering pupils around him like a master with his apprentices.'

More to the point, MMLB can be said to have created a Barcelona school of advertising, when a warm Catalan style became fused with a revolution in music, fashion and design. The Spanish public, which had previously tended to associate it with propaganda, began to appreciate advertising for the first time.

As we've already been told, one agency does not make a revolution – but two graduates of MMLB took care of that problem by setting up their own shop. In 1977 creatives Ernesto Rilova and Luis Casadevall teamed up with account handler and strategist Salvador Pedreño, who had worked with big clients such as Heinkel and Braun at the more conservative Unitros agency. Together they formed RCP. The idea was to combine creativity with hard-nosed marketing strategy. And it worked. In the summer of 1981, RCP won Gold at Cannes for its spot for Ambi Pur room deodorizer. It showed a blindfolded cat ignoring a dead fish right under its nose. Next to the fish sat a container of Ambi Pur. As soon as the container was removed, the cat pounced on the fish.

RCP's minimalist style – which owing to budget constraints hung on simple ideas rather than high production values – established a template for a decade of Spanish advertising. In 1987 Saatchi & Saatchi acquired RCP. But two of its founders re-emerged three years later with a new agency. And they hadn't lost their touch: in 1992 Casadevall Pedreño won the Grand Prix at Cannes with a spot called ‘Nuns'. This promoted a brand of extra-strong glue. Two nuns passed a stone statue of a cherub at their convent, noting with alarm that his penis had broken off. They wrapped the little organ in a handkerchief and took it to their reverend mother. In the next shot, we saw her gingerly gluing it on – upside down. When she'd gone, a younger nun rectified the situation. The ad was held up as an example of Spanish advertising's ‘beautiful simplicity'.

Another respected figure to emerge from the Barcelona advertising scene of the 1970s is Luis Bassat. After starting out as a salesman – initially to pay his way through university – Bassat founded an advertising agency, Venditor, in 1965. He sold that operation in 1973, convinced that he could build another, better agency with a more international image. At that point he was already casting around for an international partner – and having read David Ogilvy's
Confessions of an Advertising Man
, he'd set his heart on working with O&M. In 1975, with his new outfit Bassat Associados flourishing, he approached O&M and offered to sell half the agency to the network. ‘We don't accept presents,' its then president, Jock Elliott, reportedly told him (‘Olympic feats of the Barcelona boy turned O&M maestro',
Campaign
, 30 January 1998).

Five years later, however, O&M changed its mind. It acquired 25 per cent of the agency, giving Bassat a seat on the board. In 1992, he organized the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games in Barcelona. Many admen in Spain claim to have been involved in the Games in one way or another, but Bassat played a key role.

The period between Spain's entry to the Common Market in 1986 and the Barcelona Games in 1992 saw the second wave of its creative revolution. ‘I never got as many phone calls from multinational groups asking for advice on what company to buy as I did this year,' Luis Bassat told the
Financial Times
in 1989 (‘Riding high on an economic surge', 28 December). And surfing the crest of the wave was a Madrid agency: Contrapunto.

The outfit was founded in 1974 by a band of six agency professionals, including its first creative director Jose Luis Zamorano. Although it was one of the most creative agencies of the seventies, it gained international recognition only at the beginning of the next decade, with the arrival of a new generation of creatives in the form of Juan Mariano Mancebo and José Maria Lapeña. Indeed, Contrapunto became the first ever Spanish agency to win the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1989, a full two years before its Barcelona rivals Casadevall Pedreño took the prize.

The winning ad was considered another example of Spanish advertising's ability to keep things simple while hitting a heart-warming note. Promoting TV channel TVE, it showed a small dog – his name was Pippin, we later learned – doing everything in his power to distract his young owner from the TV screen. But nothing would budge the hypnotized boy from TVE's array of entertainment. Finally, after regretfully
touching a photo of his master on the mantel, the dog picked up a suitcase in his teeth and left home. (A later sequel showed Pippin sitting alone in a bar on Christmas Eve, his suitcase by his side.)

Now part of the BBDO network, Contrapunto continues to produce strong work, under a third generation of creative talent.

And it is not alone. Take SCPF in Barcelona, for example. In 1996, it was started by four leading members of the agency Delvico Bates: creative director Tony Segarra and managing executives Luis Cuesta, Ignasi Puig and Félix Fernández de Castro. They've done great work for Ikea, Vodafone, BMW – and even the über-hip restaurant El Bulli. They have also established an office in Madrid and another in Miami, which acts as a jumping-off point for both the US Hispanic market and Latin America.

In Madrid, the creative torch has been passed on to Señora Rushmore, created in 2000 by former executives from Tiempo BBDO: Miguel García Vizcaíno, Marta Rico and Roberto Lara. The agency was named after a character in an interactive advertising campaign the trio once ran (her real identity is that of Dolores Goodman, better known for her role as Miss Blanche in the movie
Grease
) and its extraordinary website is designed to resemble her fusty apartment. Señora Rushmore's very first account was the football team Atlético de Madrid. The team was going through a particularly bad patch at the time, hence the tagline, ‘A year of hell'.

The lure of Buenos Aires may be strong, but Spain still has plenty of dynamism to spare.

16

International outposts

‘If you stay in the middle of the road, you get run over both ways'

A
dvertising agencies are often involved in election campaigns. Few have had the opportunity to work for Nelson Mandela, which is one of the numerous reasons that TBWA\Hunt Lascaris stands out from the crowd. The agency resembles a book or a movie that surpasses its genre to become a cultural phenomenon. In the 1990s, Hunt Lascaris burst out of South Africa to impress the whole of adland.

‘From the very start, our mission was to be the first world-class agency out of Africa,' says John Hunt, who founded the Johannesburg operation with Reg Lascaris in 1983. ‘Everyone was trying to be the best on the block, but we had international ambitions which we articulated very clearly.'

Hunt and Lascaris initially crossed paths at a local agency. Lascaris was an account man and Hunt a copywriter. He'd started out as an aspiring writer and occasional journalist, but when an acquaintance working in advertising saw one of his articles in a newspaper, she suggested he might make a good copywriter. (He's kept up writing as a ‘parallel career', however, and one of his plays, an anti-censorship drama, won a prestigious award.) By the time he went into business with Lascaris, he'd ‘worked for two or three local agencies before going off to backpack around the world for a couple of years'. He adds, ‘It may not have been the best pedigree for working for agencies in South Africa, but I have a feeling it was probably an advantage, because it meant I didn't have to unlearn too much.'

Hunt and Lascaris started literally from scratch. ‘We sold our first campaigns from the boot of a car. It took four or five years for us to really get traction with local clients. In 1985 we signed an affiliation
agreement with TBWA. That meant we could attend the agency's international conferences and measure our work alongside spots from all over the network. People were saying, “This is great stuff,” which gave us a lot of confidence.'

The agency's breakthrough account was BMW, which it won in 1990. Two spots in particular caught the attention of the media. The first mocked a well-known Mercedes Benz commercial, which showed a driver emerging unscathed from the wreckage of his Merc after a smash on the notoriously sinuous Chapman's Peak coast road near Cape Town. The ad was apparently based on a real-life incident. The Hunt Lascaris version featured a BMW effortlessly racing around the same hairpin curves, with the tagline ‘Beat the bends': say it aloud and the provocation becomes obvious. The spot sparked a debate about comparative advertising and got the agency into the public eye.

Another spot for BMW demonstrated power steering. It showed a mouse running across the dashboard and jumping onto the steering wheel. By scampering across the wheel from left to right, the tiny creature managed to steer the car. At the end, the mouse stood up and took a bow.

‘Suddenly, journalists were calling us up and asking, “Have you got any more ads like this?” ' says Hunt. ‘We won accounts like the Seychelles tourism board and found that we were becoming more of a regional player than a purely South African one. It was confirmation that our global ambitions were not out of place.'

In late 1992, however, Hunt Lascaris won the ultimate South African advertising task: to run the campaign for Nelson Mandela's African National Congress during the run-up to the country's first multiracial elections. This did not require any change of political views on the part of the founders – they had always been liberals and reformers. In the early 1980s, Lascaris wrote a book called
Third World Destiny
, which challenged the racial segregation of markets and insisted that advertising had to be aimed at people, not colours. While Lascaris certainly found apartheid repugnant, his argument was in part pragmatic. ‘The bottom line for me was, when 80 per cent of your market is black, you can't fiddle around talking about racial differences' (‘The world's hottest shops',
Campaign
, 25 September 1992). The book became a bestseller.

At the time of its appointment by the ANC, around 30 per cent of the agency's employees were black. In addition, it would make ads showing,
for example, black and white people drinking together in a pub. These spots did not reflect reality – but they portrayed South Africa as the agency felt it should have been. In another book,
Communications in the Third World
, published in 1990, Lascaris had written that advertising ‘reflects dreams and longings' and suggested that effective communication could ‘accelerate these wished-for realities'. Now this desired future suddenly seemed within reach, and Hunt Lascaris was to play a crucial role in making it a reality. The ANC brief ranged the agency against the local branch of Saatchi & Saatchi, which was handling the campaign for FW de Klerk's ruling National Party.

At the beginning of 1993, Hunt Lascaris transformed a through-the-line division called Applied Marketing and Communications into a dedicated ANC unit, which would be on duty 24 hours a day in shifts. The agency started by attacking the opposition with tactical ads. For instance, when the National Party put up the price of petrol, Hunt Lascaris created a poster showing a petrol gauge at empty, with the line, ‘This is what the NP thinks of your brains'. In the run-up to the election, the agency switched to a massive radio campaign, as this was the best means of reaching the largest percentage of the population. Of the 23 million people eligible to vote, 18 million had never voted before, as many as half were illiterate, and the geographical coverage was vast. TV was considered expensive and not as widespread as radio.

Campaign slogans included a reworking of Abraham Lincoln's ‘A government of the people, by the people, for the people', with its underlying reference to the abolition of slavery, and the more direct, ‘The ANC for jobs, peace and freedom'. Working for Mandela did not make the agency popular with everyone in South Africa: Hunt's phone was tapped and the agency received a number of bomb threats. At the height of the campaign, the building was ringed by a barbed-wire fence.

At the same time, Hunt says, ‘our ads were being discussed on CNN and our profile shot through the roof'. He recalls that Mandela was ‘even more impressive in reality than his PR might lead you to believe'. ‘Working with him changed me as a person. It put things in perspective. I met him six months after he'd been in prison for 28 years, yet he showed no bitterness. When he was briefing us on the campaign, he insisted that we avoid referring to the past. “Let's turn our mind to the future,” he'd say. He also understood the value of cutting through the complications of politics and getting to the point, which made our job easier.'

Mandela invited the agency to the post-election celebrations, which Hunt describes as ‘a most wonderful time'. At the end of it all, although 19 parties contested the election, the three main parties – the ANC, the National Party and the Democratic Party – had accounted for 90 per cent of the estimated US $40 million spent on advertising during the elections (‘Ads bonanza in South Africa poll',
Campaign
, 29 April 1994).

Away from politics, Hunt considers that South Africa's particular mix has driven the agency's trenchant, humorous approach to advertising. With so many cultures, attitudes and education levels, there's little room for complexity. Local budgets also tend to argue for a more direct approach. Hunt's favourite phrase is, ‘Life is too short to be mediocre'. He's also been known to say, ‘If you stay in the middle of the road, you get run over both ways.' At the same time, the agency's ads retain a certain subtlety. ‘A lot of our work has a sort of wry smile,' he suggests. ‘It's not as “in” as English humour, and not as “pie-in-the-face” as the American variety.'

Looking back at the agency's rise to prominence in the mid 1990s, he observes: ‘After the elections, South Africa went from being the poisonous country to the prodigal country. It was in a transitional phase and that made it seem very sexy to outsiders. It was strange, edgy and fun.'

In 1994 – the year after the elections – the agency's ad for soluble headache tablet Aspro Clear won gold at Cannes. It featured a man offering a glass of dissolved Aspro Clear to a woman, presumably his wife, in bed beside him. ‘But… I don't have a headache,' said the woman. ‘Excellent,' replied the man, grinning lasciviously. For advertising people around the world, it was one of those ‘Why didn't I think of that?' moments.

The agency's new-found fame had its downsides – like other South African operations, it began losing home-grown talent to Britain and the United States. It also had to balance the needs of international and domestic clients. Today, the key advantage of TBWA\South Africa – as it is now known – is that it remains African first and global second. The continent and its consumers represent considerable potential for ambitious advertisers – and the agency is perfectly positioned to show them around.

Australia's favourite admen

While South Africa should seem impossibly remote from a European perspective, its regular appearance on the evening news gives it an odd familiarity. Australia, on the other hand, feels considerably further flung.

Australia's king of advertising, John Singleton, specializes in a no-nonsense brand of charm that has endeared him to the media and the public alike. Referred to as ‘Singo' by the press, Singleton is regarded as a talented copywriter and born rebel with an irrepressibly irreverent spirit.

When he floated John Singleton Advertising on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1993, journalists gleefully related examples of his unapologetically sexist campaign for Eagle Beer. Featuring a couple of macho characters known as ‘Beer Men', the TV spots showed, for example, a dog tearing off a young woman's jeans. When feminists complained, Singleton replied, ‘I don't care. There's only about eight of them and they don't drink beer anyway' (‘Australia's biggest shop goes public',
Adweek
, 6 December 1993). He developed the Beer Man's Philosophy, one of the tenets of which was: ‘Beer Man realizes women are no longer to be regarded as sex objects. These days they have to be able to cook as well.' As you'll have gathered, Singleton's comments come with a knowing, if barely perceptible, wink.

Singleton was born in 1941 in a tough inner-city area of Sydney. But he was bright and gifted and enjoyed a good education at the respectable Fort Street High School. He started out in advertising in the 1960s, founding the Sydney agency Strauss, Palmer and Singleton, McAllan (SPASM), which he later sold to DDB. The agency was one of the first to stop aping the style of American commercials and use convincingly Australian characters in TV spots.

After leaving the DDB network, Singleton started his eponymous agency in the 1980s. It swelled into the giant STW Group, which owns more than 50 marketing services operations, including Singleton Ogilvy & Mather and a stake in J Walter Thompson's Australian operations.

But while he remains the adman that every Australian knows, Singleton cannot claim to have been the country's advertising pioneer. That title goes to George Herbert Patterson.

The man himself died in 1968, but his legacy lives on as George Patterson Y&R. Patterson was already 44 and had been in advertising
for more than 20 years by the time he launched the agency that bears his name in 1934. He was born in South Melbourne on 24 August 1890, the fourth child and only son of a comedian and an actress (
Australian Dictionary of Biography – Online Edition
). When their mother died in 1905, the children were sent to stay with relatives and George quickly got a job in order to support his sisters. He started as an office boy with the machinery merchants Thomas McPherson & Sons, but his theatrical background and aptitude for selling steered him in the direction of marketing, and by 1908 he had risen to advertising manager of the firm.

Patterson led a somewhat picaresque life and in 1912 he departed for Britain and the United States, where he worked for a while in New York. He returned to Australia with the outbreak of the First World War. After initially being rejected for enlistment on medical grounds, he eventually joined the Australian Imperial Force, serving in Egypt and on the Western Front.

In 1920, Patterson joined forces with Norman Catts to form a Sydney advertising agency called Catts-Patterson Co Ltd. Their clients included Palmolive, Ford, Dunlop, Pepsodent and Gillette. But the two men later fell out and Patterson resigned. In 1934 he acquired an almost bankrupt agency and turned it into George Patterson Ltd. Although he had pledged not to swipe any accounts from his previous operation, Colgate-Palmolive and Gillette insisted on following him. In an unusual twist, Patterson was rewarded with a place on the boards of many of his most loyal clients – including Colgate-Palmolive and Gillette – virtually guaranteeing that his agency hung on to their business. To overcome newsprint shortages in the Second World War, Patterson's agency became the first in Australia to set up a radio production department. It was also the first to build a national network of offices, and the first to establish a research department. It was Australia's leading agency in billings for decades.

In 2005, when ‘Patts' – as it was nicknamed – became part of the WPP empire, the Australian press lamented the end of an era. ‘Just about every brand of note has at some stage in its life been handled by Patts,' noted an article in
The Australian
(‘Industry benchmark bites the dust', 25 August 2005). ‘Such was Patts' power it could dump clients when a bigger, juicier deal came along.' Yet the article added admiringly that when Patts won an account, the client rarely left without the agency's permission.

In the 1960s the agency had become part of the Ted Bates network, which turned out to be the wrong choice of international partner. Bates was weaker globally than many of its competitors and Patts remained largely reliant on local business. Having said that, it hung on to its position as Australia's number one agency until 2002, when it was knocked off the top slot by rival Clemenger. (Started by tennis player Jack Clemenger in 1946, this powerful marketing services group is best known in adland as the Australian outpost of the BBDO network.) As the misfortunes of Bates came home to roost, the network was swallowed up by the WPP group – and Patts with it.