David Nobay

One of Australia's best-known admen, David 'Nobby' Nobay is leading Droga5's expansion into Australia. He made the switch to Droga5 from Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney, where he was executive creative director.

I was born in London 41 years ago, but by the time I was a teenager I'd been through 20 schools - from Southampton to Canada and ultimately Liverpool, which is where I stayed the longest. My father was a professor of economics and bounced between different university chairs.

Ironically, I was chucked out of my economics class at secondary school, even though my teacher was quite a fan of my father's work. By then, my dad had left us and I was living with my mum, who was a social worker.

My dad didn't make a dramatic exit, he just faded out of our lives. To me, it all seemed quite natural because he was away so much anyway. My mother is always asking me questions about whether I was scarred and wounded, and trying to find buried meaning in everything, but the truth is that I had a really happy childhood.

Academically, I was the opposite from my father. The only lessons I didn't fail were English and art, although our entire class had our final national art exams dismissed for cheating. Our teacher, a fantastic old bloke who had taught Lennon when he was at my school, conveniently decided to go for a four-hour smoke when we had finished our two-hour life drawing exam. Naturally, we all took the opportunity to spend a few extra hours perfecting our drawings. I guess they ended up a bit too highly polished and Quarry Bank's entries were publicly penalised. But I'd already been accepted by Liverpool Art College, so it didn't really matter.

In those days, if you were a Scouser [Liverpudlian] - even an honorary one like me - you wanted to be a footballer or a musician. I enjoyed football and played in the Sunday pub league (which was great because you learned how to box). But being in a band was where it was at - especially if you wanted to get laid, which at 14 was pretty much all we wanted in life. So I started playing drums in a band at school.

When John Lennon was shot, Yoko Ono and a film crew came to our school to see where the original Quarrymen had started. They wanted us to play for a documentary, but we were all sagging off [truanting] that day and missed our chance for stardom. Timing is everything. Funnily enough, when I played in an adult band a couple of years later we did the odd gig at the Cavern at lunchtimes for Japanese tourists. I remember it was small and claustrophobic. In the end, I fell out of love with the drums and sold them to run off to art college in Newcastle. Unless you have roadies, drumming is tough. You're lugging your kit in and out of vans at midnight while the guitarist is getting drunk and pulling the girls.

We were never that good, although we did back The Waterboys in Liverpool, plus Katrina and the Waves once. I still cringe when I hear Walking on Sunshine.

At one point, before he left, my father moved to Chicago for a year. I think I was about 10 years old. He sent gifts from time to time and one was a book by John Buscema called How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. It was a fantastic step-by-step guide to drawing comic superheroes, muscles, perspectives: the whole nine yards. It changed my life. I think a few friends suspected I was gay, as I spent most of my schooldays doodling heavily muscled torsos at the back of class.

Halfway through my art direction and copywriting course I was hired by Ogilvy & Mather Direct in London as a junior copywriter after a stint of work experience there. At the time it seemed like a great move - living in London at 19 with some money. It took a year for me to realise that writing mailpacks for Amex wasn't quite the same as making TV spots for Levi's, but by then it was too late: I was branded a 'direct guy', which in the late 1980s was a real sentence if you had any aspirations to move above the line.

I must have been pretty good at writing letters, because I was promoted to creative group head at only 20 years old - the youngest in the worldwide group. I think it was my creative director's way of hanging me out to dry for being such a cocky little shit (which I was), but I hung in there for a couple more years. One of my art directors was Andy Greenaway, who's one of the most awarded advertising creatives in the world, so I guess I'm not the only one to have made it out of direct in one piece.

In retrospect, learning to write those mailpacks was the best scholarship you could hope for in terms of today's interactive world. So many of the rudiments are the same: connection, involvement, pushing for a response. I used to keep my direct marketing background quiet, but now I'm the first to celebrate it. It's the guys who've been making TV spots for 20 years who are now rewriting their resumes.

It reminds me of the way that chefs in Europe have managed to elevate the status of offal. You now go to Marco Pierre White in London and pay a hundred pounds for some innards. That's like direct marketing: it's suddenly got to the head table.

I've been called Nobby since I was a kid. In England, Nobby was quite a popular post-war nickname, even if your name wasn't Nobay. Nobby Stiles was a football legend, and in Australia Nobby's Nuts is our favourite bar snack.

Nobay is an odd name anyway. I think that somewhere down the line it was anglicised. In the 1950s, when my father came to England from a coffee farm in Kenya, things weren't particularly easy for immigrants. His full name is Avelino-Romeo DaSilva Nobay, and at that time he carried a Portuguese passport. But the locals quickly shortened all that foreignness to good old Bob, which is what he goes by now. Sad really, but those were the times. I'm not sure how much they've improved but I think we're moving forward. Christ, the US might even get a black President.

I used to say I wasn't political, but these days how can you not be? I was living in downtown New York on 9/11 - the day the world changed. Since then, I've come to despise George Bush, or at least what he stands for. He's slickly sanitised so many ugly things, like the submersion of an independent culture in Iraq. Ultimately, that's his skill: simplifying and sanitising issues that are actually far too complicated to be dumbed down into Fox-friendly soundbites.

If I'm honest, though, isn't that what we do in advertising, at least some of the time? Packaged foods and packaged answers are still the most popular fodder. As Orwell once wrote: "The public are swine. Advertising is the stick that rattles the swill bucket."

I had my own agency in Melbourne in the 1990s - Wells Nobay McDowall. Actually, the French group EURO RSCG owned it, but I pretended it was mine and we had a lot of fun spending their money. In the end I returned one day to find my office locked and an overseas CFO standing outside with an awkward smile and a big white envelope.

I don't hold that incident against the French. The stepfather of my children (Oscar and Ella) is French and a great guy. They live with him and my ex in the south of France, conveniently close to Cannes.

I said I'd never get married again, then I saw Nikoll after only a few months back in Sydney. Bang! All change. When Oscar and Ella met her in London they advised me to move fast before her eyesight came back. I rammed that ring on her finger shortly afterwards. Smart kids. Expensive, but smart.

In turn, Nikoll advised me on the Droga5 move when I was considering taking big bucks for a major role with BBDO. I was again advised that the vision of somebody important was temporarily blurred: "Team up with him quick, darling, before his eyesight comes back."

I think most people would describe me as someone who likes to have a laugh. It's not all of who I am, but it's the thing that most defines me. I hate ugly silences and tend to be the first to make a joke. When you go to 20 schools, you either use your fists or your sense of humour to fit in, and I somehow found it easy to use humour. It's obviously a benefit in this job.

A lot of creative directors think that to be serious about the work, you have to be seen to be serious. I believe the exact opposite: great ideas come from people who are unafraid of tripping over. When I work with a new creative department or team the very first thing I do is get them to relax, and make them see that I truly care about them and respect them. You'll then see the standard of the work rocket, because they become comfortable with exposing their most stupid, strategically flawed ideas, safe in the knowledge that you won't take it personally. That's where the gems come from, nestled in there among the stupidity, crap and laughter.

For most of my career, the lubricator has been booze. I guess if you ask around, that may also be seen as a defining characteristic. It's something I've wrestled with a few times, especially when I've been in a place where I feel creatively trapped and confined.

I stopped drinking a few months ago and it was funny to see how many people were quick to admit that they, too, were 'giving it a rest'. In Australia, going out for a beer is such a part of the culture; it's akin to shaking hands. But it also has a clear downside, especially if your job entails shaking a lot of hands during the day, as mine does.

I came up in the business right at the end of the age of the long lunch. They were great times - indulgent and crass, for sure, but I'd be a liar if I didn't say I loved every minute of it. As young creatives, we were conveniently insulated from the realities of the business and we were encouraged to indulge in excess. We were performing seals, even if we were too happily stoned to see it then. Of course, it also served to marginalise us. No wonder the fucking bean counters took over in the 1990s; the rest of us were too drunk to turn up.

It's the opposite now, thank God. The accountants are still running most of the business but they're starting to look very out of place in this slimmed down creative industry. Most of them have even stopped wearing ties, although bean counters in t-shirts is much worse. I think it's the result of a lot of heavyweight creative guys like Droga, Goodby, Bogusky, Lavoie, Byrnes, Beattie and Waites taking the reins and articulating about business just as deftly as they once described storyboards. Once clients see that, they never go back. Why would they? The bean counter is instantly obsolete or, at the very least, scrambling to redefine what the fuck he does and how it adds value.

The upside of working in the States is the budgets and accessibility. You can pitch to just about anyone you want. Your childhood heroes are suddenly on the end of a conference call, talking about wanting to work with you... it's insane, really, very trippy.

The downside is that those same huge budgets shrink a lot of clients' balls. So you may be working with a real artist, but the script has been focus-grouped to death and there's nowhere free to explore on the day. Tony Kaye once said to me when pitching on a TV spot: "What do you want? My 'A', 'B' or 'C' game?" The C game means he'll shoot the board as is, no changes; the B is where he'll suggest a few changes, but stick to the basic script; and the A is where he really pushes the idea and lets go. He was obviously trying to be accommodating, but I found it so sad. Too often, that's the hard reality of working in America: an A guy working on a C job.

I'm naturally restless, but not when it comes to where I want to live. I get on with Aussies better than anyone else and always have, even when I lived abroad. The whole relaxed, no bullshit thing may seem like a cliché, but it's really true.

We heard we'd won the entire Fosters VB business while we were still looking for furniture and phones for the new Droga5 office. It was insane; you couldn't write a better start. The appointment threw a lot of people. If Australia's biggest beer could pick three guys in a garage instead of one of three of the biggest networks in the world (DDB, TBWA and BBDO), then no one's safe. Equally, everything's possible.

Women in advertising? There are plenty: my managing director and partner at Droga5 -at least, she was the last time I saw her - and my last business partner, the CEO of Saatchis Sydney.

I think Aussie chicks are naturals at advertising (as are the Kiwis, who are even more feral). They have a real knock-around sense of humour; rather than blush at a comment, they'll go even further and it's you who ends up feeling uncomfortable. I don't think that combative character necessarily exists in America. Women there would be more likely to run to the human resources department and seek litigation.

I must be getting old, because I'm beginning to be attracted to gardening. The more shit you pile on plants, the better they get, which is not quite the same as the creative departments I've worked with. Fresh mint is my favourite.

My wife and I visited the Joan Miró gallery in Barcelona after the Cannes festival a couple of years ago. It had been Saatchi Sydney's best show ever, but I'd left feeling deflated. Awards are an important benchmark but are such a game. Anyway, in Barcelona I was so inspired to see that Miró's bravest, most vibrant work was in the last decade of his life; as though he was reborn and feared nothing at the end. His weakest work was as a young man, when he was listening to his peers. I found it very telling.

I was brought up as a Catholic, but when I was a teenager I started to dabble quite a bit with LSD, and somewhere along the line decided I had a new take on religion. Suffice to say, I'm convinced that this life is definitely not the beginning or the end. I think we arrive knowing everything and slowly start to forget and reinvent. Look at the wisdom in a newborn's eyes.

I'm not afraid of death, although I'm not that keen on pain. I want to be cremated, not buried. Nikoll wants to put some of my ashes in a necklace and carry me around, which I think is weird, but I won't be here to complain.

In the end, what really matters is… an honest response.