Rudder: Long distance runners and lighthouse keepers – why most great creatives come in pairs

Ad industry veteran Gawen Rudder reveals why most great creatives come in pairs

Bet you can’t remember the name of the guy who won the marathon at the Commonwealth Games back in July. Give up? His name is Michael Shelley, an unlikely and slightly built athlete from the Gold Coast. According to media reports he is something of a loner, preferring to pound the pavements solo rather than pacing with a partner.

Back in 1965 a lonely junior copywriter by the name of Charles Saatchi – after being rejected by J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, Ogilvy & Mather and every other agency he could think of – scored an interview at a now-forgotten but then-respected agency named Benton & Bowles in fashionable Knightsbridge. He got the job and was partnered with a young trainee by the name of John Hegarty.

They hit it off because, in Saatchi’s words, “He was very talented, made me look good and I bathed in his afterglow.” The idea of partnership appealed to him and would become both the making, and eventually the undoing, of the man. Saatchi rode on the coat tails of Ross Cramer, with whom he later formed CramerSaatchi and together they joined the fabled Collett Dickenson Pearce as an art director/copywriter team. He also found an ally in promising junior account manager David (later Lord) Puttnam, as he did with his younger brother Maurice (later Lord) Saatchi and PR supremo Tim (later Lord) Bell. A trifecta of peerage partnerships no less.

Being part of a team of two is being part of a special relationship. The shared triumphs and disasters, support and inspiration, the trust, partnership and friendship are sorely missed by many top creatives when they’re elevated to a solo ECD position. It can be lonely at the top.

Legend has it that Bill Bernbach conceived the idea of a copywriter/art director partnership at the agency that bears his name. Partly true. Back in the day – 1940 to be exact – Bernbach, a 30 year-old aspiring copywriter joined the William Weintraub agency. Copywriters tended to look on art directors as lesser mortals, but on meeting the legendary designer/art director Paul Rand (best known for the creation of corporate logos of IBM, Westinghouse, ABC and Steve Jobs’ NeXT), the two started visiting art galleries and museums during lunch breaks and talking about art and copy working in harmony.

Five years later Bernbach joined Grey Advertising, rose quickly from copywriter to copy chief, then VP-creative director, and teamed copywriter Phyllis Robinson with art director Bob Gage (another Rand disciple) to trial his then revolutionary ‘copy/art team’ concept. Come 1949 and together with Ned Doyle and Maxwell Dane Doyle Dane Bernbach opened for business on 350 Madison Avenue with Gage, Robinson and a half-dozen others. Doyle ran the account side, Dane ran the business/personnel side, and both stayed well out of Bernbach’s way.

“The task of selling a Nazi car in a Jewish city,” as Greek-New Yorker George Lois put it, fell to the agency team – art director Helmut Krone and copywriter Julian Koenig, overseen by Bernbach himself, obviously keen to perfect his brave new art/copy partnership. Long before he joined the agency, Krone, a first generation German-American had owned and fallen in love with one of the first VWs shipped to the USA. The other half of this unlikely duo was Koenig, a buttoned-down, skinny tie, hipster law school drop-out who made his name with his classic line for Timex watches; “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” Together they created what started off as a one-off trade ad featuring longish copy finishing with the line that became the headline, ‘Think Small.’ Krone’s depiction of the headline created a tiny revolution of its own – the full point – decades later championed by The Palace. The all-but-naked page featured the little beetle slightly angled in the top left hand corner. Job done. Point proved Mr Bernbach.

Six months later, Lois spirited Koenig to become his copy partner at Papert Koenig Lois, an agency that became, in his ever so humble opinion, “The second creative agency in the world and the first salvo of the creative revolution.” The two worked together for seven years, creating amongst others, the chimpanzee using the Xerox spot. DDB and PKL proved art and copy was here to stay. Although today, goofy titles like senior story teller and visual architect abound.

Creative teams have dominated the scene since the seventies. Think Gough and Waterhouse, Mo and Jo, Hunt and Trembath, Nankervis and Curl, Brown and Fishlock, Justin Drape and Scott Nowell, and of course AJ Foote and AJ Francis of the freakily-branded AJF Partnership (Melbourne University’s Department of Mathematics & Statistics, calculate an approximate 60-million-to-one chance that the three initialed AJFs from Adelaide would team up together.)

For many, perhaps all, the partnerships represent a marriage of equals. Leo Premutico and Jan Jacobs were joint ECDs at Saatchis in New York and together garnered a pride of 26 Lions before founding WPP-backed Johannes Leonardo in 2007. Last year former AFA grad Premutico dipped into the Australian talent pool appointing crack Clemenger Melbourne team Tom Martin and Julian Schreiber as joint ECDs. Lindsey Evans spirited Matty Burton and Dave Bowman over to her Special agency and TBWA smartly responded with another awarded team Gary McCredie and Wes Haves out of BBH London.

Not all creative teams combine words and pictures. Paddo larrikins Mo and Jo both had a way with words and an ear for jingles underscored by incredible intuition and brilliant branding. Lionel Hunt was a copywriter who just happened to team up with self-described, “Ring-in art director-copywriter” Gordon Trembath. The two kings of The Palace, together with members of the royal family: Ronnie Mather, Jack Vaughan and Scott Whybin. Teddy Horton worked at and had enormous respect for both.

The Campaign Palace exuded Melbourne-meets-British style and substance, in contrast to their strumming street-smart Sydney brothers at Mojo. Whilst the complete antithesis of one another, they defined advertising in a bygone era unlikely ever to be repeated.

Not all fit into the neat little art and copy boxes. Peter Carey is a novelist with two Booker Prizes to his name and Bani McSpedden is now the watch editor of the Australian Financial Review. AWARD godfather Ray Black is both art and copy, and the unsung art director of John Bevins’ carefully crafted copy is Brian Langford. The Glue Society co-founders Jonathan Kneebone and Gary Freeman have been described as the collective’s chalk and cheese (although it’s unclear who is which.)

Not all teams endure: Jay Chiat and Guy Day worked together for ten years, other locals like Ted Horton and Chris Dewey, Rasic and Carrasco – partnered for fewer years. Warren Brown remains the ‘B’ at BMF whilst the ‘F’, Paul Fishlock, freed at last from the WPP imbroglio, soldiers on at Behaviour Change Partners. But others endure, like Cummins partners Jim Ingram and Ben Couzens who’ve been joined at the hip for upwards of 15 years after meeting at RMIT. Former BMF joint ECDs Carlos Alija and Laura Sampedro (whose background is actually in planning), are married with children at Wieden+Kennedy London.

And not all creative partnerships are in advertising: Gilbert and Sullivan, Hope and Crosby, Lucy and Desi, Gilbert and George. The list is long, from the toxic two of ‘Breaking Bad,’ to Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, Simon and Garfunkel, Jagger and Richards, Hillary and Tensing, Patek and Philippe, et al.

How telling however is Sir John Hegarty’s observation, “You need someone around who you can trust to say, ‘that’s a shitty idea.’ Every McCartney needs a Lennon.”

The thing is, creatives are different from lighthouse keepers. They crave company.  The stimulation of another brain. Dan Wieden met David Kennedy, and copy met art in Portland, Oregon (then a backwater compared with Madison Avenue) on April Fools’ Day, 1982. The two had a number of qualities on their side and crucially, a unique client. Wieden coined ‘Just Do It’. Kennedy simply cemented the line in history with Futura condensed extra bold caps, and yes, he added a full point. Down in San Francisco, Jeff Goodby (copy) and Rich Silverstein (art) teamed up a year later. Goodby scrawled ‘got milk’ from a focus group run by planning guru Jon Steel, and Silverstein set the line in a copyright variant of Phenix American lower
case.

It makes one wonder why no one before Bernbach had considered what might happen if more than one brain worked on a problem at the same time. The concept of a creative team – art and copy, words and pictures, and a marriage of equals has largely endured. Although the loneliness of a blank sheet of paper still haunts and hinders.