Creative Profile: Tom Ewart

While he was joint ECD at Publicis London, Tom Ewart’s Mégane Experiment for Renault had the national press in a tizzy with its Gallic gall. He caused more tongues to wag when, in June 2011, he quit Publicis without another job to go to. Rumours rumbled on till finally in January 2012 The Corner opened, co-founded by him and three other ex-network names. London’s fastest growing indie, it has produced exciting work for top clients, from adidas to Jigsaw, and fosters a culture of equality and collaboration. Tim Cumming sits with Ewart in a corner at The Corner, ‘the place where people meet and things happen’

I’ve arrived early for my meeting with The Corner’s Tom Ewart, pausing to soak up some early morning sun at the top of a little snicket off Dean Street at the back of the Soho Hotel. A nice little suntrap. A hotel doorman steps forward and asks if I’m ready. I’m not. A second man, with the build of a bodyguard, turns to the doorman and says: “He’s not down yet.” They turn away from me. There’s a chauffeur standing by; he’s not for me, either. These things happen when you’re standing on the corner.

I make my way to The Corner’s offices, climb the stairs to the first floor. They are expecting me, the boardroom set with a row of different waters and fresh-brewed coffee. About fifteen minutes later, Tom Ewart arrives from a meeting with his partners Neil Simpson, Neil Hourston and Graham Stewart. First apologies, then coffee, then we sit. He chooses the high-backed soft furnishings in – where else? – the corner of the room.

“We’re spending more of our time talking about building a culture, not a company,” he says of their Soho morning pow-wow. “How we maintain that, and grow it, make it better, make it stronger. It’s a day-to-day process.” He sips at the coffee, adds more milk until it’s just the right grade of tan. “You can’t take anything for granted,” he continues. “You have to work at it. Put in processes and behaviours or opportunities to make it feel intimate and connected. Our ethos is that none of us are smarter than all of us” – it’s the keyline on The Corner’s website, after all, where creativity and productivity is about the collective, putting clever people round a table to solve problems. “And how do you make that happen all the time, when you’re not in the room driving it, leading it?” he ponders, smiling like a magician about to unveil a trick – or someone who’s able to see around corners.

The Corner is now one of London’s fastest-growing indie agencies, handling the accounts of, among others, London Pride, Jigsaw (‘style is truth, fashion is lies’ and a gorgeous print campaign shot by Rankin), adidas, Flybe and Coca-Cola. Since leaving his post as ECD at Publicis London in June 2011, and setting up The Corner in February 2012, Ewart has seen his start-up grow from five people and a blank sheet to a company of fifty spread across four floors in the heart of Soho. While there may be four storeys, the ethos of the company aims to act like a spirit level so that every type of expertise and talent, whether it be production, strategy, finance, coding, programming, writing or design all work together on the common ground, on the straight line of importance and impact. “It’s only ever about people,” says Ewart of the business. “There’s nothing else. It’s just the people. I always remind myself of that. It’s probably why we started in the first place, to have that blank sheet, to only bring in the people who get it. We’re not trying to convert, or turn people or change the ways they think. We only want to work with the people who get it.”

The pointlessness of an unmade idea

Ewart’s mantra of open creativity means not sequestering the creatives away from the rest of the business – the being from the doing. “It needs more than good creatives to make great work,” he says. “You need great strategists who understand the motivations of the creative; you need tenacious business directors to sell the unconventional; and you need clever people to take an idea and express it in different ways and different places. I was always interested in bringing people from outside the traditional creative channels to work on ideas, to make those ideas better. That was something I started at Publicis, but here it’s been from the ground up, rather than bolting on to something that already existed.”

He points to the London Pride campaign as an example of The Corner’s on-the-level working methods. “We do classic long copy cross tracks and press ads, where we tell the story of the brand, and we’ve launched a social campaign on the back of that, where you tweet a photo of your empty pint and get a coupon you can redeem and they’ll fill it up with a real pint. That, to me, is seamless. It’s connected. It’s the right thing to do, and there’s creativity in all of that. So massive respect to the whole team on that project, who worked out how we do everything – the redemption code, how that can work, how it can activate across Fuller’s pubs.”

Elevating the role of producers is one of the principles of The Corner, along with the fact that ideas – even the really great ones – are worthless unless they get made. “There’s no point having that empty pint idea stuck on a creative’s wall somewhere, or in my head, or in a bin,” says Ewart. “Until it’s seen the light of day it’s not a real idea.”

There’s a malleable, shapeshifting method of thinking and working outside the usual boxes that defines The Corner and may help explain its expansion all the way down the main street of 21st-century advertising. “People ask us what we are and we all say we don’t know,” he laughs. “We’ve embraced the fact that we’re mercurial, we’re changing almost daily, and that’s based on what out clients require – and that changes. You think, that’s what we’re going to do, and then the next day we need to do something else. To me, that’s what a creative agency should be.”

AMV – the Real Madrid of creativity

Ewart’s first agency work was at AMV at the end of the 1990s, on what was originally a two-week placement under Peter Souter. “I remember turning up and thinking, I never want to leave, this is it. I was there seven days a week. I worked out that if I always had an ad, any ad, that had been bought, at the end of my two-week placement they’d keep me for another two weeks.” He smiles. “So I did that for another eight months. And in the end Peter Souter said, I’m gonna have to hire you.” He laughs. “So that was my way in.” The steps leading to that way in began with a course in graphic design at Kingston University. “I wasn’t even aware that the industry existed,” he laughs. “I thought brands did their own advertising.” He learnt otherwise when an ex-student came in to give a talk about working in advertising, and Ewart was the only one who stayed to listen. “It unlocked something in me,” he says. “and from that moment on I ditched graphic design, worked on my book, went to see the guy I’d met, Tony Snow, who worked at CDP, and I’d go and see him every other week and he’d tell me why everything I’d done was rubbish, and we’d go out and have a drink. Each time, I’d learn a bit more, and I was so hungry to learn. He was an art director, and I locked on to that, had this unofficial training while I was still at college.” A pause, and a nod of acknowledgement. “So I owe it all to him.”

There was lot to learn, and Ewart was intent on soaking it all up, especially the criticism. After all, if you can’t stand the heat of being told what’s wrong with your work, you probably want to avoid working in the creative professions. “You’ve got to be open to listening and learning and be able to understand the help that’s being given you,” says Ewart, who recalls his 20-something self sitting on a train home, trying to unpick what Peter Souter or John Hegarty had said. “Like, what do they mean by that? Not to take it as rejection, but to understand what lies beyond it so you can go away and make the next stuff better.” It’s a method that again highlights the importance of collaboration, of working on the same spirit level. “A lot of teams I’ve seen since then take criticism the wrong way,” he adds. “It becomes personal, and that way, you’re not going to survive.” It was at AMV that he scored his first big hit with Rush Hour, the award-winning, roof-jumper BBC1 ident of April 2002. “It was an amazing place to be,” he says of AMV at that time, “the Real Madrid of creativity – Walter Campbell, Tom Carty, Steve Hudson, John Gorse, Nick Worthington. The line-up was incredible.”

Driving The Daily Mail backlash all the way to Cannes

Before the BBC1 ident fell in to his lap, he was with one of the agency’s young teams “waiting for dribs and drabs to tumble down”. Tumble down it did, and he wrote the script with Tony Cox in a day, got the green light while other teams had sat at red, and put himself firmly on the industry map with the athleticism of, well, a Parkour athlete. “We were nominated for five D&AD Pencils, and seven or eight national papers that weekend covered it,” he says, but it wasn’t the industry gongs so much as the word on the street that told him he’d scored a real success. “Two things happened – a lot of people were talking about it in what I call the real world, and it was nominated for a lot of awards. And it was the first time I got a sense that what was important was that buzz in the real world. I loved the fact that it had connected with real people and that they were talking about it.”

He recalls the roof-top shoot, and people coming out of their offices and houses to see what was happening, because there was no digital trickery involved – this was for real. This was an event. One false step could be fatal. “There was a lot of pressure on us for us not to do that,” recalls Ewart, “for him to jump using ropes and doing it in post, but then there wouldn’t have been a story. He really did do these jumps, and you feel that in the film. It was the physicality of it. That was what really connected. And ever since then, I’ve been much more about hunting down the impact that can be made on the real world, and culture.”

That real-world connection with the general public continued at Publicis, where he memorably worked with director Henry-Alex Rubin on the cheeky 2011 Mégane Experiment, in which a Frenchman visited the glum Lancashire village of Gisburn to convince the inhabitants that their lack of joie de vivre was related to the fact that few of them drove a Mégane. Cue national emergency. “The MG Owners Club threatened to ring-fence Gisburn to stop the advance of Frenchies,” laughs Ewart. But here’s another lesson in constructive feedback. “After the campaign launched, the client rang to say, ‘we’re getting negative criticism’. And I asked, who from? ‘The Daily Mail, Rod Liddle in The Spectator’. And I said, ‘brilliant – we’re selling Méganes to late 20- early 30-somethings, and if The Daily Mail says no, they’ll say yes’. So we took the quotes from The Mail and Rod Liddle, made them into ads and stuck them on the sides of buses.” The campaign won two silver Lions.

Making real-world connections

Most brands and agencies would start hyperventilating at negative press, but not Ewart. “You’ve stirred it up and provoked a reaction,” he exclaims. “That’s what it’s all about. People noticed it and were moved by it; some people loved it and some hated it, and I’d go for that every time, rather than just wallpaper.” The big lesson is that advertising needs to be a part of the real world, the world of events. “At its best it’s up there with the best books, the best films and the best games. It becomes part of popular culture – look at the John Lewis Christmas film. The ambition should always be to be a real part of people’s lives, and whether that’s gaming or experiential or product or a fantastic TV ad, a piece of music, a club night –  it’s always about trying to present the story in a way that people genuinely want to be involved in and be a part of.”