Hegarty on Advertising

Hegarty on Advertising
Hegarty on Advertising

John Hegarty doesn’t sit on fences. He says what he means and manifestly means what he says. In a business notoriously prone to compromise and equivocation his feisty honesty helps explain his success. But the fundamental reason for his exceptional success is his exceptional creative talent.

Consequently, as he says in Hegarty on Advertising, the aspect of current advertising management that most winds him up is the ‘tissue meeting’. In tissue meetings, agencies present clients with a ragbag of rough campaign ideas, and everyone chews them over: compromise and equivocation personified. Worse still, tissue meetings negate creative talent like his because everyone present is encouraged to throw their tuppence-worth into the ring. Had Leonardo’s Mona Lisa suffered a tissue meeting, John playfully suggests, she would have ended up with an apple on her head ‘to get people wondering’. His uncompromising view is that ‘whoever came up with the completely stupid idea of tissue meetings should be taken out and shot’.

John deplores tissue meetings because they are wimpish. However, there is a more fundamental reason for deploring them. They concentrate on ‘ideas’ rather than execution. But brilliant ideas succeed only when they are brilliantly executed, as BBH has consistently demonstrated. Think how subtly the memorable BBH campaigns have been crafted, such as Levi’s 501s; sexy Häagen-Dazs; and brutal Barnardo’s. The ‘ideas’ would have been destroyed by cack-handed execution.

Hegarty on Advertising is in two halves. The first summarises John’s beliefs about advertising, branding, creativity and agency management; the second is autobiographical, highlighting key moments in his dazzling career. For my money, the second half is the better because his career is fascinating; while his thoughts on advertising, creativity and the rest are forthright, vigorous and a good read, they are rarely unorthodox. Yes, he believes creativity is advertising’s magic ingredient, thinks creatives should question briefs, considers old and new media must be integrated and so on – but who doesn’t?

Reading his vehement – and entertaining – diatribe got me wondering: might tissue meetings be the smoking gun that has triggered the much discussed, and much lamented, demise in the quality of British advertising? Sounds depressingly likely to me.

Hegarty on Advertising, John Hegarty, Thames & Hudson, £16.95

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