This week we are very pleased that Billy Mawhinney, Executive Creative Director at BJL and D&AD exec member is sharing his thoughts on how things have changed in the industry....or how they haven't!

"I’ve just seen a great Poster" is not something you hear very often now, but I did. Last week.

 

It’s a black and white photograph of a young boy in a wheelchair.

The hand written headline above him reads,  "He’d love to walk away from this poster too." It raises awareness and money for muscular dystrophy in a very challenging, interactive, bold and wonderfully simple way.

 

It’s also about thirty years old. It was done by a really great art Director, at J Walter Thompson, called John Knight.

 

We all knew him as J F K because as an East End London boy, John would regularly break up words and sentences with an expletive.

 

It was just after I’d joined JWT as a trainee art director that I met John. His girlfriend was Lorraine Chase and she was always coming in to meet her “Johnny” in our Berkeley Square office. She too was very cockney and as beautiful as John was handsome. (No really. If you walked into a bar with John, every woman in the place looked at him.)

Terry Howard was a writer in the next door office and after hearing Rainey’s distinct voice coming from someone so gorgeous he wrote the famous Campari Ad: “Were you truly wafted here from paradise?” she was asked. “Nah, Luton airport” came the reply.

 

Terry was also writing sitcoms at the time with Mitch Walker. They were doing Hollywood movie trailers that were being researched to see which way the scripts should go.

 

Berkeley Square was like a big old club full of rich and varied creatives. Even Dylan Thomas’s grandson was working as a copywriter alongside David Jones, later Bowie, in The Post Room.

 

We had a home economics group that would create products for our clients.

 

Mr Kipling was born, bred and baked at number 40.

 

After Eight mints were a slim invention for Rowntree Macintosh as was its chunky counterpart, the Yorkie bar.

 

Our shop at the back, which was just like a corner shop selling everything you seemed to need, was the first shop in the UK to go decimal.

When JWT were pitching for the business of telling the country about decimalisation, they did the pitch in the shop where they had converted every price from pounds shillings and pence. Or, knowing JWT, from guineas.

 

We even had a reference library where Jeanette McDonald spent every Monday morning going through the weekend’s magazines to cut out photographic and any other reference for a quite unrivalled support system for art directors. At that time it was our Google which no art director could do without now.

 

But there we were at an old fashioned advertising agency doing social marketing, creating TV programming, working with Hollywood, creating new products, using McGoggle and, when I started, all during a recession that was so bad most people were on a four day week.

 

So I’m glad John Knight’s poster is as good today as it’s always been and that thankfully what we do hasn’t changed much.

 

As Bill Bernbach said when asked in the early 60s what advertising would be like in 20 years time, he replied, "It’ll be the same in 20 years as it was 20 years ago. People with the power to touch people will be successful and people without that power won’t."

 

Or as Eric Cantona might say to the seagulls "Plus ca change plus la meme chose."