Russell Ramsey: The Magic in his Method

As a school boy his exercise books were neat and well-presented, as a graphics graduate he methodically focussed on his goal of getting into advertising till he landed a job at Saatchi & Saatchi. Now JWT London’s ECD and executive partner Russell Ramsey still employs a single-minded approach to create top work but, as he tells Danny Edwards, he believes in a bit of random magic too...

Russell Ramsey is not a man who has many hobbies. The 52-year-old follows Newcastle United, his hometown football club, and when we meet (in mid-December of last year) he takes more than a hint of pleasure from their recent victory over Manchester United in the Premier League, “at Old Trafford. First time in 40 years. So that was good”. But apart from that, he says that thinking about work is actually how he relaxes. “I’m work focussed,” he states, “and I probably think about work too much outside of work, but I don’t think it affects me in a negative way. If I’m thinking about [a campaign] that’s going well, a piece of work I really like, that’s a big relief for me. That makes me feel good, makes me relax. It’s still about work,” he concludes, laughing by this point, “but it’s the good bit of work. 

Clever KitKats and a chatty platypus

To be honest, Ramsey probably feels pretty relaxed at the tail end of 2013 having overseen a raft of acclaimed work for a variety of clients. Chocolate bar KitKat’s association with the similarly named new Android operating system allowed for a very clever and extremely funny online spoof video about KitKat being the ‘perfect dual screen companion’ [see below]; a TV spot for The British Army, Step Up [bottom], was lauded, picking up prizes at the 2013 British Arrows Craft Awards, so too was television work for First Direct which featured an endearing talking platypus.

Then there was The Legendary Journey, HSBC’s multi-platform campaign supporting the British Lions rugby tour and celebrating 125 years of the British & Irish Lions. Along with an epic TV spot featuring the team as 19th-century sailors, the campaign’s strong digital element allowed you to find out more about each member of the team and plot the tour on HSBC’s YouTube channel.  

• KitKat: Android

Like all successful people though, Ramsey is not content to rest on his laurels and while taking satisfaction in his agency’s recent glories, is already looking to this year and the creative prospects it can offer. “In the last two years we’ve won some really exciting business,” he says. “We’ve recently won Canon which is obviously a great creative opportunity and we’re already working on that. And things like The Army we’ll be working more on [in 2014], plus we’re soon to launch a new Mr Kipling [campaign].”

It’s certainly no fluke that JWT London and Ramsey himself have experienced success, as Ramsey’s single-mindedness means that he is always pushing for more. Single-mindedness is a trait he has possessed from a very young age. Unusually among the advertising fraternity he didn’t fall into the business by chance or decide on a career in advertising as a fallback from something else. He knew what he wanted to do and aimed for it accordingly.

He was, he says, always very image conscious. Not necessarily of his own image but of the images around him; record covers, adverts in magazines, anything remotely graphical. Even as a 10-year-old boy he was already aware of design and how things appeared and recalls that “at school I had the neatest, most brilliantly hand-written exercise book, and my biology book had fantastic diagrams”. A born art director, then.

He admits that he didn’t exactly know what a job in advertising meant, or how precisely to go about getting one, but seeing posters and billboards as a child inspired his love of advertising and cemented his desire to be involved in the industry. “I used to see Benson & Hedges billboards and posters in Sunday supplement magazines, with big cover spreads, and I just loved it all,” he says. At 18 he left Newcastle for London to attend a foundation course at the Chelsea School of Arts, then it was onto the London College of Printing for a graphics degree. “I knew John Hegarty was down there [in London] and I had my eye on advertising from the start.”

BBH flying through golden days

After graduation though, it wasn’t exactly plain sailing. The degree he had done didn’t provide him with the necessary advertising portfolio. “I started going round agencies,” he remembers, “and quickly realised that they needed to see a different type of work.” So he went away and created it and after “eight or nine months of unemployment” eventually got a job at Saatchi & Saatchi London, but as a copywriter. “I had a book,” he explains, “and I’d done all the work myself, the art direction and the copywriting, and they had a job for a copywriter, so I took it.” 18 months later he moved over to become an art director and soon after that Saatchi took on John O’Keefe, with whom Ramsey was partnered and not long after that, Ramsey got his wish to meet with John Hegarty as he and O’Keefe were taken on by BBH.

This was 1991 and, by Ramsey’s own admission, he and O’Keefe joined BBH at a time when the agency was “just flying”. “BBH was just on an upward curve for the next 10 years,” says Ramsey. “We worked on Audi, we worked on Levi’s and we just learned how to do film. The attention to detail was just phenomenal. We learned how to visually tell a good story. BBH could do TV commercials that ran in every country across Europe because there was no dialogue. I just got better and better because I was learning so much.”

• Levi's Engineered Jeans: Twist

Both men started to move up the BBH ranks with O’Keefe becoming creative director and Ramsey deputy executive creative director, running Levi’s and Audi at different points. “Everything,” he states, “was golden”. Then in 2001 came Levi’s Twist, the FX-heavy, Frank Budgen-directed TV spot that was a commercial and critical success and which reinvigorated a then-tired brand for a new generation and crowned a decade of creative excellence for Ramsey at the agency.

In September 2007 Ramsey joined JWT London as executive creative director [he was also made an executive partner in January 2012] and explains that the more senior the role you take on, from creative director upwards, the more pragmatic you need to become. “When you become a creative director there are two things that happen,” says Ramsey, channeling Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, “you have more power, but you also have more responsibility. You can make things happen and dictate events a bit more but gone are the days when you can be the creative prima donna and throw your toys out of the pram, because you can’t walk away. You’ll still be sitting there with the problem in front of you and you still have to solve it. You have to learn to be pragmatic but also to judge when to be pragmatic and when to push things.”

Keeping your toys in the pram

Decisiveness is also a key attribute, says Ramsey. A creative director needs to know what they want for themselves and their agency, and what they expect from others. “I’m quite black and white,” he says. “I like something, I don’t like something. This works, this doesn’t work. If you’re a bit floaty, a bit indecisive then people aren’t sure what they’re meant to be doing next.” So you need to have the courage of your convictions? “Yes, you’ve got to, and I think I always have in terms of choosing work or choosing directors. I’ve always thought, ‘this is how I feel, this is what I want to do’, and just backed it up. I’ll pick that director. It may not be perfect, I may be worried about this or that but we’ve done it now, we’ve picked him so we’re going to back it and not worry about it. We’re going to go with it and do the [project]. I’ve always tried to be that way.”

Despite saying that being in a position of more creative responsibility means that you are unable to ‘throw your toys out of the pram’, Ramsey isn’t so sure it should work in exactly that way for directors. The current trend is often for directors who are as adept in the meeting room as on the set and there is less patience for renegade characters or even for those who may be creative visionaries but simply not great verbal communicators.

• The British Army: Step Up

“That is true,” Ramsey says, “and I think it’s a shame. And I also think there’s a danger that, because the clients are getting closer to the process, that you choose the director who the client likes best, who did the best meeting. That’s the easy way, but you shouldn’t do that. You should go with the director who’s going to do the best job, even if they’re a bit introverted or aren’t client-friendly, if they don’t give good meetings. You know, Frank Budgen is a genius but doesn’t give good meetings; he’s introverted and hates following the process and doesn’t like storyboards, and that can be quite difficult to manage but the end result is brilliant.”

And that, fundamentally, is what Ramsey is aiming for; brilliance. How to get there can differ as can who you bring on board along the way, but ultimately the goal is to create advertising messages that consumers are engaged with and which clients appreciate. “[The magic of advertising] is still there,” he confirms. “And that’s what it’s about, the magic bits. You can follow the processes, you can do all the research and go through all the motions but what we’re trying to do all the time is make something special, or better, or more interesting.”