The Way I See It: Peter Souter

In 2012 Peter Souter was appointed chairman and chief creative officer for TBWAUK Group and quickly hired his former star creatives Sean Doyle and Walter Campbell, having worked with the latter on Guinness Surfer, for which he feels awkward about having a creative credit. Previously, he’s been a president of D&AD and was handed the reins of AMV after hitchhiking his way into the company, literally. He’s also spent time away from advertising to concentrate on his other life as a successful writer (for TV, film and radio) but now he juggles both worlds. Here he tells Joe Lancaster about his dad’s superior Geiger counters, recalls being trapped in a radioactive toolbox, reveals that dyslexia is a superpower he shares with Jamie Oliver and confesses to being a creative vampire.

I was born in Leicester, England, in 1962. My mum was a telephonist and my dad worked in the nuclear power industry. I’ve got four older brothers and if my dad hadn’t had so many kids he probably could’ve made a decent living, but there were five of us and my mum kept adopting people and all kinds of shit, so we were pretty poor.

The only thing I remember about my childhood is when Chernobyl happened. I said, ‘Dad, have you seen this thing, it’s on fire?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it? We could sell a load of Geiger counters over there’. He went [to the Ukraine], and the first thing the guys there did was compare their Geiger counters to his because theirs were set about ten times too low. Their lives depended on how long they spent in the glowing thing and my dad’s [Geiger counter] said, ‘Get out of here now’, while theirs said, ‘No, you’re fine’. My dad was a fantastic fella.

Dad had these yellow boxes that held the lead boxes that held the very, very low-level radioactive stuff that he dealt with, but he used to keep his tools in these fucking things. They were about three feet by two and said ‘DANGER – radioactivity’ on the outside and my brothers used to think it was funny to empty out the tools and put me in; they were exactly the right size for a child’s coffin. It was probably only for a few seconds but they used to sit on the lid and tell me that when I got out I would glow in the dark. For some reason I’m claustrophobic, I don’t know why. 

I’m slightly dyslexic and I view it as a superpower. My sons are dyslexic and they’re really brilliant. It’s an ability to see the world in three dimensions and (if you can get) through school... I worked with Jamie Oliver for a long time on the Sainsbury’s campaign and he’s dyslexic but also a genius. He can’t really read – I don’t think he’s read a book in his life – [Oliver recently read his first book, aged 38] and he’s one of the world’s bestselling authors. I think dyslexia is a wonderful, slightly odd way of seeing the world and couldn’t recommend it highly enough. I can’t spell to save my life but there are machines for that now.

I did a graphic design degree at St Martin’s School of Art in London and I thought I was a typographer because I kept solving the problem in type. Then one of my tutors said, ‘You’re a copywriter’ and I thought she meant I was a shit designer, which I was incidentally, but she said, ‘No, you’re solving all of these problems in words’, and because I’m from a working-class background and because I thought writers went to Oxford I didn’t really understand what she meant. 

I used to go and sit in the Westminster City Library where they had every D&AD annual going back to 1962, the year I was born, and I just read them and read them as if they were novels. I can remember sitting there thinking, ‘When I’ve got a job I’ll come back and sit here [and see my work in the books]’. Then one day I ended up being President of D&AD. 

Looking at the D&AD annuals I worked out what was good and everything I liked was pretty much written by David Abbott, or somebody who worked for him. He had this wonderful little Volvo campaign where there’s a guy holding a hitchhiker sign and it says, ‘Cambridge, Volvo preferred’. I worked out where David lived and stood outside his house with a sign reading, ‘Abbott Mead Vickers, Volvo preferred’ and the first day he drove past me in a Mercedes, the fucker. The second day I had a sign that read: ‘Abbott Mead Vickers, Mercedes preferred’. He picked me up and I got an interview. The only way in which this story doesn’t really work out is because my book wasn’t good enough. He said, ‘I like what you did but the work’s no good’. But three years later I went back with a better book and got the job and now I’ve got his job, ha ha! 

My first job was at Delaney Fletcher Delaney in 1985 and I was the best one there after about a year. I actually thoroughly recommend taking a not-so-good job and consequently feeling quite good about yourself because I got some confidence from doing that, whereas I think if I’d started at Lowe, or even Abbott Mead Vickers, I might have been a bit overwhelmed. 

I moved to Woollams Moira Gaskin O’Malley and then Wight Collins Rutherford Scott, where I started working with Paul Brazier. No disrespect to Robin Wight but we were just trying to get into Abbott Mead. That was all we cared about. It was 1990, we were 20-odd and we did a £30 million [Frank N Stein] campaign for the UK electricity privatisation and although it wasn’t great, our stuff was everywhere. Every poster, every TV station had the Frankenstein gag on and we sold about £5 billion in shares. In 1991 we snuck in a job as juniors at AMV and over the next five years we won a bunch of Pencils, then David [Abbott] made me creative director.  

Paul and I did the Volvo SIPPS campaign and a lot of the Economist posters [including Industrial Secrets] there but we were never as good as Walter [Campbell] and Tom [Carty]. I wouldn’t pretend that for a moment, but [when I became creative director and later executive creative director and deputy chairman] I think I was good at creating an environment in which people would want to do good work. I don’t ever say, ‘My idea’s better’. Sometimes with David, if you hadn’t written a really good line he’d write a better one, but I had grown up with Walter and Tom and Nick Worthington and all these fantastic creatives and the job was really just to make it so that they felt free to do something great. I realised that I should stop doing a poor man’s impersonation of David Abbott and be my own version. 

My name will eternally be on the credits for Guinness Surfer as creative director but I take absolutely no credit for it whatsoever. Walter showed it to me and I thought, ‘Yeah, that is a good idea’. I’m slightly ashamed of my little black Pencil but all I would say is that it’s for all the other days. It’s for creating the right circumstances in which somebody like Walter wants to work for you.

About six years ago, during Christmas, I had a really bad cold, but it was one of those colds where it’s just from the neck down, your head’s alright but you can’t move. I wrote a radio play because I thought it would be similar to [radio] advertising in that when you get started the one thing they’ll let you do is radio, nobody gives a monkeys about it, so you can write, produce, direct and do everything. I thought, ‘It must be the same in drama,’ forgetting there’s only one outlet for radio drama – Radio 4. There are five plays a week and 500 people going for them. But I took the former BBC head of drama out for lunch to show him my script and he ended up producing it.

In 2008 I left advertising to focus on writing radio and TV drama. I was pretty successful [creating a six-part TV series Married Single Other with ITV, as well as numerous other radio and theatre productions] but I was fascinated to discover that radio and screenwriting is about 20 per cent writing, 80 per cent selling. I spent most of my time pitching ideas and development. 

It was when my second radio play, Goldfish Girl, won the Tinniswood Award in 2009 that I thought, ‘I might as well have a go at telly’.

I met with Andy Harries, who produced the film The Queen, but he wasn’t very interested until I offered to write a pilot for free. It worked out well because when ITV commissioned [Married Single Other] I owned the show, so I was the executive producer and got a fantastic deal for a first-time writer. It was all because I didn’t let anybody have [ownership of] anything until someone else was prepared to pay for it. That way you retain both power and a little bit of creative control in a world where writers get treated like shit.

My television series, Married Single Other, pulled in six and a half million viewers for the first episode in 2010. It would’ve been lovely to do a second series but I’m a reasonable salesman and I convinced ITV to let me kill off the lead character at the end of the first series. I’m very proud of the last episode and I shouldn’t say it, but I think it’s really lovely the way it is. You follow her all the way through and if she didn’t quite die… Well, it’s like Homeland, I think he should have blown himself up in the first series and then it would have been the most fantastic show ever made. However, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t have liked to have made another series of Married Single Other but as it turns out, in a way, I’m kind of proud of my naivety. But my hot tip to TV writers is – don’t kill off your star if you want another series, it’s kind of dumb.

I’m like a fucking vampire – I need to feed off the creativity of other people and about two years in to scriptwriting I found that I was just sitting there at home thinking to myself, ‘This is not the way that I actually work’, I like to talk things over with someone. I used to find that by two o’clock in the afternoon I’d written all that I could have written, I’d called who I could call, I’d done the emails and there was literally nothing that I could do apart from wait for the kids to come home. I need more to do during the day.

The second time I got a TV gig, in 2012, [for All At Sea, a show set on board a ferry], I also got a call from Omnicom offering me this job [chairman and CCO for TBWAUK Group]. So, one [job] pays twice what the Prime Minister earns and the other has me wondering if they’ll make the show.

Although scriptwriting was fantastic and I did some things I’m really proud of, I’m temperamentally unsuited to working on my own. I think that I regret leaving Abbott Mead now because I think I could’ve done both, so it’s been really great to be back in a gang. The truth is that it hasn’t stopped me in the development process; I’m doing things with Ealing Studios and ITV at the moment, but all that’s happened is I do an [agency] job in between the gaps. 

[TBWAUK Group] was in a right old state when I joined. Ten years ago we had 60 accounts and we made £70 million and won every prize going and now we have 12 accounts and we make about £12 million and it’s my job to get the prizes back.  Apparently, something like 75 per cent of all turnarounds fail so I don’t feel massive pressure and it was still a good time to join.

I took over AMV when I was 32 and it was already fantastic, so my job was to not fuck it up and I think I did a decent job of maintaining what was already a brilliantly successful agency. What’s interesting here is I feel very energised by the fact that there’s quite a lot that needs to be put right and there are a lot of really young, really good people who’ve never been, in my estimation, led properly. I’ve been here 10 months now and we’ve just started to do some fantastic work.

I wouldn’t make any great claims for myself [as a creative] although I’ve done some good work, but I wish it was the other way round; I’d rather be Walter [Campbell] than me. But I think that I can manage Walter better than most people and the fact that he’s chosen to come back to work for me a second time, after he was leading creative at Anomaly, is one of the things I’m most proud of. That was when I knew this place was going to be alright, when we could get someone like him to come to TBWA.

When I told the press that Walter is earning more than me, it caused a stir but it’s like a footballer earning more than his manager. The manager can’t score the goals so he should earn less. I’m proud of the fact that Walter earns more; he should. However, I’m reasonably secure about what my contribution is too. 

When I first got to TBWA I muffed up a pitch. We did some really fantastic work for a very conservative client and I was stupid, I didn’t realise that they wanted something else and I should’ve done. That was probably the worst day of my career. It’s not necessarily my job to always flog good stuff, sometimes it’s my job to reel a client in and get to know them, you very rarely run the work you pitch, and I’d forgotten that a little bit. I can remember getting the call from them saying we hadn’t made it through to the second round. I don’t really like coming second, but I do not like coming fourth. But we’re now pulling in more new business than other UK agencies. 

One of the most attractive things about this job was the Apple account [held by TBWA’s Media Arts Lab]. I thought it was a really cool thing to be around. It’s kind of hard to break in though because the Apple team are in a separate part of the building which has retina recognition entry. I had my eyes lasered and the entry system didn’t work for me anymore, but I’m finding interesting ways to wriggle my way in there. 

My friend Ben Kay is the creative director on Apple and shows work directly to the client. Walter, Sean and I all worked on the new corporate stuff but they’re just not quite ready yet to let go. I don’t think it’s enough to have a white poster with the Apple product on it and one line anymore. They used to be the ‘other guy’ and now they’re ‘the guy’. I think it’s a very exciting time. We’re niggling away, trying to get to do something Walteresque.  

I think clients read faces more than they read scripts but it would still be great if I could find better writers. It’s all John Hegarty’s fault. I think he’s a genius but he has sort of created a state of affairs where you see so many books with a great picture and then an end line – and the end line is the same on every one. It’s as if people don’t dare to write anymore.

What I’d say to kids at the moment is, ‘Concentrate on your copywriting because there are more opportunities for a great copywriter than there are great art directors now’.

For a really long time now I’ve raised my family, gone to work and written screenplays; I don’t have any friends or any hobbies other than playing a bit of tennis. I used to write at four o’clock in the morning because that was the only time when I wouldn’t be letting someone down – either my wife or my employer.

I’m really having fun with my kids. I’ve got three boys and they’re just the light of my life. They’re 10, 16 and 19 years old and there’s nothing that a 10-year-old and a 19-year-old want to do at the same time. 

My wife Maggie teaches advertising students at St Martin’s. We met there on our first day of studies in 1982. My son started college today and I just sent Maggie a little text saying, ‘I wonder if he’ll meet his wife’. 

Maggie is an art director and in 2009 we wrote a dialogue-free, short Christmas film together for Sky called Deep & Crisp & Even [directed by Brett Foraker]. It starred Timothy Spall and Natascha McElhone and was shown around the world. Maggie has fantastic vision and that’s why the visual story was so successful.

I’m quite a politically-minded person. I think that the world should be fairer. If I was Prime Minister for a day I would make tax punitive for rich people, I mean properly punitive. Nothing in this country couldn’t be fixed by 60 per cent tax for those earning more than £100,000.

Not much makes me angry but I’m not overly keen on dogs. Lee Clow runs this agency and he’s a fantastic fella, but because he brings his dog to work, other people are allowed to bring their dogs and every day I want to ban the fucking things. Every time I see one I want to pop a cap in it!

Both of my grandfathers served time in prison at the same time. My mum’s dad was a conscientious objector during the First World War and he ended up in prison with Keir Hardie, one of the founders of the Labour Party. My dad’s dad was a soldier who stole and sold horses but eventually got caught for nicking a pony. There’s a really fantastic photograph from my parents’ wedding with this super-good man and this really naughty, old ex-soldier.

I probably care what people think about me more than I should. I’ve come to feel reasonably secure about what I’ve done and proud of what I’ve achieved, but when Married Single Other came out I did feel quite exposed. Your stuff gets reviewed in the paper and, although it got largely good reviews, I’d never realised it was possible for your work to be so public. It took a while to get used to that, but [if there are negative comments] I find myself going, “Yeah, but what did you do?” 

The worst human invention is the atomic bomb.

The greatest human invention… I have to say that I think the iPhone is a really beautiful bit of kit. Steve Jobs, in just a quarter of a lifetime, has created something with which there is virtually nothing you can’t do. The first car had four tyres, one in each corner, and an engine at the front and so does a Formula One car. Aeroplanes have always looked the same, basically, since they stopped being designed with double wings. But look what Jobs has done in tech. I think that’s really great. But is that bad? Should I have said some sort of cancer-curing thing?

I can’t bear that Bill Gates, who’s a nerd who produced ugly, dysfunctional crap, is still alive and Steve Jobs is dead – it doesn’t seem right to me. But God bless Bill Gates, he does wonderful charity work battling malaria and all that.

Richard Curtis is better than Steve Jobs. I worked on the Make Poverty History campaign with Richard, which is the thing I’m absolutely most proud of. We got $50 billion in government pledges. I just think he’s a wonderful writer and a brilliant human being, and that’s pretty rare.

At the end of the day what really matters is going home and having dinner with your wife and your kids.