Pat Murphy
Hi and welcome to the MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising for the future and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how our best place to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Andrew Robertson, President and CEO of BBDO since 2004. He’s worked with major clients including Metta, AT&T, FedEx, GE, Mars and plenty more. He was inducted into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame in April 2022.

Before joining BBDO, Andrew began at Ogilvy and Maitha in London as a media planner, switched to account management and was appointed to the board of Ogilvy and Maitha in 1986. In 1989 he joined JWT, where we met first, and in November 1990 was appointed Chief Executive of WCRS. Then he joined AMV BBDO in 1995 and in 2001 moved to North America where he became President and CEO of BBDO. Andrew currently serves on the board of Hope Funds for Cancer Research and is a past chairman of the Advertising Council.

Andrew, it’s great to have you here on my humble podcast.

Andrew Robertson
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pat Murphy
Now it’s been about 33 years, until very recently, that we last saw each other properly when we worked together at JWT. You as Account Director on Kellogg’s, if I remember rightly, and I was a producer working with you. What I can recollect, though, is how brilliantly you managed that client and the rapport you always had. I used to see you down at the Champneys in Piccadilly. That’s the art of schmoozing, but it’s very hard to find great client service people today! What are the key tips for a client service person to manage their clients?

Andrew Robertson
I think the first thing is you have to love your clients. You have to love your clients. The point is it’s an active choice that you make. You don’t fall in love. You actively choose to love the clients. If you choose to love your clients, generally, what you find is they’ll love you back. The most important element of that is genuinely understanding what they need from you. What they need from you as a brand, what they need from you as a business and what they need from you on a human level, because they’re all people. They may have titles, but they’re people. To me, I think, understanding the business, understanding the brands and understanding the people is the thing that distinguishes the people who are really good at it from the people who are good at it.

Pat Murphy
Is it a taught thing or is this a natural skill? Do you think?

Andrew Robertson
I definitely think it can be taught, because I think it’s something I learned by observing people who were very successful at it.

Pat Murphy
Did you take any of the learnings from being a vacuum salesman into that role?

Andrew Robertson
I did, because what you’re referring to is my time as a Vax vacuum door-to-door salesman – as a student, I used to walk through the neighbourhood knocking on people’s doors, ringing their doorbells and trying to convince them to spend a large amount of money on a bright orange, very heavy vacuum cleaner that just had extra suction capability. What did I learn from that? In terms of strategy, advertising strategy, communication strategy, getting people to buy things – I learned first of all that sometimes you have to find a way to dramatize just what’s wrong with something that people already think is really brilliant in order to get them to consider switching to something else! If they’re already satisfied with whatever it is they’re using. It isn’t always enough to just say ‘this one’s better’. You have to tip the scales by showing them what’s deficient and the one that they think is great, and how the new product that you’re offering can overcome that. And in the case of Vax vacuum cleaners, everybody thought their vacuum cleaners were great. The thing I discovered was really effective at converting sales was showing them how much dirt was still being left by their current vacuum cleaner.

The single most powerful demo of that, because it’s the one that affected them emotionally the most was to show them how much dirt there was in their mattress. So what I would do is, if I could get in and vacuum the mattress, they would see all this stuff coming out of the mattress, which is just a disgusting thought that you’re sleeping with all of that awful stuff, and they would 9 times out of 10. If I could get to the mattress, I could convert it into a sale.

Part of it was strategic and then the second part, which is executional, is the power of humour to disarm people and make it easier for you to sell them things. Once I realised that this demo was so important, I used to ring the doorbell. The doorbell would be answered, usually in those days by a woman, and I would say ‘my name is Andrew Robertson, I’m here from the Vax vacuum cleaner company’ (It’s obvious because I was carrying one) ‘can we go up to your bedroom’? Most of the time they would laugh. Occasionally they’d slam the door in my face, but most of the time they would laugh and actually that was enough to get inside and do the demo and then I would sell a vacuum cleaner.

But that learning that making somebody feel good, which you do by making them smile or making them laugh, is incredibly disarming if they’re hostile towards you, but also an incredibly effective way of opening a channel for a possible conversation / demonstration / experience that might get them to buy something.

Pat Murphy
Definitely!
Congratulations on BBDO’s recent Crestor 2023 Network of the Year award. Can you share some insights into what sets BBDO apart from its competitors and how innovation plays a role in achieving such recognition?

Andrew Robertson
Our mantra is ‘the work, the work, the work’. We are focused on the work and we mean it. Why are we focused on it? We’re focused on it for two reasons. One is because there is so much compelling data to prove that exceptional work delivers exceptional results for clients. So it’s where we see the greatest leverage for maximising the efficacy of our clients’ investment, both in time and money.

And secondly, in a market which is as crowded and broad as the advertising agency business, you know where you’re competing with literally hundreds of agencies in most countries – that the work is our most powerful source of differentiation from all of those other agencies.

So we’re obsessed with it because it’s how we separate ourselves from our competitors and, more importantly, because it’s how we can deliver exceptional results for our clients. In order to do that, we have a few kind of pillar strategies – I’ll call them. The first is to secure an unfair share of the limited pool of exceptional talent. None of us will ever have as much as we want. We’ll never have as much as we could, but we should have more than we deserve, and there’s a virtuous circle there. We want that exceptional talent because it’s the exceptional talent that does the exceptional work, that delivers the exceptional results, that raises the bar for everybody else in the organization to shoot for better quality work, that makes it easier to attract more really good people who then do more exceptional work. So that virtuous circle of exceptional talent is something we believe in very strongly.

The second thing is to have as much process as we need, but no more. And we need enough to make sure that we spend our time, our energy, our talent coming up with solutions and ideas, not discussing how we’re going to go about coming up with solutions and ideas.

And then the third thing is to really leverage the network. To leverage the knowledge, the experience, the talent, the skills of our global network to benefit not only international and global clients, but also local clients and local businesses. Just being able to get help, understanding, insight from somebody somewhere else is an important element in it.

If you do all of that and if you start from the premise that you want to have very strong local agencies in order to put together a very strong network, which is how BBDO was built – I don’t take any credit for that that was done by Allen Rosenthal and Bruce Crawford, but a lot of the network agencies were basically I would describe it as you know they colonized the world on the back of global clients. If they had Coca-Cola or Unilever or Procter & Gamble and they said we want you to be in these markets and they went and took Procter & Gamble to Belgium and Spain or wherever it was. We didn’t do that. Allen and Bruce went and looked for the best local agency they could find, took a small stake in it, then a bigger stake eventually took control with the thinking that if you build this from the ground up, you’ll end up with a stronger network. And I think they were right.

So, how do you win things like the Crest award? You win by having lots of good work coming from lots of different agencies. You can’t depend on two clients in one agency if you want to win that kind of award and I think we genuinely have… I can tell you, if you shake anybody who works in BBDO, you know, if you wake them up in the middle of the night and say ‘what’s the most important thing in BBDO’, they will say the work. And maybe everybody would say that in every network. I don’t know, you’d have to be an idiot to say it doesn’t matter, but there’s a big difference between saying it and believing it. And for us it’s a conviction. There’s that wonderful phrase of you know, ‘if you really have conviction, you don’t need the courage of your convictions, because it’s a conviction’, and for us, the value of great work is a conviction. It affects every decision we take, because that’s the thing that’s going to determine whether we go for this solution or this solution, this person or that person, whatever it is.

Pat Murphy
And is it the work that keeps you going? I mean, you’ve been doing this gig now for 20 years, right?

Andrew Robertson
Me personally? Yeah it is. I mean, I think, if I ever get to the point where I don’t get excited when somebody shows me something, that’s really fantastic and it’s like, oh ho hum, that’s when I want to be taken out behind the wood shed and taken care of because, yes.

The two things that I really love about this business are the work and the people. I mean the people I get to work with every single day in our agencies, but also with our clients. You, get to spend a day doing with good people. That’s a pretty good way to live.

Pat Murphy
I don’t know if you’re like me. I mean, I’ve never really done a proper day’s work in my life. I’ve actually loved my job that much. Are you the same? We’ll get found out one day, right?

Andrew Robertson
Yeah I had this fantastic hairdresser in Greenwich. She was crazy. Early on she said to me so what do you do for a living? And I told her. And she said she stepped back and held her scissors up and said ‘oh wow, you have a real job’. And I said ‘I’ve got to be honest. I’ve been doing this for a long time. Nobody’s ever really accused it of being a real job’. And she said ‘oh no, but you guys actually make stuff’. And this says more about Greenwich than it does about advertising. She said ‘all my other clients just gamble with money other people have borrowed’. So yeah, I like being a silly little business where we make stuff!

Pat Murphy
Yeah, no, it’s brilliant fun and it continues to be so, certainly for me, and I’m enjoying every single day and every single minute.

Recently I met you with your Head of Production in Nashville with one of our shared clients. In the rapidly evolving advertising landscape, how does BBDO stay at the forefront of production innovation to meet the changing needs of clients and consumers?

Andrew Robertson
I’d say there’s two points on this. One is you need to observe what I call the 80-20 rule, which is it’s not my rule, but you need to spend 20% of your time being curious, interested in, learning about, getting excited about new things that seem to be very interesting, but you need to spend 80% of your time focused on things that are already important. There’s always a new, shiny thing, there’s always something else going on and everybody goes chasing after and says ‘it’s fantastic’ and it’s important for conferences and filling up trade magazines and probably podcasts! But as interesting as some of those things are, they’re not always going to be important. So, for me, you need to know about them, you need to think about them, but not spend too much of your time figuring out how to use them until you know that they’re really going to be important.

The second thing I’d say is creating a culture where people can learn fast when they need to is more important than being out front, because I think you can use up a lot of resource being out front and then finding out that 80% of what you spend your time doing is never going to be that important, or you can spend a bit of your time making sure you know what’s out front and make sure you have an organisation that can quickly, quickly become capable and competent in anything that is going to be, or has already become, important. So that, for me, is this important versus interesting balance and tension.

The seismic shifts that have taken place in this business as opposed to the continuous evolution and development of this business have really been twofold so far. The first was the invention of the internet, which was obviously a turning point, and the second was the introduction of smartphones. Those are the two big, big moments over the last 30 years that had profound, profound impact on what we do and how we do it, but they really were primarily about how we reach people and how they interact with our work, rather than how we create. They affected what we create, but not how we create.

The third seismic shift that I see in our business is the one we’re in at the moment, which is that of generative AI, which I think, for me, is going to be the third profound shift and the first, which is really focused on how we make things, how we create things. The others, as I said, were more about how we distribute and what we have to make. I also think an area that is going to have its impact much faster than the other two.

I think it took like 10 years for the internet to become a real advertising medium, and it took five for smartphones to be, as this is something I see happening in two or three, and I’m really very excited about what it could mean because I think, if everybody just sees it as an efficiency play which allows everybody to get everything at average for nothing, we’re really, as an industry, agencies clients we’re going to have missed a big trick, because to me, this is a massive effectiveness opportunity and primarily because it enables us to close the most important gap for creative people, which is the gap between having an idea and bringing it to life, and that gap can be big because of time, it can be big because of money and it can be big because it’s something just isn’t possible.

You know – I’ve got a brilliant idea but it’s not possible. Then it’s just an idea, it doesn’t become work until you’ve made it. I’m really, really excited by the potential to close all three of those gaps – that gap between having an idea and bringing it to life that generative AI is offering, not so much, I have to say, from the perspective of the written word I think that’s good for summarising reports and stuff like that but for creating visual images and video and improving those images and video at a speed, at a cost and, in some cases, making something that wasn’t possible, possible like we’ve never dreamt of before.

Pat Murphy
I mean, I agree with you. I think this is probably the most exciting time I’ve ever been in advertising. With this technology now, the possibilities are endless, I think.

Andrew Robertson
Well, what it does and this is the point is it really puts the weight of value on your ability to have amazing ideas becomes the thing that’s most important.

Pat Murphy
And that’s exactly right – In my recent interview which I did with Rishad Tobaccowala who, you may know. It was a really great interview and he said ‘look, the whole thing about technology and AI is being democratised, so everybody has access to the same stuff. The only differentiator is two things – one is the craft and the other is the storytelling. And you just hit the nail on the head just now.

Andrew Robertson
I don’t know if you saw the work that Marcel did for The Women’s World Cup, where they had that brilliant idea of – what we’ll do is we’ll show some really striking soccer footage of male French male soccer players doing and raising things, and then we’ll reveal that they’re actually not. It was all women all along. It was just like what a wonderful idea, but it would have literally been impossible without the, the generative AI capability that exists today.

You know, that’s just one example of what I’m talking about, where amazing ideas can now happen. That couldn’t have happened before. But unless you can have the amazing idea, doesn’t matter!!

Pat Murphy
Exactly

And one of the other things you said in that presentation that I saw you do recently in Nashville, was you said that we’re all gonna have to be absolutely brilliant, prompt engineers in the years to come, a bit, like you know, Microsoft365, as you said. Do you still subscribe to that?

Andrew Robertson
Yeah, because I think when it comes to using these technologies, that’s where the craft skill lies. So there’s, if I take, two elements, one is can you have a great idea and not everybody can, but the people who can are gonna be really valuable! And the second is do you have the craft skills to make it as wonderful as it can be and being able to define exactly what you want to generate, which is what this technology does? That’s a craft. That’s how you’re going to get the perfectly crafted execution if you know how to ask for it.

I still think this is genuinely not a case where ‘any fool can do it’. I don’t think that is the case at all. I think what it means is really smart, really brilliant people can have ideas, and then people who really understand the craft can generate, produce those ideas. And again, if you come back to where we started on this conversation about the work and its value, the more exceptional it can be, the more exceptional the results. A race to a situation where everybody gets the average for nothing is gonna kill businesses – clients, businesses, not ours.

Pat Murphy
Now, I did read, though, an article where you mentioned a concern about the legality of using Gen AI, though for client works.

Andrew Robertson
Yeah! Ad this is an important point. Again, when I come to that 2080 rule, my conviction is that generative AI is definitely gonna fall into the 80 bucket, it is going to be really important. It’s clearly very interesting, but it’s also going to be very important. But there’s still a lot of landmines that people can stand on and therefore the way in which we keep moving forward on it is, you know, we got to be, we got to put the diligence into it and make sure that we’re not creating problems for ourselves or our clients that could explode in our faces. That’s true about copyright and IP. It’s true about bias. There’s lots of different elements that go into a generative AI model that could create problems if we don’t figure out how to deal with them up front. I don’t want that to be a reason not to do it, because I’m convinced of it, but these are, these are landmines we need to identify and remove

Pat Murphy
Totally.

Now, a couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk said at the AI UK summit with the UK Prime Minister. He said ‘look, there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want to have a job for personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything’.

Do you subscribe to that?

Andrew Robertson
Not at all! It depends whether you think right at the heart of this – It depends whether you think there is value in originality and inspiration, and I do. And I, and the reason I do is I’ve seen all the data that shows how much more people sell when, when what they put in front of people and the experiences they create for people are as emotionally powerful and inspiring as they can be! And I don’t believe that that models that are basically built on what is already out there can do that. At some point, you have to have a leap, you have to have an idea, you have to have, you have to spot something that hasn’t been spotted before, rather than just find a way of synthesizing everything that has. And again,  if you can do that, you’re going to create value, and if you create value, you’re going to create jobs. The jobs will be different, probably, or most jobs, a lot of jobs are going to be very different, but I don’t see it as, I don’t see it as optional. Unfortunately, I think we’re all going to have to work!

Pat Murphy
That’s a shame!

Andrew Robertson
Yeah, it is. Yeah. It’s not the first thing I’ve disagreed with Elon Musk on, though!

Pat Murphy
No, me neither.

Now let’s talk about something that’s quite personal for me – sustainability. So my son came home one day from school – he’d done a presentation which said ‘how do we save the planet from the adults’? And I thought, ‘oh my God, you know what are we going to do?’. And it was my first kind of like light bulb moment and I thought I need to make my son proud of me in the future at some point.

And it’s become a big, important issue for both consumers and for brands. H ow are you incorporating sustainable practices and innovation into production processes and just in general at the agency?

Andrew Robertson
Again, this is one where I think, if you’re serious about it, you’ve got to look at the 80% that can have a real impact rather than the 20% that is interesting for conferences And the reality in our business – I think one of the advantages of being part of a network and part of a holding company that can operate at this kind of scale – the two most important things that we can do in terms of having a big impact are massively reducing our server capacity and, secondly, really doing a good job of recycling: recycling batteries, computers and phones. Those are two. They’re not very exotic, they’re not very exciting, they’re not the kind of things that win you awards at environmental and sustainability events, but they are going to make a difference, and I think being very ruthless and rigorous about what is actually going to make a difference rather than what’s going to make a headline is the key to this, and you know that’s maybe something where your son might… it’ll take a while for him to possibly understand that, but there’s a lot of noise about stuff that isn’t going to make any difference and not a lot of noise about stuff that really will, and I think we should be looking at what really will!

Pat Murphy
One of the big impacts is travel right? So the Ad Green Calculator says that something like 65, 70% of the carbon footprint is on travel, on production. My son, unfortunately, he wants to be an airline pilot! So are you reducing the number of people going on shoots and you have you stopped flying your personal jet?

Andrew Robertson
I am a big fan of travel, actually because I’m a big fan of face-to-face meetings, big fan! So I’m traveling as much as I ever did, maybe even more so, because if I learned anything during the period when none of us could, it was just how valuable it had been. In terms of reducing the number of people we sent on shoot, I think we’ve always… the motivation may not have been because we wanted to save the planet. The motivation was because we wanted to save time and money. We’ve always been pretty ruthless about who should go on a shoot and who shouldn’t, etc etc.

I think that that comes back to my point about what are the things that we can change that are really going to make a big difference versus things that may sound like. Like if I said, ‘okay, well, we’re going to reduce the number of people who go on a shoot by 25%’. Compared to reducing our server capacity, unused server capacity, by 10%. It’s a rounding error compared to that and it will be different for every business and it will be different for every activity. That’s why I come back to the point is like – what’s important, what can have a material impact, versus just get a headline?

Pat Murphy
You mentioned earlier about humour in advertising. You did a presentation on humour in Cannes this year. I was in Cannes as well and I heard you do that, and I think probably because we’re both Brits – well, depends on whether you call Scottish being Brit right?

Andrew Robertson
I’m Zimbabwean, mate, and actually after the World Cup. I’m South African.

Pat Murphy
And you know, as we were growing up, I always loved the ads more than the programs that they were in-between. Do you think that political correctness, though now in the current world, is affecting the way we include humour in advertising?

Andrew Robertson
I think that unquestionably it has. I mean because it’s made a whole load of – for good reason – it’s made a whole load of areas that you might have looked for material, no go-zones. But I don’t think that means you can’t be funny. I don’t think that means you can’t be humorous. I don’t think that means you can’t make people smile or laugh.

The metaphor or the analogy I use for this is stand-up comedians. There are stand-up comedians who depend on poking at sensitive issues in order to get laughs, because we all, we respond to that and there, you know, there are comedians who depend on, you know, being fat or being black, or being gay or being whatever they are, for their material. But there are also comedians and if I take somebody like John Mulaney, there are comedians who can write an hour of material and deliver an hour of material without offending anybody. They just make incredibly good observations about what’s absurd in life or what’s absurd in their lives. So I think it’s closed down areas, but it’s closed them down for the right reasons. I don’t think that’s an excuse for us not to try and find ways to make people smile and laugh. There is a way to do it.

Pat Murphy
And there are some topics that are just quite risky to address. I think you used stand-up comedians in your Sandy Hook campaign, right? Tell us a bit about that.

Andrew Robertson
The Sandy Hook campaign we’re in I think it’s I think it’s eighth or ninth year and the position that Sandy Hook takes is, it’s a remarkably generous position for them to take, given the horror of what happened in Sandy Hook is – we’re not going to win a battle to get rid of guns, but we can save lives.

We can save lives by teaching people what signs to look out for in somebody who could be potentially the perpetrator of a mass shooting. That’s the strategy for all the work that we’ve developed. The challenge every year is how do you do one that’s new? How do you do, how do you create something that isn’t just an extension of what we did the last time. And this year  I think it was a particularly good breakthrough in that, in that we have a series of of well-known stand-up comedians saying things Like you know, ‘don’t come to school tomorrow because I feel like killing people’, all kind of stuff like that, all the lines. And then, and then what we reveal is those were all things that were said by the perpetrators of mass shooting events in the past. The idea is it’s not a joke. Look out, look out for this stuff, and it’s a very subversive and shocking way to bring that message home to people, which is and, like I said, you’ve always got to find a new way. You’ve always got to find a new way of doing it.

Pat Murphy
Yeah.

Andrew Robertson
So, you start off thinking this is funny, then there’s a real twist when it really just makes you think about what was being said. And I think that based on the immediate views that it got and everything else, it certainly seems to be hitting a nerve.

Pat Murphy
I think it’s brave and brilliant work. The whole thing is alien to me because, as I was growing up I never saw a gun. Until I went to the United States you know, you know? Now you look at the stats, it’s like what – 565 mass shootings just to the end of October of this year.

Andrew Robertson
Yeah, it’s crazy. And that’s the whole point of Sandy Hook is there are always signs that you need to look for that can lead you to conclude that somebody might be about to do something like this and that that is the most effective way of saving lives now, rather than trying to get rid of guns, because that is that’s a hard thing to do.

Pat Murphy
Given your involvement with organizations like Autism Speaks and Hope Funds for Cancer Research, how do you see the role of corporate social responsibility and innovation intersecting?

Andrew Robertson
I’ve been on the board of a few non-profit organisations over the years, and when I’m asked to join my position is always ‘look, I’m not going to join unless you think that there’s something I can do, something we can do, that is going to create real value’. You know, I don’t need to go and sit in a room and have board meetings. Autism speaks – we have created the autism speaks campaign for as part of the ad council for 15 years now. It’s, you know, it’s a very successful campaign that designed to increase awareness of and awareness of the signs that you need to… again, so much of this is about looking out for signs that you can, that you can use to get early treatment that make a big difference on the outcome.

And in the case of Hope Funds, it’s a wonderful organisation: we give grants to postdoctoral researchers looking for solutions for the rarest and toughest cancers in the world, but they tend to be younger, doctoral postdocs and they need funding and we provide it. We’ve had three people go on to get Nobel Prizes. We probably fund two, somewhere between two and four a year, and three of them have ended up with Nobel Prizes.

But it’s a tiny organisation that most people haven’t heard of. So my value in that is to try and find ways to tell stories about the Hope Funds for Cancer Research that are going to increase its reach and increase, ultimately, the support it gets and donations it gets, so that we can go from two or four grants a year to 10, to 20, to 100, whatever the number is.

So that’s my thing, it’s how can I add value, not necessarily is this a cause that I’m particularly passionate about, because everybody has a good cause. I mean, you know you can’t get into competitive causes, you got to get into where can we add some value, have some impact? That 20/80 thing again.

Pat Murphy
Looking to the future now, what are the key trends that you’re seeing and what are you keeping an eye on and plan to integrate into, into creative strategies going forward?

Andrew Robertson
I think the first thing is, if I focus on what’s important rather than just what’s interesting. And the best place to start with that is with consumers, because otherwise you can drive yourself mad trying to understand everything else. But what consumers have learned to expect and now expect is effortless, seamlessly connected, at times magical experiences at each point in what are increasingly, non-linear purchase and usage journeys. That that in some cases the whole thing is two clicks, In other cases it may be six months, I mean, and but what they want is it’s got to be effortless, it’s got to be seamless,  what those journeys could be and then to figure out how to make any of those moments as magical as it can be – that’s where the creativity comes in, and to shorten the gaps, the steps between all of them.

That’s what consumers want, and therefore that’s what we need to find a way to provide. So all of the all of the things that need to happen in order to make that work are what are really important to me, and, and within, there’s no question, as I was saying earlier, that the evolution, or the revolution of generative AI is going to, is going to make a lot of that more possible than it once was, because it’s going to close a lot of gaps. So, to me, those are the two big, big things.

Pat Murphy
We have one final question. You know it’s the one that we always ask every time we talk to somebody on our podcast, and it’s become the highlight of these now over the last year or so. The question is what’s your favourite ad of all time?

Andrew Robertson
It’s a very, very difficult question to answer and I could give you the flannel about all my children being equal, but… but I actually do have an answer. The answer is an economist poster that David Abbott wrote. That is ‘On the edge of a conversation. One of the loneliest places on earth. The Economist’.

I think it’s my favourite ad of all time because in 11 words he managed to reach into your brain, demonstrate that he understands the emotional insecurity of a moment and serve up the economist as a solution to that, ie to play on and create a very emotional response and sell a solution in 11 words. And that’s what advertising is all about. And I think and so there’s a lot I could talk about Guinness – Surfer… there’s lots of things I could talk about, but I think for me, those 11 words epitomize creative brilliance, because there’s only 11 of them.

Pat Murphy
Wow, and that’s brilliant, because most people always pick a TV ad or something like that, but you’ve just picked a poster.

Andrew Robertson
The oldest medium on earth!

Pat Murphy
Incredibly powerful. I remember it very well. We’re going to post that up on theprodcast.com as well – the website. So thank you very much for that.

Andrew. It’s been an absolute pleasure being good fun. I hope it’s not going to be another 33 years. Maybe I’ll see you either in New York or I’ll see you in Cannes in 24 or something like that.

Andrew Robertson
Yeah, well, let me know if you’re over and one of those two things will make happen.

Pat Murphy
Lovely Love to do it and thank you very much for being here. Catch you again very soon.

Andrew Robertson
I hope so. It was good Thanks Pat!

Pat Murphy
Today we talked to Andrew Robertson, president and CEO of BBDO for almost 20 years.

To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes. If you’d like to feature on the psodcast or have any comments, questions or feedback please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com.

I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, of which all the links in the notes for this episode will be there – we’d love to hear from you.

Thanks again to Andrew, my team at MCA and to my production team at What Goes On Media. Thanks for listening, see you next time