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After a brief period working with Hegarty at Benton & Bowles, Charles was teamed with senior art director Ross Cramer. Before long, they found the atmosphere at Benton & Bowles too stultifying for their radical ideas and moved to where the action was: Collett Dickenson Pearce. Here the pair produced a string of remarkable ads, including racy ads for Ford – comparing various models to rival cars, an American technique quite unheard of in the UK at the time – and witty ones for department stores Selfridges and Lewis's. The D&AD awards flew in. Eighteen months after their arrival at CDP (following a brief but unsatisfactory stint at a smaller agency) Cramer and Saatchi went into business with their own ‘creative consultancy'.

Cramer Saatchi was based above a fast-food joint in Goodge Street – in the same building where David Puttnam had set up his photography agency and BMP also occupied floor space. The pair recruited John Hegarty and another young adman called Jeremy Sinclair. The latter was to have a major impact on the Saatchi saga by devising one of Britain's most famous print ads.

The background to the ad that fuelled the Saatchi legend could not have been more mundane. While waiting for one of his children at the school gates, Ross Cramer had fallen into conversation with another parent, a woman who worked at the Health Education Council. When she discovered what Cramer did for a living, she mentioned that her boss was looking for an advertising agency. Soon, Cramer Saatchi was applying its forceful words and images to public health advertising. One print ad was a picture of some noisome brown sludge being poured onto a saucer, accompanied by the words: ‘The tar and discharge that collects in the lungs of an average smoker.' The antismoking campaign attracted considerable press coverage – but not as much as the agency's best ad for the HEC.

It's a strikingly simple image of a young bloke in a V-necked sweater. His palm rests tenderly on his enormous pregnancy bump as he gazes at the camera with a doleful, resigned expression. The text reads: ‘Would
you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?' Capturing at once the downside of permissiveness and the nascent women's liberation movement, the ad presaged the more thoughtful 1970s after the extended party of the sixties. Years later, the BBC voted the image one of the top 10 British ads of the century. At the number one position was another Saatchi ad, ‘Labour isn't working'. But by then, the agency had evolved.

When Ross Cramer left the agency in 1970 to embark on a career as a commercials director, there was one obvious candidate to replace him. Maurice Saatchi had followed a different yet convergent career path to that of his brother. Less flamboyant and more strategic, he had graduated from the London School of Economics and joined a small trade press company called Haymarket Publishing. He was tasked with relaunching a dusty periodical called
World Press News
, aimed at journalists and advertising people. It was transformed into
Campaign
, the advertising trade magazine. Provocative and punchy, equal parts gossip and news,
Campaign
was the mirror of the business it portrayed. It quickly became the bible of British adland (which it remains). Maurice was a success.

And yet he was clearly confident enough in his brother's abilities to leave Haymarket and become the co-founder of Saatchi & Saatchi – a name ‘so bizarre no one will forget it in a hurry', as Charles pointed out.

On 11 September 1970,
Campaign
carried the front-page headline, ‘Saatchi starts agency with £1 million.' The brothers also took a one-page advertisement in
The Times
. It was possibly the only time they had to pay for column inches. The Saatchis were news, and would remain so for years to come.

Mrs Thatcher's ad agency

Along with people like John Hegarty and Jeremy Sinclair – who stayed on from the Cramer Saatchi period – the new agency attracted an impressive line-up of talented young players. One of them was ebullient Australia-born account man Bill Muirhead, who recalls, ‘Everyone was about my age and they had a certain attitude. I'd been at Ogilvy, where they had all this rule-book stuff. But we took the rules and threw them out of the window. We were always getting into punch-ups with regulatory bodies.'

Another recruit was a personable media director named Tim Bell. Highly charismatic, Bell later went on to become one of Britain's foremost public relations practitioners. In advertising history, however, Bell's name is most often associated with that of Margaret Thatcher – and with the 1979 Conservative Party election campaign. Although Charles Saatchi led the creative effort, Bell presented the work to the Conservative Party leader. As far as Margaret Thatcher was concerned, Tim Bell was the face of the agency.

Saatchi & Saatchi was appointed by the Conservatives at the prompting of Gordon Reece, the party's head of communications and the man who is often credited with honing Mrs Thatcher's steely image. As a sizeable British-owned agency that had developed a reputation for creativity, Saatchi & Saatchi met all the party's requirements. Bell made his first presentation to Thatcher in June of that year.

Much of the Saatchis' work for the Conservatives was exemplary, but the poster that the BBC chose as the advertising image of the 20th century was the idea of deputy creative director Andrew Rutherford. He came up with the line ‘Labour isn't working', above a photograph of an unfeasibly long and winding queue outside an unemployment office. (The Labour party publicly attacked the photo as fake, which was beside the point: like all the best advertising, the poster crystallized a perceived truth.) In reality the poster only ran at a handful of sites, but the media furore it provoked made it one of the most cost-effective ads in history. The Saatchi & Saatchi campaign didn't exactly win the election for the Conservatives – the strikes and unrest during ‘the winter of discontent' did that – but it was certainly a factor. When Mrs Thatcher came to power on 4 May 1979, the Saatchis could take at least part of the credit.

A few years earlier, in 1975, Saatchi & Saatchi had merged with a stock-market-listed agency called Compton, part of the larger Compton Advertising of New York. The deal gave the New York operation 26 per cent of the merged entity – and Saatchi & Saatchi access to a juicy list of clients, including Procter & Gamble and Rowntree Mackintosh. It also meant that Saatchi & Saatchi had gone public.

Around this time, the company gained a sharp young financial director in the form of Martin Sorrell, educated at Cambridge and Harvard. Sorrell's business acumen would help the Saatchis realize their increasingly ambitious expansion plans. As if to confirm that an era of growth and prosperity was about to begin, the agency moved out of its Regent Street base and into Compton's larger offices in Charlotte Street.

In 1982 Saatchi & Saatchi won the British Airways account – which was to become one of its signature pieces of business. The first TV commercial was genuinely spectacular. It began with an ominous shadow passing over the streets of Britain as if a giant spaceship was about to touch down. People emerged from their houses to peer anxiously up at the sky. Finally, the entire island of Manhattan came in to land at Heathrow Airport. ‘Every year,' the endline explained, ‘British Airways flies more people across the Atlantic than the entire population of Manhattan.'

The grandiose TV spot was in proportion to the magnitude of Saatchi & Saatchi's global ambitions. The eighties had begun.

07

Eighties extravagance

‘A question of prestige'

T
he 1980s are often regarded as the golden age of TV advertising. Cable television was in its infancy, expensive global campaigns were newly fashionable and agencies could afford the best directors, many of whom were honing their craft, creating shimmering images for music videos. Advertising and MTV – which launched in 1981 – pushed the products and the lifestyle that seduced a new breed of young, upwardly mobile consumers. This, then, was the time of the yuppie.

In the United States it was as if the world had been turned on its head – London's burgeoning creativity was inspiring Madison Avenue. ‘For a long while TV ads were little more than moving print ads,' said Phil Dusenberry, who was the creative powerhouse behind BBDO through this period and beyond. ‘I remember sitting in a darkened room in the 1970s looking at a bunch of ads from Britain and saying to myself: “This is the kind of stuff we should be doing!” It was so much more entertaining than most of the advertising that was coming out of the States at the time. TV advertising didn't really get into its stride until the 1980s. By 1984 it was really going places.'

But London ad agencies were indulging in more than just a frenzy of creativity. The entire restaurant and bar scene of Soho seemed to be catering solely to media and advertising people – and to those who wanted to bathe in their champagne-tinted glory. Smart young agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi and Bartle Bogle Hegarty had chosen Soho as a base over the advertising industry's previous centres of gravity, Mayfair and Covent Garden. This was mainly because all the cutting rooms and photography studios were in Soho – the area's traditional status as a red-light district, still tawdry around the edges, meant that minimal rents were charged for maximal spaces. Soho, effectively, became London's Madison Avenue.

Neil French, a well-known copywriter who worked at the London agency Holmes Knight Ritchie in the late seventies and early eighties, says nostalgically, ‘I guess what made the era special was that so many erudite and talented blokes happened to be in the right place at the right time, when the art of communication was limited to press, posters, and TV – with radio if you knew a famous comedian to deliver the script. Life was so much simpler, and the only distractions were the pubs, the Zanzibar, and hordes of ra-ra skirts.'

Writing for
The Independent
, Stephen Bayley referred to the ‘Porsche-driving, champagne-drinking, coke-snorting image of 1980s advertising' (‘Goodbye to all that', 22 December 1996). Recalling the era, Bayley pointed out: ‘As UK advertising agencies battled to win the increasingly large number of multinational, billion-dollar accounts that decided to centralize their business in London during the 1980s, entertaining clients became a high priority. So, in due course, did entertaining staff. An agency's capacity to party came to symbolise its capacity to do everything else: win business, attract the best staff, make advertisements… It was all a question of prestige.'

An article in
Campaign
a few years later featured anonymous accounts of unwise behaviour. ‘My creative director at the time used to drink gin as if it were tap water,' said one art director. ‘After all, how can you come up with a great campaign or a unique idea unless you're under the influence of some form of mind-altering drug?' A young personal assistant stated that when she entered the advertising industry, in around 1982, ‘cocaine was considered a relatively harmless drug' (‘The plague of addiction', 2 October 1992).

For the majority of people in the business, however, the 1980s were more about cash than coke. In the decade from 1978, total spend on advertising in the UK grew by 315 per cent. It was a time of mega-mergers, going public and achieving global reach. And at the centre of it all was Saatchi & Saatchi. As Stephen Bayley wrote, ‘Everything the agency did in those days was larger, brasher and more confident than anyone else.'

The Saatchi saga continues

In the spring of 1986 a salivating article in
Time
magazine commented: ‘In this era of the entrepreneur, nearly everyone and his brother are thinking big. But Charles and Maurice Saatchi, London's most successful
admen, are thinking gargantuan' (‘The British admen are coming!', 28 April). It confirmed that the brothers were on track to turn Saatchi & Saatchi into the biggest advertising agency in the world.

The main subject of the article was the Saatchis' ‘estimated US $100 million acquisition' of the US agency Backer & Spielvogel, best known for its Miller Lite ads. The deal put Saatchi & Saatchi at the number three position in the listing of the world's biggest agencies, behind Japan's Dentsu and the Madison Avenue monolith Young & Rubicam. The same piece defined the media image of the brothers. ‘The reclusive Charles drives to his office every day accompanied only by his pet Schnauzer and often spends his lunch break playing chess,' it claimed. ‘The more outgoing Maurice has excelled in courting outside financing for the company's rapid growth.'

Whether the image was accurate or not, it was the one that became fixed in the minds of journalists: Charles busy creating behind the scenes, while the more extrovert Maurice, with his trademark heavy-framed spectacles, fronted the company. They were the most famous admen in Britain, running an organization that was no longer a mere agency, but a global advertising empire. Their motto was ‘Nothing is impossible'; and it seemed to be the case.

As well as Backer & Spielvogel, the group snapped up another US agency, Dancer Fitzgerald, and the giant Ted Bates Advertising – a deal that cost it US $450 million. It also bought management consultants, researchers and direct marketing operations. Its standard policy was to pay half the asking price up front and the rest in instalments, ensuring the loyalty of existing management for a fixed period.

By the end of 1986 Saatchi & Saatchi PLC had spent US $1 billion acquiring 37 companies. It had 18,000 employees in 500 offices across 65 countries. But the Americans had grown wary of the group, which had waded into the stable, cloistered environment of Madison Avenue and begun dismantling and reconstructing agencies. As a result of these reshuffles, clients occasionally found themselves in bed with their competitors. Some of them leapt right out again.

In 1987 – in a move that in hindsight seems to typify the excesses of the decade – Saatchi & Saatchi decided to buy a bank. It approached Midland, the fourth largest bank in Britain. The overture was summarily rejected, to derisive asides from the City. This setback prefigured a turning of the tide for Saatchi & Saatchi. In September 1987, the stock market crashed.

For a while it looked as though Saatchi & Saatchi would weather the storm – then all hell broke loose. Alison Fendley writes: ‘In 1988 Saatchi & Saatchi was… the biggest advertising group in the world. Three years later, its shares had lost 98 per cent of their value and the company was no longer number one.' The advertising business was experiencing its worst slump since the war and the Saatchi organization was being dragged down with it. In 1989, after 18 years of consecutive growth, the company issued its first profits warning.

Although, like Charles, Maurice had sold some of his shares in the company, he was still chairman and CEO. Instead of walking away from the wreckage – as both of them could easily have done – the brothers sought outside help. They brought in Robert Louis-Dreyfus and Charles Scott, from a Pennsylvania-based research company called IMS, as respectively chief executive and finance director. The two newcomers accepted the challenge of bringing the group back from the brink – and Scott remained to take on the role of chief executive in 1993 when Louis-Dreyfus was lured away to help the ailing German sportswear firm Adidas.

According to Alison Fendley, the relationship between Maurice Saatchi and Charles Scott became strained, as Saatchi worried that Scott was not doing enough to put the company back on the right track. In the end, though, it was not this uneasy partnership that forced Maurice to leave the agency he had co-founded – but American shareholder activism. A group of rebel stockholders represented by David Herro decided that in order for the company to start over again, Maurice Saatchi had to go. His impressive salary, his flamboyant lifestyle and his tense relationship with Charles Scott were all produced as evidence against him. Acting in his favour was the support of important clients – including British Airways and Mars – and many members of staff, who saw him as the figurehead and brand identity of the company.

It was not enough to convince the shareholders. In January 1995, the news emerged that Maurice had been ousted in a boardroom coup. The media lapped up the story – after all, Maurice Saatchi had always been their favourite adman – and even the satirical
Private Eye
magazine paid him a backhanded compliment with the sardonic headline, ‘Man with glasses leaves job'.

Maurice Saatchi did not let matters lie. Shortly after his ousting,
Time
magazine reminded its readers of the first line of the novel
Damage
, written by his wife, the bestselling novelist Josephine Hart: ‘Damaged
people are dangerous, they know they can survive' (‘Damage and Destruction', 23 January 1995). And so he did. Saatchi still had loyal friends, in the form of Jeremy Sinclair – who had been with the agency since the Cramer Saatchi era – Bill Muirhead, and David Kershaw, an account executive who had risen through the ranks to become head of the London agency. They quickly began drawing up plans for Saatchi's return as a partner in a new agency. Charles, now more embroiled in the world of art than in that of advertising, lent his support to the business. After operating for a brief spell under the name The New Saatchi Agency, M&C Saatchi sprang to its feet in 1995 as an international agency, with offices in London and New York. One of the first things it did was to win back the Saatchis' most iconic account, British Airways.

Today, in the typically self-contradictory fashion of the advertising industry, two Saatchi-branded entities exist: Saatchi & Saatchi and M&C Saatchi. Those who know the background to the story can tell them apart – anybody else has a right to feel confused. For identification purposes, M&C Saatchi bills itself as a younger and more dynamic agency, specializing in ‘brutally simple' ideas. In 2004, it floated 39 per cent of the agency on AIM in order to fund its expansion into mainland Europe. At the time of writing, it has 26 offices in 18 countries: ‘As few offices as necessary rather than as many as possible,' its website comments, as if to distance itself from its estranged cousin.

But one thing neither of the Saatchi entities have is the British Airways account, which M&C Saatchi lost in 2002 – to an agency called Bartle Bogle Hegarty.

Jeans genius from BBH

Saatchi & Saatchi was not the only advertising agency attracting attention from the media in the 1980s. Another, much smaller operation was grabbing eyeballs with a series of remarkable TV commercials for Levi's 501 jeans. The ads created a retro fantasyland – a 1950s that never existed – full of pouting girls in tight mohair sweaters and sharp-cheekboned boys with pomaded hair. The glossy images were accompanied by luscious soul hits that, having been discovered by a new generation, zoomed to the top of the charts. The most celebrated ad in the series was called ‘Launderette'. To the sound of Marvin Gaye singing ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine', a young man clad in jeans and a black T-shirt sauntered
into a launderette. Without further ado, he stripped down to his pristine white boxer shorts and put his clothing in one of the machines. Then he settled down to read a magazine, to the delight of female onlookers.

For something that lasted only a minute, the ad had a disproportionate effect on British popular culture. It brought back not only Levi's, but fifties fashion and soul music. As an unexpected bonus, it got men out of Y-fronts and into boxer shorts. Young women everywhere heaved sighs of gratitude. ‘To this day,' admits John Hegarty, ‘I'm not sure what we sold more of: jeans or boxer shorts. Ironically, we were originally going to put him in Y-fronts, but the advertising standards people thought it might be too risqué. Boxer shorts were less revealing – and they added to the authenticity of the ad.'

When
Campaign
was debating who to choose as its ‘man of the decade' at the end of the eighties, it veered towards John Hegarty. ‘Of the many advertising rules set in stone,' the magazine wrote, ‘this is the most deeply-etched: “Thou shalt not set trends: thou shalt only follow them.” In the 1980s, that stone tablet was split in two… BBH told us what jeans to wear; sent records to the top of the charts; and produced commercials whose launches became media events for a national press suddenly obsessed with advertising and admen' (‘Who is the man of the decade?', 6 January 1990).

Hegarty complains that photos make him look a little too craggy these days (‘I see them and think: “Who is that person?”'), but with what one could still describe as a mop of unruly hair, a broad smile that sets up pleasant creases beside his eyes and a voice calibrated for persuasion, he's very much the charismatic creative. As we know, Hegarty began his career at Benton & Bowles. He'd originally wanted to be a painter. ‘I went to art school at Hornsey, but when I got there I was disappointed to discover that I was unlikely to become the next Picasso,' he says. ‘One of my teachers, a wonderful man called Peter Green, told me I had lots of good ideas and that I should become a graphic designer. So I went to the design department of the LCP [the London College of Printing; now the London College of Communication], where I was rather perplexed to find that they all wanted to be artists.'

Fortunately, Hegarty found another mentor in John Gillard, who took a group of promising students under his wing: ‘He introduced me to the work of Doyle Dane Bernbach, which for me was a seminal moment. It brought together all the things I'd been thinking and I suddenly realized, “This is what I want to do.” It was as if a switch had
been thrown and a light had come on. It showed that advertising could be witty and smart – but also inclusive.'