Phillip Adams (5 page)

Advertising agencies in those days were havens for interesting, creative people. Monahan Dayman Adams provided a wonderful environment for its staff. Even now, more than thirty years later, people tell Brian Monahan that their time at MDA was the happiest and best of their working lives. The agency's engine room was the bar. You could help yourself to a drink at any time and there was no charge. You would find people there until early morning and they would still have their work ready by 9 am. Many of its staff went on to have tremendous careers in films and other creative industries. But Adams didn't drink at the bar. In fact, he hardly ever drank. After work, he'd go straight home.

The MDA partners, their staff, clients and other invited guests such as politicians and media personalities also had regular office lunches together — but only for about ninety minutes and fuelled by mineral water, which was replacing wine at business lunches. Adams was the life of the party, holding forth with political anecdotes.

Board meetings were also a lot of fun. Phillip would occasionally seize the opportunity to lie down on the couch and look as if he was asleep, but at a strategic moment would make a pertinent comment. Lyle Dayman told me, ‘Phillip sometimes actually fell asleep during board meetings, although I have to admit that I used to relieve the boredom myself by drawing sketches of the other board members.'

At this time, Adams was doing a great deal in his life, such as writing columns for
The Age
, which riled some of MDA's clients, while others found his views challenging and entertaining. He was also making films and working on government committees.

The partners were earning big money, which made left-winger Adams feel guilty. He started to despise the advertising business that was making him wealthy and expunged his guilt by planning campaigns for the good of society. In 1975, he conceived the ‘Life. Be in it' campaign for the Victorian Department of Youth, Sport and Recreation. Graphic designer Alex Stitt brought the campaign to life with cartoon characters, particularly a lethargic, beer-bellied, middle-aged couch potato called Norm. The Victorian Government launched the campaign in 1975, initially urging people to get out and get exercise, although later the campaign was expanded to promote quality of life.

By 1977 the campaign had become national, supported by all Australian governments, and fat, middle-aged Norm became such an anti-hero cult figure that he took part in the 2001 Sydney Centenary of Federation Parade. The Macquarie Dictionary of Slang describes Norm as ‘an average citizen addicted to watching sport on television'. In 1981, federal funding for the campaign ended and ‘Life. Be in it' became a not-for-profit company. You can send Norm an email at
www.lifebeinit.org
to find more about it and suggest how Australians could become more active. Perhaps the campaign should be modernised and stepped up as it is now 35 years old and many Australians have never seen it.

Another legendary campaign, devised by Adams in 1980, was ‘Slip! Slop! Slap!' for the Victorian Anti-Cancer Council. Peter Best, who wrote the music for the original commercial, told me that the slogan was originally ‘Slip! Slop! Shove!'

‘But,' he said, ‘“Slip” (on a shirt), “Slop” (on sunscreen) and “Slap” (on a hat) preserved the “Sl” sound each time.'

And so another widely recognised slogan sprang from the frontal lobe of Phillip Adams. Like ‘Life. Be in it', ‘Slip! Slop! Slap!' went national and has been adopted by all state cancer councils. Both campaigns were usually screened free of charge as community service announcements. ‘Slip! Slop! Slap!' was also used in New Zealand and Canada. The cartoon characters were again created by Alex Stitt, with Sid as an animated seagull. The ad has become Australia's longest-running commercial.

For another government initiative — planning a national campaign for disabled people — Adams spent a day in a wheelchair to experience what it was like to be disabled. He told me, ‘I learned more about being disabled in that day than ever before or since. I was sitting in an Adelaide office with other people planning the campaign when a man in a wheelchair came in. “Get in the chair,” he told me, so I did. “Now go downstairs and see what it's like.” So I did. At the lift, I could hardly reach the button and the lift doors nearly closed on me. Downstairs, there were steps leading to the street.

‘I might have been at Niagara Falls,' Adams said. ‘I cheated and got out of the wheelchair and walked down the stairs, so people stared and me and probably thought I was trying to fool them that I was disabled. Then on the footpath, there weren't ramps at the kerbs like there are these days and I had to get out of the chair again. It was an amazing day, but I learned what it is to be disabled and it helped us plan the ad campaign.'

Adams undertook more and more ‘do-good' campaigns because he enjoyed using advertising to do things other than sell products. The origin of one campaign was the fact that few women were presenting for breast-cancer examinations and research found they feared that neither they nor their men would be able to cope with a breast operation, in the same way that men feared losing their penis. Women complained that when they found a lump in a breast, their doctors often brushed it off. So a breast-cancer campaign planned by Adams and others used drama to show men how to treat women's anxieties, friends how to be supportive and doctors how to be understanding.

But not all the memorable campaigns were for not-for-profit organisations. Every time Adams sees the Qantas slogan ‘Spirit of Australia' he remembers giving birth to it; now he wants to take it back because he says Qantas doesn't deserve it.

***

As global brands reached Australia and started to dominate sales, their advertising agencies bought local agencies and began to dominate billings, which made it harder for local agencies to pick up anything except the crumbs. About eighty per cent of ad bookings were taken by international agencies, which made MDA's success and continued growth even more remarkable. The agency that had started in one room generated an extraordinary client list and opened offices not only in all Australian capital cities but also in London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore and Auckland. Adams counteracted his feelings of guilt for working on commercial campaigns for global brands by planning social engineering campaigns against racism and smoking.

In 1974, when he was only 35 and still at MDA, he said in the first of two oral histories recorded by the National Library, ‘Advertising is a despicable, irritating, shallow sort of business, but I think its history will be interesting. I think it's going to eventually be used as an educational force against consumption, against the very things it's been used for in the past.

‘In a sense, what is advertising? It can be used to persuade people that racial prejudice is bad just as easily as to sell detergent. It can be used, as it is in America, to discourage consumption just as simply as it is used to encourage it.
Sesame Street
uses advertising technology for educational purposes — short spans of attention, lots of colour, and lots of technique as in television commercials — to keep people interested.'

Adams' criticism of advertising must have made his partners and workmates squirm and point out that he made a lot of money from it. He continued in his oral history, ‘Advertising has to be cleaned up and the sooner the better. I'd like to see stringent government regulations not only on cigarettes but also on alcohol and some other products. I am against advertising being used in politics because it is dangerous. Although I've done a number of political campaigns, I've also lectured and written against applying advertising techniques to politics. I'd like to see Australian laws preventing political advertising, mainly because it makes parties so vulnerable to business interests funding the campaigns. It's not the case in Britain, where there is televised free political program time but no such thing as televised political advertising. That approach should be followed here.'

By the early 1980s, Phillip was sick of the ad industry and exhausted not only from it but additionally from film-making, writing columns — even if he enjoyed the activity — and sitting on many Victorian and federal government bodies. In 1983, MDA's partners floated the agency on the stock exchange, then bought Alan ‘Mo' Morris and Allan ‘Jo' Johnston's Mojo agency, which had made the ads ‘Put Another Shrimp on the Barbie', ‘C'mon Aussie, C'mon', ‘I Feel Like a Toohey's' and Paul Hogan's ‘Anyhow, have a Winfield'. In 1989, Mojo-MDA, with billings of $500 million, received a takeover offer from Chiat-Day of Madison Avenue, resulting in $A77 million being spread largely among the three partners.

Brian Monahan bought a cosmetics business. He thought it would be a simple marketing exercise to crank up the brand, Natural Glow. He didn't understand the manufacturing, distribution and retailing problems but later found a CEO with industry knowledge and the brand, now called Natural Glamour, is sold in all Kmart and Priceline stores and several thousand chemist shops. Lyle Dayman bought a farm at Yea in Victoria and later returned to his home state of South Australia, where he has a house on the beach at Somerton Park. He paints landscapes and streetscapes for his own pleasure and his paintings are sold in local galleries.

Adams' campaign, in columns and in the Labor Party, against televised political ads led to the Hawke Government (1983-91) banning any commercials of less than two minutes' duration so that parties could not ‘hit and run'. The networks were also required to give free time during election campaigns. Adams and his supporters were pleased that they had actually changed the laws, but then the High Court overturned the laws on the grounds that they were against free speech.

Adams has maintained friendships he made in his thirty-five advertising years, particularly with Peter Best, Brian Monahan and Bruce Petty. Peter Best told me Adams wrote an email to him a little while ago that said, ‘Here we were, two old lefties who put a lot of time and energy into helping advertisers get richer — talk about supping with the Devil. But we had fun in advertising and when it ceased being fun, we both got out.'

Chapter Four:
Having Fun Making Films

Phillip Adams told me during one of our hour-long sessions at his office at Paddington in Sydney, ‘I bought a clockwork movie camera for sixty quid, but it was useless.' We were discussing his first forays into film-making, which sprang from his experiences making commercials at the Melbourne advertising agency Briggs and James in the early 1960s. He and a colleague, Brian Robinson, wondered whether, if they could make commercials, could they make movies? A few loonies and brave souls were experimenting with film; why shouldn't they join them? They had to put up their own money, of course — hence the sixty quid expenditure.

‘The camera ran for twenty seconds and then stopped,' Adams continued. ‘So you could have no shot longer than twenty seconds. And we couldn't record sound. We edited literally with scissors and sticky tape. We had no gear and when we needed light interiors, we would borrow emergency lighting from road gangs. And when I say “borrow”, I mean we borrowed it and took it back later, hoping no-one had noticed.'

With the most primitive equipment, Brian and Phillip started to make a feature film. It cost them six thousand dollars, took six years of their spare time and was the story of a love affair between a kindergarten teacher, Jill, and a bikie tow-truck driver, Jack — a story in nursery rhymes with a voiceover reading the rhyme.

It was launched in 1970 and called
Jack and Jill: A Postscript
. The proposition was that, simply by using nursery rhymes and stringing them together, they could make a feature film. It opened with a voiceover, Phillip's then wife Rosemary, saying ‘Mary, Mary quite contrary', and you saw a statue of the Virgin Mary. Then with ‘How does your garden grow?' the camera zoomed out to reveal a cemetery. Every nursery rhyme told part of the story. Adams told me, ‘Bugger me, the film won the Grand Prix at an international film festival, a modest one, the Adelaide-Auckland Film Festival, but ­nevertheless a kosher film festival.'

Jack and Jill
was the first feature film to win the Australian Film Institute Best Film award. Years later, in his oral history for the National Library, Adams called
Jack and Jill
‘an abysmal thing, greatly embarrassing to look at in retrospect but with a lot of innovations, both in the way it was put together and the narrative style of using nursery rhymes.'

It was the first of fifteen feature films that Adams made or helped make in the sixties, seventies and early eighties, mostly as executive producer or producer. Amongst these films were
The Naked Bunyip, Hearts and Minds, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie
(released in 1972, directed by Bruce Beresford and the most successful Australian film up to that time),
Don's Party
(1976);
The Getting of Wisdom
(1978);
Lonely Hearts
as executive producer (1982);
We of the
Never Never
as executive producer;
Grendel Grendel Grendel
as producer (1981); and
Fighting Back
as executive
producer (1982).

Many other people had tried in vain to revive the Australian film industry after its succession of booms and slumps since the 1906
Story of the Kelly Gang
became the world's first feature film. Adams saw a great opportunity when John Gorton became Liberal prime minister in 1968; Gorton was also the minister for the arts. Adams didn't know Gorton, but his friend the quiz champion and then schoolteacher Barry Jones did, for the oddest reason. Jones had the first open-line radio program in Australia and also a low-rating program on Channel Seven called
Encounter.
He managed to have Gorton appear on both programs and it gave Gorton's role as prime minister a degree of credibility. One thing led to another: Gorton smiled on Barry Jones as his lucky rabbit's foot and Jones' reward was to be invited to The Lodge. Gorton loved American westerns, but he was also worried about foreign ownership and selling the farm, and Jones and Adams saw this as their way in.