Ben Priest: The Way I See It

With both a father and godfather in the advertising world, Ben Priest might have seemed destined for industry success, but his 25-year career didn’t enjoy the smoothest of beginnings. After a false start as an account man and a ‘bludgeoning’ approach to copywriting, he finally hit his stride as an ECD, co-founding agency adam&eve and overseeing its meteoric rise – via a multi-million pound merger with DDB London – from boutique shop to multiple Lion-winning powerhouse. The group CCO tells Selena Schleh about the Christmas campaign arms race, potting-shed politics and why mass market appeal isn’t a dirty word

I was born a long time ago – before electricity – on 22 February 1968 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. I’ve never been back, but that’s no reflection on Walton-on-Thames.

My first real memory is playing with a gun and lining up all the soldiers at the top of a hill in Reigate. Just to be clear, it was a toy gun and toy soldiers. It’s worrying that it’s my earliest memory, as I must have been about four or five. Mind you, I can’t remember what I did last week.

My dad worked client-side at Volkswagen but my mum wasn’t connected to the [advertising] business at all. She had an amazing career as a child protection social worker, dealing with thinly-stretched resources and horrific situations of abuse, for which she got very little thanks and was paid bugger all.

I really enjoyed my childhood growing up in Balcombe, a fabulous village in Sussex. My brother was my best friend and we went everywhere together. In the morning, Mum would open the door and out we’d go, and we’d only come back when we needed a meal. It was great: Brighton was a train ride away, so we vaguely knew what was going on in the world, but mainly we were kept naïve and innocent.

Tragically, I always wanted to be an adman. I soon worked out that there was a connection between all the outrageous, fun people that came to our house through my dad’s work – which was that they were all from the ad agency. That got me thinking: ‘Maybe I could have a go at that’.

I’m outrageous and very conservative rolled into one, so although I really enjoyed acting at school, the conservative part of me said: ‘It’s not a real job, you can’t do that’. Looking back, I can’t think of anything worse. The acting world isn’t healthy: there’s too much self-analysis and torture. Auditions are really tough. You stroll into a room and there’s five disinterested people sipping cappuccinos, managing to keep half an eye on you while you go through the part.

Boarding school was a bit of a bear pit, so I had quite a few horrific nicknames which I’ve managed to keep secret. At adam&eveDDB, everyone calls me Priesty. James [Murphy] is Murph and David [Golding, co-founders] is DG. For a creative agency, very limited creativity has been applied to our nicknames.

My school career was like most of my life: [I had] limited ability, but I worked very hard to make sure that I got what I needed. I’m not an academic. I see myself as more intuitive and emotionally intelligent. I’m a ‘people’ person – I read the room and ‘feel’ people. Not physically, of course.

Oxbridge would definitely not have been an option. Instead, I went to Swansea University and studied English. That was good for me: prep school and boarding school was a bit of a conveyor belt, so it was good to go somewhere that wasn’t a redbrick university. It knocked a few of those Home Counties edges off.

On my dad’s advice, I spent two summers doing work experience at GGT (when it was the best agency in the country) and then at WCRS. Work experience was brilliant: it confirmed to me that advertising was a really vibrant business with lots of interesting people.

After university, I got a place on the copywriting course at Watford College, which was amazing. I was in the same year as Charlie Rudd [MD of BBH], Karen Buchanan [CEO of Publicis London] and Neil Simpson [co-founder of The Corner]. At the same time I went for interviews in account management, because my dad said, ‘You’ve been at university for three bloody years – get a fucking job!’ The first place I went was Ogilvy, where Cilla Snowball, now group chairman and CEO at AMV, offered me a job. I didn’t really know what it entailed, but my dad told me to take it and swap between departments once I got in there.

As soon as I started, I realised account management wasn’t what I wanted to do at all. I loved the people and the agency but the work made me very miserable and I was terrible at it. I ended up hanging around with the creatives for about a year. In the end I said, ‘I’m going to resign, because if I don’t go now, I’ll never be able to’. So I went on the dole and wrote a collection of the world’s worst advertisements. Eventually I got an art director partner [the late David Harvey] and we did a week’s placement at Simons Palmer, which in those days was the hottest agency in town. On the basis of that everybody wanted to talk to us, and I ended up back at Ogilvy in a weird full circle. I wasn’t the greatest copywriter in the world, but I had this energy and drive and I just bludgeoned my way through it.

I was very lucky in my mentors. My godfather is Alfredo Marcantonio, of Holmes Hobbs Marcantonio, who co-authored the book Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads? [with David Abbott and John O’Driscoll]. He took me under his wing when I told him that I wanted to be a copywriter and when I showed him wave after wave of appalling ads, he never once said to me, ‘You can’t do this’. He always made time to see me, even after a full day’s work. We used to sit down and write together. My other mentor is my dad, who is still the best person in the world to show work to. He doesn’t spray praise around, so if you get a thumbs-up from him you know that you’ve got a winner on your hands. He is a great influence on me.

The first adverts to really make an impression on me were John Webster’s for Hofmeister and Unigate. We used to shout ‘Watch out, watch out, there’s a Humphrey about!’ at each other in the schoolyard and do the George the bear walk. It was only years later that I realised all the ads we liked were written by the same bloke. He might have won loads of awards, but John’s real genius was that the country took the advertising he did to their hearts.

One of my big gripes with UK advertising is that we’ve allowed a group of people who regard doing famous and populist work as almost vulgar, to create a potting-shed industry. They spend a lot of time noodling about on little things, and what they’re really doing is making ads for themselves. That’s easy to do; it’s like recording a really weird concept album. What’s difficult to do is to write six consecutive albums that the whole world buys and which are critically acclaimed and commercially successful. There are still a few bad apples in my generation running creative departments, and if you sat them in a taxi and said: ‘Right, tell the driver about the six pieces of work you’re most proud of,’ the cabbie literally wouldn’t have a clue, because they’ve spent their career in the potting shed. Once they’ve gone, mass market appeal will be the name of the game.

I need to get my creative kicks in lots of different ways. There’s nothing wrong with spending ages crafting a poster campaign that only goes up on 30 sites. But to be focused on that kind of hit every time is really weird. The Foster’s campaign hasn’t won any awards – apart from the IPA Effectiveness Grand Prix – and nor should it, but I love listening to the lads in the local pub joking about budgie-smugglers. That gives me more of a thrill than any critical award.

My favourite piece of advertising would be pretty much anything David Abbott ever touched. He was the greatest there has ever been. Every lesson you need can be learned from reading his work and looking at his life. I also really like David Kolbusz’s work for Lynx [Sporty Girl, below, and Flirty Girl]: the voiceover was a copywriting masterclass. The campaign had been going for 10 years, but he totally flipped the idea on its head. Or the Stella Artois poster: ‘“My shout,” he whispered.’  How can you tell a whole story in just four words? It’s insane. 

You’ve got to have heroes in this business. It’s a shame when agencies slag everyone else off and don’t vote for their work. The very best people, the people that know they can achieve success again tomorrow, are generous with their praise.

In the early days of my career at Lowe and TBWA, I was a massive pain in the arse to work with. I couldn’t write and create in a swashbuckling way, so I made up for it with effort: I’d walk up to the chief executive’s office and hammer on the door, demanding to be seen about a tiny body copy change. I still see people now who obviously want to cross the street to avoid me. If I were creative directing myself now, I would probably fire myself.

It was a no-brainer to sell adam&eve to Omnicom in 2012. It was a lot earlier than we expected, but after all it was DDB London, it was Volkswagen, it was the agency my dad had worked with and the agency Ben [Tollet] and Emer [Stamp, co-ECDs] had come from. People talked fondly about the halcyon days of John Webster, but the truth was [DDB] had ceased to be that type of agency years before and it needed resuscitation. The only people who were going to do that were people who didn’t give a fuck about what was sacred. We steamrollered in there and smashed every office down. I thought the most profound visual thing we could do was intermingle everybody. Even if it wasn’t a good idea, it sent a message that we were here to change things.

Sometimes in life, something comes along that mirrors or connects with what you’re doing, and that was the case with The Long Wait for John Lewis. I was getting divorced at the time; I had two little kids, and the ad itself was about a little kid. My ex-wife and I have been very fortunate in that we’ve ended up being good friends – we go on holiday, the four of us, as a family – but it didn’t always look like it would be like that. It was a very strange time for me. But funnily enough it was the easiest ad I’ve ever made, from getting Dougal [Wilson] on board as director to choosing the music and casting Lewis, the little boy, who was just delightful. I remember the look on David and James’s faces when I showed them the finished ad. Afterwards, David turned to me and just said: ‘What the fuck are we going to do next year?’ 

Ultimately, getting it right every time is difficult, whether it’s humour or emotion. Any job you do with Dougal is bigger than the job itself. It’s an experience you’ll remember forever. It’s a wonderful collaboration. You disappear off into this bubble and then suddenly you fall out the other side, clutching the memory stick with the ad on it, and you have to come back to the real world.

There’s a mass of emotional advertising right now. It’s become acceptable and it’s what everybody does. I think [adam&eveDDB] has it slightly easier, in a way: when the John Lewis logo comes up on screen, people are prepared to be emotional for the brand. It would probably be different for something like Zurich Insurance! Although after Monty The Penguin and the Sainsbury’s Christmas ad came out, my mum said something very interesting, which was: ‘Be very careful, you lot. This looks like an arms race to me. You all need to remember what you’re there for: to flog mince pies and woolly hats.’ 

We had no idea at the time, but [adam&eveDDB] presented the same idea behind the Sainsbury’s Christmas ad [the First World War Christmas Day football match] to John Lewis in March 2014. They thought about it, but because they didn’t have a connection to the British Legion, they decided not to go ahead. So we went with Monty the Penguin instead, and then found out two weeks after it was all finished that Sainsbury’s had made their version. That was terrifying.

I can’t concentrate on anything for longer than 20 minutes, so one of the brilliant things about this business is that you spend the morning talking about very sensitive, emotional stuff for John Lewis and then you come out and go into another room, and the script is: ‘Is it alright if my mate rubs sun cream on my back?’

When we started adam&eve, we tried hard to be different, but soon worked out that we didn’t need to do that – we just needed to be good. We’re a very honest, ego-free environment. In many places, you have to do something because the ECD says so. It’s not like that here: if you want your way, you have to be able to justify and explain it, not bully people. I didn’t want to make Monty The Penguin for John Lewis: I thought a fluffy penguin would look like we were tugging at heartstrings in a very obvious way. Also, we’d already sold the client a different idea. But Rick [Brim] and Dan [Fisher] kept coming back with new ideas [on Monty], and everyone else loved it. That’s how decisions should be made, rather than: ‘We need to look after Ben’s ego’.

Job titles are ridiculous. Being CCO doesn’t mean anything to me. There are a lot of old-fashioned people out there who place great store by what it says on their business cards, but if you want to have a great agency you need three or four creative leaders who can go out, win pitches and create great work. I always think of the England rowing coach, whose only criteria for considering suggestions was: ‘Does it make the boat go faster?’ 

Juan Carlos Ortiz [president of DDB Latina] gave some brilliant advice during a recent talk at the agency. He said: ‘We never, ever set out to do great work’. There was a collective intake of breath – then he went on: ‘People who do that sit around, piddling about, and nine times out of ten it doesn’t turn out to be great. We set out to do good work, and 50 per cent of what we do, through energy and love, migrates upwards into great work’.

Generally speaking, though, I’m not very good at taking advice. I tend to do everything in my life once very badly and then go on and do it better. I don’t really learn unless I get burned.

There are far too many awards, and most of them aren’t worth winning. When we were still adam&eve we didn’t enter as many, but we’re a global agency now with a responsibility to the network and we have to play the game. My personal view is that awards are irrelevant and meaningless – and yet rather lovely if handled the right way.

Be a doer; be busy. That’s what I’d tell anyone starting out in the industry today. Don’t sit in a dark room trying to persuade yourself and everybody else that you’re a genius while minutely adjusting the typography for the millionth time. Energy will create work and work will get sold on the back of that energy.

I struggle with the whole advertising thing en masse and my love-hate relationship with awards ceremonies means that the best days of my career truly are about the process and making of advertising; being the potter at the wheel.

If I could change one thing about myself I’d like to be able to hit a golf ball about 400 yards, dead straight. Other than that, it’s not something I think about. Make the best of what you’ve got; make your peace with it. You’re the best you are today, the wisest you can be, and if you’re lucky you might learn a little bit more.  

If I was given the chance to time travel, I wouldn’t go back to the past. I’d much rather explore the future.

I would never work on a campaign for the Conservative Party. Or for Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club.

Outside of work, I do a lot of running. I’m training for the London Marathon at the moment [Priest finished in 3 hours 22 minutes], which has given me a very sore right leg. I love Crystal Palace [Football Club] very dearly and I watch the England rugby games at Twickenham. Before I had children, I played a lot of golf, and one day I will return to it – though probably when I’m too old to be any good. 

Money isn’t that important to me. When I was at Lowe, I did a spot with Burt Reynolds who told me: ‘Ben, I’ve been unhappy rich and I’ve been unhappy poor. Unhappy rich is better.’ But honestly? I’m relatively low-maintenance to run. I like nice things and I buy silly things from time to time, but I could exist pretty simply. 

I’m not the kind of person who’s kept awake at night by worries. Two glasses of red wine and talking to people who see advertising as utterly ridiculous will usually do the trick. It’s why I love getting out of the bubble and going back to Sussex, where no one cares what I do. My family just tell me to come and set the table. That’s really healthy, it keeps you grounded.

I’d class myself as an extrovert. I’m very chatty and noisy. I can be quiet and reflective, of course, but generally I get my energy from other people.

Injustice makes me angry. I get very unhappy if I think someone has been treated badly, or is behaving badly. I find it hard not to get involved.

It matters what people think about me. But you can’t control every story. Someone says something, it spreads and then suddenly it’s become fact. The most recent one I heard was that in the early days of adam&eve, we had a ‘War Room’: four PRs locked in a room who worked around the clock.

The internet’s a weird thing. When you do work that matters and people are talking about, then you’re in the firing line. When we released Sorry, I Spent It On Myself for Harvey Nichols there were lots of nice comments on YouTube, and just one saying: ‘This is shit.’ Underneath that, someone had written: ‘Why don’t you shut up and go back to doing the agency Christmas card?’ I thought that was brilliant.

The mobile phone is both the single best and worst human invention. My five-year-old daughter always says: ‘Daddy’s gone into the phone space!’ When I’m actually texting her mum, trying to work out what to pack for the holiday.

If I were UK Prime Minister for the day, I would throw my heart and soul into the National Health Service and I’d fix the railways. As someone who’s wrestled with a three-and-a-half hour commute for seven years, the decline in the train services is terrifying. They are being run for profit, but they don’t work and they’re unfeasibly expensive.

I’d like to be remembered fondly, as a good friend, a good dad and a good brother.

I think of that quote from the book Birdsong, when the character Firebrace says: ‘There is nothing more than to love and be loved’. At the end of the day, that’s what really matters.