Have I Got Newsworks for You
John Lloyd, the founder of QI and producer of Blackadder, has teamed up with Newsworks to create a new, multi-platform advertising campaign for newspapers. Here, writing exclusively for Newsline, he explains – via a trip down memory lane – why they need it…
I started directing television commercials in 1987. Advertising was glorious fun in those days. Budgets were generous, clients were brave, agencies were wildly inventive – and the work that resulted was often blindingly good. It’s not like that anymore, sadly. Oh no.
Advertising, so often mocked and despised by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, is a seriously important part of contemporary culture. Not only that, it’s a bellwether for everything else. For many years, the success of the British economy could be precisely measured simply by looking at the sales of Kit-Kat. And their ads were classics, back then.
The creative health of a nation’s advertising tells you a lot about the whole of society’s well-being. I remember shooting a job for Deutsche Bahn in Leipzig, just after the Berlin Wall came down. There were no ads anywhere in the city, not even any shop signs – everything was grey, like a broken tooth.
The first ad I ever shot was for Phileas Fogg exotic snacks. I really didn’t know what I was doing. John Hegarty, now a knight of the realm, came down to the edit, sat and watched the cut, made one brilliant suggestion and saved my bacon.
The idea that the creative director of one of the world’s hottest agencies would deign to do that today is unthinkable. Good grief – have you seen his diary? He’s in meetings until 19th November 2042.
Like modern television, medicine, industry, policing – even art galleries – advertising has become infested by talentless managers, who won’t leave the people who know how to do their jobs alone.
But it doesn’t have to be like that.
Earlier this year, Rufus Olins, the chief executive of Newsworks, the marketing body for national newspapers, had a bold idea. It was to run a campaign for and about the press, in the press. Aimed at media buyers, it would make the case that newspapers aren’t just paper any more, they are multi-media newsbrands: vibrant, innovative, very much alive and kicking.
He asked me to put him in touch with a friend of mine who’d just founded a start-up. Full of enthusiasm because we’d just shot a rather good film together, I said: ‘Let’s not do that, Rufus, let’s do it ourselves’. So we did.
We rang two exceptionally talented young graphic designers, Mark Tappin and Simon Gofton, and we sat down in Rufus’ office and kicked a few ideas around. I wrote the copy, Mark and Simon created the look, and Rufus sold the ads to the marketing directors of all the national newspapers. It was fantastic fun, it was quick, it was easy and the work (we think) is first class.
