[0:14] Darren Jamieson
The lady who’d signed my offer letter was the lady who the same lady who’d signed my previous three rejection letters. You think you’re very clever,
[0:23] Darren Jamieson
don’t you, Raven? Think you’re very clever. You won’t get anywhere in this life being clever. One of our TV producers, Emma, dropped a load of
[0:32] Darren Jamieson
polyboard when she was walking down the stairs. And one of the only one of the 10 interview candidates got up to go and
[0:41] Darren Jamieson
help her. And Paul and I looked at each other and just went, “Yeah, we’ll hire him.” On this week’s episode of the Engaging Marketer, I’m speaking to Kevin
[0:49] Darren Jamieson
Chesters. Kevin was one of the people behind the legendary TV advert for Thre’s Moonwalking Shetland Pony. So,
[0:59] Darren Jamieson
I’m going to be talking to Kevin about how he got into the world of advertising, how that advert came to be, and how it was nearly quite different,
[1:08] Darren Jamieson
and of course, what he’s up to now, and what it’s really like at an advertising agency. And are all those myths about
[1:16] Darren Jamieson
advertising agencies true? Spoiler alert, they’re not. But let’s find out firsthand from Kevin. Um, so you’ve
[1:24] Darren Jamieson
you’ve worked with some really high level agencies, haven’t you? You’ve had some pretty high positions.
[1:31] Kevin Chesters
Yeah. Um, yeah. Uh, you know, many times my, you know, my um, I’ve had C before
[1:40] Kevin Chesters
my name and and and in a good way mostly. Um, what what what’s C before the name mean?
[1:46] Kevin Chesters
Uh, seauite. I’ve been uh you know I’ve been cso chief. Hail to the chief.
[1:52] Kevin Chesters
Hie. Yeah. I so I’ve worked at um you know, I was head of uh consumer
[1:59] Kevin Chesters
planning at BT on the client side. I then went to Sachi Sachi and Sachi here in London uh where I was planning
[2:07] Kevin Chesters
director uh Widen. I eventually became chief strategy officer joint with a fellow called Paul. Um
[2:16] Kevin Chesters
I then went to Densu where I was chief strategy officer and then my last job job kind of job was as chief
[2:24] Kevin Chesters
strategy officer of Oglevik here in London. Uh and then I set up my own place and I sold my share of that and
[2:33] Kevin Chesters
now I am I am chief of me. Your greatest challenge yet.
[2:42] Kevin Chesters
Oh yeah. and also also my worst boss. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it’s all right. Boss is a dick, but you know, we get on. Um,
[2:50] Darren Jamieson
so how how do you get a position at something like um like Sachi or Ogulvie?
[2:58] Kevin Chesters
well, I mean, the sort of way that I would sort of jokingly say is I think when when in our industry, you either get good or old or good and old, right?
[3:09] Kevin Chesters
So you get one of them or both of them and and then you normally rise up um you know and become
[3:15] Kevin Chesters
in charge of it eventually. Um I mean I think how I ended up getting you know a job in the first place was probably
[3:23] Kevin Chesters
through I mean I don’t mean a senior job I mean any job in the industry was probably through I would always say perseverance. So when I get asked by a lot of grads or mentor,
[3:35] Kevin Chesters
you know, mentees that I’m I’m chatting to,
[3:38] Kevin Chesters
I often say there’s only really two things that matter in getting a job beyond luck.
[3:44] Kevin Chesters
One of them is you actually sort of have to want one cuz it’s quite a difficult process. So if you don’t re if you’re
[3:51] Kevin Chesters
not really that bothered, um then you probably won’t get one because there’ll be people who are bothered. Um and the other thing is persistence. You just
[4:00] Kevin Chesters
have to get used to people saying no to you.
[4:08] Kevin Chesters
One of the advantages of having autism is you’re sort of medically
[4:18] Kevin Chesters
incapable of being offended. So, you often sort of lack the self-awareness to know whether you’re being rejected or not. Keep going, you know. Um, and yeah,
[4:26] Kevin Chesters
I found that in the early part of my career. I mean, there was one month and it was harder back then because
[4:33] Kevin Chesters
there was no LinkedIn or no email or anything. So, you had to send people letters or phone them up. Uh there was
[4:41] Kevin Chesters
one month in 1996 where I think I had over 40 interviews. Wow.
[4:49] Kevin Chesters
And you had to wait when you got home to whether you’d got a letter or not.
[4:55] Kevin Chesters
And you learned eventually that if you got an A4 envelope,
[4:59] Kevin Chesters
it meant you’d got another interview because they’d sent you a brochure or something. And if you just got a sort of manila envelope, it was one of those polite lies.
[5:07] Kevin Chesters
uh that said we’re keeping your information on file, which you knew full well they weren’t. Yeah.
[5:12] Kevin Chesters
But I suppose the one thing I would say at least back in the day compared to what I hear about now from from youngsters,
[5:17] Kevin Chesters
even if you got a sort of polite f off, at least you got one.
[5:24] Kevin Chesters
You know, you didn’t get I think in the days, it’s weird, isn’t it? Because in the days when it was harder to do it,
[5:30] Kevin Chesters
you didn’t get ghosted.
[5:37] Kevin Chesters
I mean now it’s fairly simple to set a roundroin going, “Oh, you were very close number two. We’ll keep your information on fire, even though it’s not true,
[5:47] Kevin Chesters
but I find it astonishing that people haven’t even got the basic common humanity or decency just to write back to people, even to say, I acknowledge you’ve written to me.” You know what I mean? So,
[5:59] Kevin Chesters
yeah, it’s a bit weird. That always bothered me.
[6:03] Darren Jamieson
That was that was a very long non-answer as to how I got a job.
[6:08] Kevin Chesters
Um, well, I love the answer. Uh it always bothered me when I was applying for jobs when people didn’t get back to you. I thought that was the height of rudeness and and we make sure whoever comes in
[6:16] Darren Jamieson
for an interview now that we always get back to every single person to let them know one way or the other because it’s just basic blindness.
[6:23] Kevin Chesters
Thoroughly decent human being but also I mean the astonishing bit is that you know sort of I feel like I should
[6:30] Kevin Chesters
clap for that when for me actually is pretty [ __ ] decent you know I mean it’s just you know where’s my medal I wanted a medal for that. Come on. Where is it?
[6:37] Darren Jamieson
Yeah. I mean, it’s funny, isn’t it? I mean, like I say, now it’s really easy to write back to people. I mean, it’s,
[6:43] Darren Jamieson
you know, it’s almost astonishingly simple to actually automate that process, whereas back in my day, you had
[6:50] Darren Jamieson
to sort of and genuinely hand something to a secretary cuz nobody had computers.
[6:56] Kevin Chesters
Um, somebody actually had to type that up and send it to you in the post.
[7:02] Kevin Chesters
And yet they always did, you know. I mean, but not saying I’m like a poisonous holder of grudges, but I did
[7:08] Kevin Chesters
for years have a lever arch file of every rejection letter I’d ever received,
[7:12] Kevin Chesters
just so actually I could cross reference it against people I might meet in later life.
[7:20] Kevin Chesters
And it did happen to me once,
[7:23] Kevin Chesters
yeah,
[7:24] Kevin Chesters
when I finally got my job offer from Sachis in 2004.
[7:29] Kevin Chesters
I asked my mother to go back and check this folder that was back at her house to discover that the lady who’d signed
[7:36] Kevin Chesters
my offer letter was the lady who the same lady who’d signed my previous three rejection letters. So I was able to bring them in
[7:44] Kevin Chesters
on my first day and sort of say, you know, can we just have a quick little word about this? Is that you actually did that?
[7:52] Kevin Chesters
She was a Yeah, I did. Yeah, she’s a thoroughly lovely lady by the way called Kate Morris who was absolutely impossible to be angry with. So, uh, we just had a bit of a laugh about it,
[8:00] Kevin Chesters
which I suppose considering I actually had a job offer at that point then it was very easy to laugh about it.
[8:07] Darren Jamieson
And what what did she say? What were the reasons that you got rejected?
[8:14] Kevin Chesters
I mean, I know the reason I got rejected the first couple of times. I mean, I was a bit [ __ ] I mean you I mean genuinely I mean in that time it was after the
[8:23] Kevin Chesters
recession in the early ’90s so 93 when I applied I know because I found this out later from a friend who
[8:30] Kevin Chesters
worked there at the time there were 1,800 applications for two jobs.
[8:37] Kevin Chesters
So you were going to have to be pretty good and believe me I wasn’t even
[8:44] Kevin Chesters
half good. So yeah, I didn’t get any of that.
[8:51] Kevin Chesters
I mean, I suppose the one thing that was
[8:57] Kevin Chesters
quite useful, a bit like sort of, you know, if you’re a trainee boxer getting endlessly battered around the ring, I
[9:03] Kevin Chesters
mean, it it did at least teach me, you know, one or two things about the uh uh application process and how to get a bit better at getting through it.
[9:12] Kevin Chesters
But it still it still ended up as total luck. I ended up meeting a girl at an all you can eat curry night in
[9:20] Kevin Chesters
Birmingham who who genuinely I’m not even making this up was the girlfriend of a friend of a friend of a friend of an
[9:28] Kevin Chesters
acquaintance of mine and I had nothing else to do that night so I ended up at this curry and because I didn’t know anybody I ended up on sort of an obscure
[9:37] Kevin Chesters
table that wasn’t near where the person was whose birthday it was and she told me about this agency in London that basically the
[9:45] Kevin Chesters
their recruitment process involved giving anyone a job for a week if they wrote them a letter.
[9:53] Kevin Chesters
So that’s how I got my start in advertising.
[9:59] Kevin Chesters
I wrote a letter and um I got a job for a week. I mean the punch line there is I got a job for a week. I
[10:07] Kevin Chesters
didn’t. I got a job and then it you know I got promoted and it was all right. And then from that I got my job at Oglev.
[10:13] Kevin Chesters
Not not the one I subsequently had as cso. That would be an amazing progression.
[10:18] Kevin Chesters
That would be very quick.
[10:22] Kevin Chesters
Yeah, that would be fun.
[10:24] Kevin Chesters
Yeah. Yeah, I got one as an account manager. Um, and yeah, it was good. It was good fun.
[10:31] Darren Jamieson
Uh, and through that serendipitous letter.
[10:35] Kevin Chesters
What was quite funny about it was I ended up going into Oglev like way higher than I would have done
[10:43] Kevin Chesters
had I got the graduate job I’d applied for originally.
[10:46] Darren Jamieson
Wow.
[10:47] Kevin Chesters
Because obviously then you would progress, you know, graduate to account exec to account manager, whereas I just went in at account manager because I’d
[10:54] Kevin Chesters
done 18 months tarting around at an agency that you never would have heard of that no longer exists.
[11:01] Darren Jamieson
So you got this this job from this letter because you said basically they hire anybody that applies. Presumably you have to display some level of
[11:09] Kevin Chesters
competence in order to keep that job. So what what were the requirements that you had to do?
[11:15] Kevin Chesters
Well, I genuinely think and I’ve given this advice to any young person,
[11:18] Kevin Chesters
including both my own sons right now, my grandmother who was a proper down to
[11:27] Kevin Chesters
Abby kind of, and I don’t mean in the good part, I mean the bad part. Um, she u left school at 12. Uh, couldn’t read all right, became a servant, sort of,
[11:37] Kevin Chesters
you know, lived off the scraps from the master’s table, all the classic sort of upstairs, downstairs bollocks.
[11:44] Kevin Chesters
She would give me loads of advice about work, which which I mean it’s slightly bizarre what what this woman knew about being successful in an advertising
[11:52] Kevin Chesters
agency in London in the mid ‘9s, but um but her advice was absolutely golden.
[11:59] Kevin Chesters
What she’d always tell me was um you think you’re very clever,
[12:04] Kevin Chesters
don’t you? Are Kevin think you’re very clever? You won’t get anywhere in this life being clever.
[12:12] Kevin Chesters
You said people don’t like clever people are Kevin. She always told me this when I was growing up, right? And um people don’t like clever people are Kevin.
[12:21] Kevin Chesters
People like useful people.
[12:23] Kevin Chesters
People who get things done. So she’s now morphed into Brian Cloff for some reason. I don’t know why. Anyway, young man.
[12:29] Kevin Chesters
Um you’re so young man. Yeah. Um, so anyway, um,
[12:35] Kevin Chesters
I always learned this and I had a I had a boss when I was back in my hometown when I just had a job before getting a real job, you know, I was just helping
[12:44] Kevin Chesters
him out on stuff and he gave me like this same advice which was just sort of,
[12:51] Kevin Chesters
you know, just get known as somebody who helps people out who need help. And so I spent a lot of my time in the first
[12:58] Kevin Chesters
couple of months at that agency just going up to people and going, “You got anything that needs help?” Or if there was a creative team doing stuff at the
[13:07] Kevin Chesters
photocopy, I’d be like, “Well, give me that. Let me do that. Why don’t you get on with something more useful?” or you know if someone was setting something up
[13:14] Kevin Chesters
and this is something that stuck with me years later like if if one of our like receptionists or something was setting up a meeting room for a big meeting just
[13:22] Kevin Chesters
go and help you know and and I found this and and years later I can tell you a story about when we were hiring um an intern at
[13:31] Kevin Chesters
Widen years later there were about 10 very smart interns who’d come in for a day you know to crack a task that
[13:39] Kevin Chesters
something Paul and I had set for And we noticed one of our TV producers,
[13:44] Kevin Chesters
Emma, dropped a load of polyboard when she was walking down the stairs. And one of the only one of the 10 interview candidates got up to go and help her.
[13:56] Kevin Chesters
And Paul and I looked at each other and just went, “Yeah, we’ll hire him.” Because obviously they were all bright.
[14:04] Kevin Chesters
They’d all got through the process. We were thinking, “You know what? At 3 in the morning when we need someone who’s going to be really useful, that kid is going to be useful. Whereas everyone
[14:13] Kevin Chesters
else is too obsessed with getting a job to actually realize what you have to do when you’re in a job. Yeah.
[14:18] Darren Jamieson
And that was the thing. How did I progress? I think I was actually just quite useful to people. And I was also
[14:25] Kevin Chesters
given all this advice that sounds really silly. It’s not about presentism,
[14:29] Kevin Chesters
but if you’re the if you’re the youngest in the team or the the first, you know,
[14:36] Kevin Chesters
um you know, the most junior, it won’t do you any harm to not be out of the door at five. And it won’t do you any
[14:44] Kevin Chesters
harm not to be seen when your boss comes in that you’re already there. Do you know what I mean? Just these little things that my nan told me or that this
[14:51] Kevin Chesters
guy Mike, my first ever boss, told me just sort of stuck in my head. So I think um look, I’m not being arrogant
[14:59] Kevin Chesters
about it. I’m quite bright, right? And and and look, the difference between arrogance and confidence is arrogance is assumption. Confidence is validated,
[15:08] Kevin Chesters
right?
[15:10] Kevin Chesters
So I mean I’ve got a lot of things to show that I’m quite bright. I mean, back then, academic qualifications, right? So, I didn’t just turn up and vote a copy, although I did
[15:18] Kevin Chesters
do an awful lot of that. Um, you know, I I think I helped people out and sort of spoke up when I was supposed to speak up. And
[15:27] Kevin Chesters
yeah, I mean, I progressed in my early career pretty quick if you think about it.
[15:33] Kevin Chesters
I mean I was my quite senior client side job at BT, which at the time was the largest single advertiser in the UK,
[15:42] Kevin Chesters
you know, I had when I was 28,
[15:47] Kevin Chesters
you know, which is pretty probably pretty young, I would think, for quite a senior role in a client. Um you I got my
[15:56] Kevin Chesters
planning director job at Sachi when I you know just just about around about aged about 30 31. So so yeah I um
[16:06] Kevin Chesters
yeah I think um but honestly we’re all encouraged these days to have binary thinking. It’s got to be all this
[16:15] Kevin Chesters
or all that. If I was made to pick between clever and useful on my grand’s dichotomy, I’d definitely go useful first.
[16:24] Darren Jamieson
Yeah, I mean that that’s a valid point because I mean we hire on a similar principle to be honest with you that once you’ve got people of very similar
[16:33] Darren Jamieson
skills, it’s hard to choose between them. You can teach skills, you can teach um knowledge, but you can’t teach attitude.
[16:42] Kevin Chesters
Yeah, you can’t you genuinely you can’t bluff character.
[16:46] Kevin Chesters
You’ve either got it or you haven’t.
[16:50] Kevin Chesters
Um and my assumption is always particularly if you use a good recruiter
[16:58] Kevin Chesters
and and you know when you do find a good recruiter hold on to them because a you know a lot of them are a bit sort of cookie cutter. They won’t really go
[17:06] Kevin Chesters
outside the thing of finding you know the the quickest way to put buyer and seller together for the fewest amount of
[17:14] Kevin Chesters
um hours that you have to put in. Uh if you find a good recruiter, one that really understands people, and I’ve met
[17:22] Kevin Chesters
a few in my time,
[17:26] Kevin Chesters
what I always assumed was every
[17:30] Kevin Chesters
candidate who was in front of me could do the job. Otherwise, why would she have put this person in front of me,
[17:38] Kevin Chesters
you know, my my assumption was every single So, I very rarely asked questions about communications or advertising.
[17:45] Darren Jamieson
Wow. One of my main go-to interview questions is always to ask respondents what’s their favorite biscuit and why.
[17:52] Kevin Chesters
Because I’m really interested to see whether people can get really really animated over a topic that isn’t really very important and whether they can
[18:00] Kevin Chesters
actually defend a position where there’s a thousand right answers.
[18:07] Kevin Chesters
You know, someone could sit there and go I mean I always say to people or I always ask them what’s their favorite biscuits or what’s their favorite chocolate bar, you know, and there’s no right or wrong answer apart from the fact it’s a double-decker.
[18:18] Kevin Chesters
um you know that is the right answer of course
[18:23] Kevin Chesters
but I can defend that on a thousand different levels but if someone wants to come in and sort of come up
[18:30] Kevin Chesters
with a wrong answer like a Twix or a dairy milk or something then um you know knock yourself out I’m very interested to hear the argument.
[18:37] Darren Jamieson
H okay well I am curious now on what is the best biscuit not the favorite the best biscuit.
[18:45] Kevin Chesters
Yeah I think it’s I mean I I’ve tended to go classic when it comes to biscuits.
[18:50] Kevin Chesters
Uh, and there’s there’s a kind of top two, but then I’ll explain why one of them, you know, raises above. Um, and by the honorary mention for the Tim Tam,
[19:00] Kevin Chesters
but I’m going to go for British biscuits. Okay. An honorary mention for the Tim Tam, which is a great biscuit.
[19:08] Kevin Chesters
so I would say a very close second is the Borbin.
[19:13] Kevin Chesters
Okay. Very good dunker. Two biscuits in one because you’ve got the the level of cream in the center plus two. And in fact, it is two biscuits as well. It’s astonishing. If you have a molted milk,
[19:20] Kevin Chesters
it’s always going to start behind cuz there’s only one biscuit.
[19:26] Kevin Chesters
Whereas a whereas you’ve got two biscuits with a bourbon.
[19:31] Darren Jamieson
I haven’t actually thought about this as you can probably I can tell. I can tell.
[19:36] Kevin Chesters
Yeah. The absolute, you know, not even close is the dark chocolate home wheat. Dark chocolate. Okay.
[19:44] Kevin Chesters
Yeah. I mean the milk chocolate home wheat is very nice to probably sit somewhere I would say a bit like a British Olympian. Probably sits like you know between fourth and fifth.
[19:54] Kevin Chesters
Now, you see, I I would pick biscuits based on the occasion. Oh, yeah. Very good.
[19:59] Darren Jamieson
So, you know, if I was going to be dunking something, it would be different than if I was just eating a packet of biscuits, watching TV without a cup of tea.
[20:06] Kevin Chesters
It’s a valid It’s a valid thing. You know, sort of, as a client would say, you know, usage occasion. Exactly. Category entry point.
[20:15] Kevin Chesters
If if there’s a party or or a picnic going on or something in the garden, then I would go and it’s controversial. Party rings.
[20:22] Darren Jamieson
Now, I was about to say the party ring is astonishing and again to get slightly off topic.
[20:29] Kevin Chesters
What topic? We haven’t got a topic. This isn’t off topic. Carry on.
[20:34] Kevin Chesters
One of the absolute greatest gamechangingly brilliant things about being an adult.
[20:41] Kevin Chesters
Okay. Is the fact that all the things that restricted you as a child no longer do. So, in the sense that you can go to
[20:47] Kevin Chesters
a shop, buy a box of After Eights, empty every one of them out the envelopes and eat the whole lot in one go. You don’t
[20:54] Kevin Chesters
have to have one or two. Do you know what I mean? You can eat all of them and then go and buy another box and do it again.
[21:01] Darren Jamieson
I thought you meant like mashed like an apple. Put the whole lot together. No, no, I do mean eat them singularly,
[21:06] Kevin Chesters
but you can use them. You can put two or three together. It’s quite an interesting experience.
[21:12] Kevin Chesters
But the party ring is a very very good example of this. M so when you go to a party and you’re a child,
[21:19] Kevin Chesters
your mother or father will be like,
[21:22] Kevin Chesters
“Kevin, ah, Kevin, you know, have a have a sandwich. You’ve got to have a you got to sit there and eat your way through a
[21:28] Kevin Chesters
disappointing egg sandwich before you’re allowed anywhere near like the sweet stuff.” I realized this was amazing when
[21:36] Kevin Chesters
I first started taking my children to kids parties that I could eat the entire plate of party rings and eat nothing savory at all.
[21:43] Darren Jamieson
Thanks.
[21:46] Kevin Chesters
Yeah, you’re your own boss.
[21:48] Kevin Chesters
I mean, I did leave some I did leave one or two for the children sometimes, but Yeah.
[21:53] Kevin Chesters
Not the pink ones, though. Those pink ones were going. And they do all taste the same.
[22:00] Darren Jamieson
Yeah. But it’s it’s the experience when you look at it as you eat it.
[22:06] Kevin Chesters
Yeah. And also the the other thing with the party ring is um much better.
[22:13] Kevin Chesters
I’ve I’ve overthought this, which is not like planning, but the party ring is much better at a party in the winter than the summer because they’re much
[22:20] Kevin Chesters
better biscuits if the party ring um the the icing on the top has a little bit of
[22:27] Kevin Chesters
crunch to it and in a colder room it goes a bit snap compared to in the summer where it gets a little bit softy.
[22:34] Kevin Chesters
H I I I haven’t looked at it like that, but I I do like to take the party ring,
[22:41] Kevin Chesters
put it on my tongue, and absorb the top uh layer of the of the icing so that it kind of comes off just leaving the biscuit. But that’s a bit weird.
[22:50] Darren Jamieson
See, my my my wife found this a bit strange. She’s French, you see, so it’s sort of a little bit culturally
[22:57] Darren Jamieson
different that that there is a way to eat every biscuit. Like she’d be sitting there watching me eat a bourb and going,
[23:03] Darren Jamieson
“Why have you snapped the top layer of biscuits off?” And you’re eating that and now scraping the cream off with your teeth so you can eat the second biscuit uh in the same way you ate the first.
[23:14] Darren Jamieson
Like why with the Twix have you nibbled all the caramel off the top to leave the biscuit? Then nibbled all the chocolate
[23:21] Darren Jamieson
from around the biscuit and then eaten the biscuit. I’m like cuz there is a standard way to eat every single biscuit.
[23:28] Kevin Chesters
Then I must admit she decided this had gone slightly um possibly having me committed when I was explaining the only way to eat a Mr.
[23:39] Kevin Chesters
Kipling’s Bramly apple pie. Anyhow, where’d you stand on the Jammy Dodger?
[23:46] Darren Jamieson
Welcome to Welcome to Biscuits with Jam. Where’d you stand on the Jammy Dodger? No, I’m a big fan of the Jammy Dodger.
[23:55] Kevin Chesters
You nibble around the top, then you nibble around the base. Yeah.
[23:59] Kevin Chesters
Leaving a mini a mini jammy dodger in the center with minimal biscuits and the jam.
[24:05] Darren Jamieson
Oh, that’s Yeah, that’s an interesting Yeah. Oh, I like that. I like that.
[24:11] Kevin Chesters
Okay, let’s let’s move on from biscuits momentarily. I’m sure we’ll circle back to such an important topic.
[24:16] Darren Jamieson
Hopefully. Yeah. Now, whenever I’ve I’ve seen TV programs, films, or read stuff about working at big advertising
[24:24] Darren Jamieson
agencies like Sachi, I imagine it as just people completely high on coke,
[24:30] Darren Jamieson
swanning around having no idea what’s going on in the real world, coming up with these ridiculously over-the-top advertising campaigns that then the lawyers have to say, “You can’t do that.
[24:40] Darren Jamieson
You can’t do that. You can’t do that.”
[24:42] Darren Jamieson
But then something sneaks through and it’s just absolute chaos. Nobody knows what’s going on. There’s showers of champagne flying around. Is it anything
[24:52] Darren Jamieson
like that? And please don’t destroy my image.
[24:56] Kevin Chesters
Yeah, 100%. The answer.
[25:00] Kevin Chesters
Oh, brilliant. Thank you.
[25:02] Kevin Chesters
Um I mean I think what I would say about ad agencies and I I do a presentation I I as you know in my new world I
[25:12] Kevin Chesters
work directly with clients and agencies and I do a lot of training and seminars with them. You know, I have one called Two Worlds Collide, which is how to
[25:21] Kevin Chesters
burst the minefield of fallacies that exist about agencies and clients with
[25:28] Kevin Chesters
the other side. And the minefield of fallacies about an agency is pretty much how you described it.
[25:37] Kevin Chesters
Um I would say
[25:40] Kevin Chesters
that um and by the way I didn’t mean to grab my nose there when I said sounded like some comments on agencies
[25:47] Kevin Chesters
but um but the um what what I would say is um
[25:53] Kevin Chesters
agencies are like any organization or any um enterprise.
[25:59] Kevin Chesters
Um there are good people, there are bad people, there are average people, there are people who are really into it and are conscientious. there are people who
[26:08] Kevin Chesters
are dialing it in.
[26:12] Kevin Chesters
Um, I mean, one of the biggest fallacies is that thing about people just sort of sit about all
[26:18] Kevin Chesters
day sort of going, “Oh, I wonder what would happen if somebody decided that market sounded a bit like Mircat.” You know, I mean, it’s like I mean, there is
[26:26] Kevin Chesters
genuinely an astonishingly difficult process. I mean, the story I always tell is when we were doing the dancing pony ad for three at Widen,
[26:38] Kevin Chesters
right? So I did I led the pitch and then was the chief strategist on all that stuff
[26:45] Kevin Chesters
when it came on telly and you can always tell the best ideas because you don’t know whether you’ve made the worst career ending mistake of your life or done something that’s utterly genius,
[26:55] Kevin Chesters
right? We didn’t know when we put it out on I think it I think it launched during the X Factor from memory and um when you know those big sort of
[27:04] Kevin Chesters
Saturday night windows that still exist despite what very boring old art directors will tell you no one watches telly anymore. What will they do?
[27:13] Kevin Chesters
Um anyway, the um when we put Pony out, I was monitoring the tweets
[27:21] Kevin Chesters
and I was amazed at how many of those there were. They what are they doing at these agencies? I bet they just sit around all day smoking crack pipes,
[27:28] Kevin Chesters
coming up with their [ __ ] you know. And and I I just wanted to sort of tell them not that it would change their mind.
[27:36] Kevin Chesters
That I mean I did 4 months of quantitative analysis with what were then known as brain juicer but are now
[27:44] Kevin Chesters
known as system one. you know, to sell that in to the client who was an Austrian mobile phone salesman who’d never spent more than about 10,000 euros
[27:53] Kevin Chesters
on an ad before really,
[27:56] Kevin Chesters
you know, we had to go through like ranges of stuff, even to the point of having to I had to write some 50 slide deck about why putting Fleetwood Mac on it was a good idea when they were like,
[28:06] Kevin Chesters
well, we’re trying to go for young people and who’s going to give a [ __ ]
[28:13] Kevin Chesters
about a band from the 70s. having to go through the sort of scientific analysis of nostalgia and the you know I had to
[28:22] Kevin Chesters
write a paper on why hashtags would be effective because the client was saying why put a hashtag on it no one’s going
[28:30] Kevin Chesters
to use it no one knows what it is I’m like had to write them a paper telling them and showing them that there were hashtags at the end of Antiques Road
[28:39] Kevin Chesters
Show you know I mean this wasn’t something for like you know road show yeah come on wasn’t something for like Steven and C3PO
[28:47] Kevin Chesters
I mean the amount amount of the amount of work that had to go in to sell that. Wow.
[28:55] Kevin Chesters
You know, the amount of analysis that went in to how people used memes, the whole ad itself, the idea is based on a PhD thesis on the science of LOL cats,
[28:59] Kevin Chesters
if you can believe someone was paid to do that. So, this thing that everyone just sits about pissing about all day. I
[29:07] Kevin Chesters
mean, that might have existed in the 80s when there were three TV channels. They were all [ __ ] and the ads didn’t have to be very good really to like cut through.
[29:17] Kevin Chesters
I mean, if you’ve got to be better than Wayne Sleeps hot shoe show in order for people to think you’re good, it’s not exactly going to be that difficult. I’m not saying ads weren’t good. They were,
[29:26] Kevin Chesters
but they were just as they’re just as good now, but they have to work a hundred times harder to beat the incredible content that there is out there and all the platforms that you can
[29:34] Kevin Chesters
get it from. So people are pissing about and you know and it’s increasingly getting harder and harder and harder to come up with something great and something distinct.
[29:45] Kevin Chesters
So I mean ultimately yes somebody of a creative bent normally has to make that
[29:52] Kevin Chesters
leap at some point and whatever stimulant has allowed them to do that from jammy dodgers to you know
[29:59] Kevin Chesters
whatever you know not not suggesting anybody does pharmaceuticals and I mean I haven’t been in an agency really for
[30:06] Kevin Chesters
about 10 years so I don’t know but um yeah, I mean the myths exist And there’s
[30:13] Kevin Chesters
a reason that the myths exist and it’s because less than 10% roughly of people
[30:21] Kevin Chesters
who work on the client side ever work in an agency and it’s the same percentage the other way round.
[30:29] Kevin Chesters
So all these fallacies although they are based like all cliche and trope on a grain of truth. You know,
[30:38] Kevin Chesters
agencies do care about awards. There are quite a few people there who spend a bit of time recreationally drugging it, right? Allegedly,
[30:46] Kevin Chesters
you know, these things do go on in the same way that agencies have these myths about clients that they’re all, you know, so logical and somehow wake up
[30:55] Kevin Chesters
every morning and think, “Hang on a minute. How can I mess up the AY’s creative today?” you know, um, you know,
[31:04] Kevin Chesters
it’s these myths persist because there’s no cross-pollination. And I’ve tried over the years to get the ad association
[31:12] Kevin Chesters
and the marketing society to commit to making graduates on either side do three months on the other side of the fence. I think it would really help break this stuff down, but no one can be bothered,
[31:24] Kevin Chesters
unfortunately.
[31:27] Darren Jamieson
That is a shame. That is a shame because it would promote a much healthier and more trust-based working relationship if they did.
[31:33] Kevin Chesters
It really would. It really really would.
[31:37] Kevin Chesters
And it would help to sort of break down this kind of adversarial thing that goes on between, you know, the client and the
[31:44] Kevin Chesters
agency. And it’s it I find it very strange having been both.
[31:49] Kevin Chesters
I mean, I’ve often had to explain to people in the agency when they’re like, “Oh, the client’s coming or the client’s going to be annoyed.” It’s like they’re a client,
[31:56] Kevin Chesters
mate. It’s not the SS.
[32:00] Kevin Chesters
You know what I mean? Just like pick the phone up. Have a conversation. If it’s going to be late, phone up.
[32:06] Kevin Chesters
They’d rather you told them it was going to be late than find out. Yeah. You know, just pick the phone. I mean, all my best relationships with clients,
[32:14] Kevin Chesters
all of them. And you know, you’re happy.
[32:18] Kevin Chesters
I’m happy for you to phone any of them up and check this. You know, every one of my good relationships with a client has been based on two things, you know,
[32:27] Kevin Chesters
honesty and trust, right? And and the thing is you
[32:33] Kevin Chesters
just just be honest, you know? I mean, I can honestly tell you when I when I was a client, my first week as a client, I
[32:44] Kevin Chesters
sat in a room with my agency and I’d spent my whole career in agency until this point. And I sat in the room and I just thought to myself,
[32:56] Kevin Chesters
Christ, I didn’t used to sound like that, did I? You know, honestly, you’d be like,
[33:03] Kevin Chesters
here’s here’s the scary idea, here’s the [ __ ] idea, and here’s the one we want you to buy. And I know mate I know how
[33:12] Kevin Chesters
managing a room happens you know it’s honestly it was just annoying.
[33:18] Darren Jamieson
So with that that pony adver then because that was that that’s quite did quite well. It’s quite well known. Where
[33:26] Darren Jamieson
did the where did the creative idea for that come from? Because it’s a bit I say it’s very left field from what the the product actually was.
[33:34] Kevin Chesters
Yeah. I mean once you explain it it kind of isn’t but um I mean like all good things. So, so my my closest creative
[33:42] Kevin Chesters
partner is still Mick, who I wrote my book with, who I set up a company with,
[33:47] Kevin Chesters
who I’m about to do a second book that comes out later this year, and we do a lot of projects together for clients.
[33:54] Kevin Chesters
And, you know, all of the best things were collaborations.
[34:00] Kevin Chesters
You know, it was collaborations. It was strategy and creative working together.
[34:04] Kevin Chesters
And you know, I didn’t do Pony with Mick cuz I did it back at Widen with, you know,
[34:12] Kevin Chesters
the the two driving creatives really on it were were Dan Norris and Ray Shaughnessy and they worked with a team
[34:19] Kevin Chesters
Freddy and Holly.
[34:21] Kevin Chesters
Um, where did the idea come from? I mean it starts when I say an idea in a proper
[34:30] Kevin Chesters
analysis of what the client’s challenge was which was they were the number five out of five network
[34:37] Kevin Chesters
in the country at the time three five out of five by miles not really very well liked terrible reputation awful net
[34:44] Kevin Chesters
promoter score not doing very well right but they were the number one of five for mobile data people used them for data
[34:53] Kevin Chesters
because it’s three, right? Most people don’t know this to get to geek out on it a second.
[35:00] Kevin Chesters
Voice and text goes over 2.5G.
[35:03] Kevin Chesters
Data goes over 3G. So if you use the 3G network for talking on then the calls drop out all the time. Now most people
[35:11] Kevin Chesters
were using three for data but because of various historical things to do with how the market was um the only way like
[35:19] Kevin Chesters
people who wanted a cheap tariff used to keep getting rejected by the big network. So they’d apply to three one in three of them would fail the credit
[35:28] Kevin Chesters
check and it would cause a terrible bit of customer satisfaction and then of course because they also wanted to get cheap calls they were putting cheap
[35:37] Kevin Chesters
calls over a 3G network and the calls were dropping. So that was doing terrible for reliability. Anyway, so go back to the client’s problem. They
[35:45] Kevin Chesters
wanted you to get known for being the network you used for the internet. And remember this is, you know, nearly 15
[35:53] Kevin Chesters
years ago. So it was quite expensive to use the internet on your phone. And three had the only all you can eat
[36:00] Kevin Chesters
internet tariff in Britain and they wanted to launch it.
[36:05] Kevin Chesters
So you’re going, “Okay, cool. If we tell everybody you’ve got the only internet tariff, everyone will be asleep by the time you finish that sentence, right?
[36:13] Kevin Chesters
It’s just boring. No one gives a [ __ ] if you tell everyone you’re reliable or you’re, you know, whatever, no one cares.
[36:21] Kevin Chesters
So when we were sitting in the room and it’s sort of difficult to know where the actual sort of genius, and when I say genius, I mean genus, not genius, but
[36:30] Kevin Chesters
genius of this idea came from. I can tell you where the pony idea came from,
[36:35] Kevin Chesters
but I’ll tell you where the genius of the overarching idea came from, which was to keep on interneting, which was when you love something, you want everyone else to love it, too. Right.
[36:46] Kevin Chesters
You genuinely do, right? You really want everyone else to love it. So, if you were going to give the internet away for free, which is what three did, it would
[36:56] Kevin Chesters
be you’d say, “Well, we love the internet so much. We think it’s so amazing. We want everyone to have as much of it as possible right now.” So,
[37:04] Kevin Chesters
but love is one of those weird words.
[37:08] Kevin Chesters
Um, you know, everyone uses it in everything. So, you go, “Well, you can’t love the whole internet. Is there a bit of the internet you love more than anything else?” So genuinely we printed
[37:17] Kevin Chesters
out the whole internet and put it on the wall and we were looking at it going well look there’s kind of work and
[37:24] Kevin Chesters
there’s kind of porn and gambling and there’s sort of sport and here’s what and then we looked at this corner which was essentially fannying about you know
[37:32] Kevin Chesters
waving bears and sort of you know all the old memes right going well that’s the bit that’s actually quite funny is it and Freddy Powell who’s now brilliant
[37:40] Kevin Chesters
director lovely man um found this PhD thesis someone had done on lc cats and
[37:48] Kevin Chesters
like all craves he didn’t read it I read it and basically I read through the whole thing these days you just drop it into chat GPT and it summarize it for you in a second but back then you
[37:56] Kevin Chesters
actually had to read the bloody thing so I read the whole thing and what that thing proved was that people thought you sent silly stuff around on the internet
[38:05] Kevin Chesters
to make yourself look good oh look at me I’m funny I’m great what the PhD thesis proved was people pass stuff around on
[38:13] Kevin Chesters
the internet to make other people feel good.
[38:19] Kevin Chesters
So, it actually wasn’t silly stuff at all. It was really, really important.
[38:24] Kevin Chesters
It was a great way to fundamentally connect to other humans. Hence, silly stuff it matters. So, once we came to
[38:32] Kevin Chesters
this that what we wanted to tell people was we loved the internet and we wanted as many people to have as much of it as
[38:40] Kevin Chesters
possible. It was then Dan Norris, the creative director on it who said, “Well,
[38:46] Kevin Chesters
there are two ways you can go.” And we had two ways to go. There was a script that was written that was a 90-second
[38:54] Kevin Chesters
dummy TED talk explaining the idea and Dan there were two ways to go in the original creative presentation.
[39:03] Kevin Chesters
One was that Dan said you could do this talk explaining you know about the internet and why we think it’s so
[39:10] Kevin Chesters
brilliant or you could just do something like this. And he literally had a picture of a horse.
[39:16] Kevin Chesters
He just went, “Or you could just do a moonwalking horse.”
[39:20] Darren Jamieson
Anyway, he carries on, sorry, what was that about a horse? And he went, “Well,
[39:25] Kevin Chesters
you can either talk about the internet or you can do something from the internet that people talk about.”
[39:32] Kevin Chesters
He said, “If you do a if you do an amazing ad with just a moonwalking horse,
[39:39] Kevin Chesters
people will go, why the [ __ ] are you running an ad with a moonwalking horse?”
[39:45] Kevin Chesters
And then you’ll go because we think that it’s not silly. We think it matters and that’s why we’re going to give you an all you can eat internet tariff. Oh, you
[39:53] Kevin Chesters
give people a reason to ask you a question. Now, the thing most people don’t know about that ad was until pretty much just before it got finished.
[40:02] Kevin Chesters
It used to have a voice over on it.
[40:04] Kevin Chesters
There was a voice over all the way through it going, “Imagine imagine this little horse and then imagine this horse drops in your inbox in a explaining it.”
[40:13] Kevin Chesters
And then when I don’t know whether it was Dan or Ray or Freddy or Holly, but somebody went,
[40:23] Kevin Chesters
“Would you take the voice off? It’s a way better film.”
[40:28] Kevin Chesters
And so now that the only the only four words that appear in that film after 60 seconds of Moonwalking Horsey are the
[40:35] Kevin Chesters
words silly stuff, it matters. And then you went you you then put on a pony mixer at the end. I mean, the best thing to say is that the client Tom, you know,
[40:46] Kevin Chesters
he embraced the idea so much that like he allowed us to spend £200,000
[40:56] Kevin Chesters
making an online pony mixer so you could make your own version of the ad at home.
[41:00] Kevin Chesters
Now, this was very people remember how this was before essentially like iMovie,
[41:08] Kevin Chesters
before Tik Tok, before creators, you know,
[41:12] Kevin Chesters
you got to go at home and mix your own version. Again, from a media perspective, what most people don’t know about that ad
[41:20] Kevin Chesters
is that the ad itself, the moon walking horse, only ever ran on television for 12 days. No.
[41:28] Kevin Chesters
After 12 days,
[41:31] Kevin Chesters
everything that ran on TV was a 10-second mix that people had mixed themselves. It was all user-generated.
[41:39] Darren Jamieson
Oh, that’s genius.
[41:41] Kevin Chesters
I mean, you could argue if you were the finance director, we actually probably spent their entire media budget in 12 days.
[41:48] Kevin Chesters
Um, but it worked. It really worked.
[41:52] Kevin Chesters
I mean, the positive sentiment was astonishing. They went to number three of five networks in the UK within the space of about a month. The NEP
[42:00] Kevin Chesters
promoter was insane. I mean the commercial impact of that campaign and of course then what it led to was all
[42:07] Kevin Chesters
the subsequent ones. So, you know, I mean, we did the idea and then they did it again with Sing It Kitty and then
[42:14] Kevin Chesters
once we’ established the tone of voice and the whole idea, you could then come up with all the other things like the holiday spam thing or whatever. But, but
[42:23] Kevin Chesters
it all started with, you know, so I mean, it’s a very long answer to a very simple question, which is where did the idea come from?
[42:32] Kevin Chesters
Like all good ideas, there’s a lot of myth, a lot of things lost in the dense myths of time. And you know, this kind
[42:40] Kevin Chesters
of tedious myth of the creative Superman, this creative lone genius sitting in a room coming up with everything is [ __ ]
[42:48] Kevin Chesters
I mean, it might have existed in 1978, but it doesn’t exist now. You know, in the modern world doesn’t need cowboys. It needs pit crews, right? It needs a lot of people,
[42:58] Kevin Chesters
you know, and so where did that idea come from? It came from a lot of smart people working together, like all great ideas, a collaboration between lots of
[43:08] Kevin Chesters
good smart people. And then the other thing to say about it, by the way, is in some ways ideas are easy. People have
[43:16] Kevin Chesters
loads of ideas all the time. Getting them made,
[43:19] Kevin Chesters
that’s the hard bit.
[43:21] Kevin Chesters
So I say having a partner like system one who enabled that to get onto the screen, having brilliant
[43:30] Kevin Chesters
TV producers at Widen, having a great client who would give you that level of trust.
[43:37] Kevin Chesters
Um, you know, it’s I know it’s an old cliche, it takes a village. Do you know what I mean? But it really did. I mean,
[43:46] Kevin Chesters
you know, that was that wasn’t like I say, one person sitting in a room coming up with something,
[43:55] Kevin Chesters
you know, after smoking, whatever. You know, that was six months of astonishingly hard work.
[44:03] Kevin Chesters
You know, big shout out here to Helen Andrews, Helen Fer as was who was the main suit. You know, she’s now chief exec at um
[44:12] Kevin Chesters
Johannes Leonardo in New York. But, you know, huge shout out to her. Just the level of energy and power it takes. You can imagine the amount of times that thing nearly didn’t happen.
[44:23] Kevin Chesters
Yeah.
[44:24] Kevin Chesters
And that’s where my shout out is always to account management who are often the most derided department in any organization in any agency. Account
[44:33] Kevin Chesters
management are like farmers, right? You ask a kid what a farmer does, they’ll go they grow crops. No, they don’t. They’re not Harry Potter. They’re not nature.
[44:44] Kevin Chesters
You know what farmers do is create the conditions within which things can thrive. And that’s the role of account management in any organization. not to
[44:53] Kevin Chesters
sit there spotting problems or you know kissing the client’s ass.
[44:58] Kevin Chesters
They are there to create the conditions of trust internally and externally that can make great work happen.
[45:05] Kevin Chesters
And so that’s the thing it was everybody you know from our finance director Bronwin who’s still there now by the way. Hi Braum. But you know again it was
[45:14] Kevin Chesters
like the money. There were times when we didn’t have all the money we needed. So it was like right well it’s Bronwin’s job then to work out with the client
[45:22] Kevin Chesters
what is the best payment schedule what is the best way of making sure this occurs you know it’s everybody’s job to get
[45:30] Kevin Chesters
that idea over the line if people think it’s just creator’s job or just the client’s job or just the planner’s job it’ll never happen
[45:38] Kevin Chesters
collaboration is everything that’s why I just get really angry about these sort of silly myths of you know and I read it
[45:46] Kevin Chesters
a lot on LinkedIn particularly from people, you know, who were agencies in the 80s who go on about, you know, oh, it’s not
[45:54] Kevin Chesters
about, you know, teamwork, it’s about one person. No, it isn’t. It really is.
[46:01] Kevin Chesters
It wasn’t even then, but even less so now.
[46:06] Darren Jamieson
I find it fascinating what you said about the about the voice over last minute being cut.
[46:11] Kevin Chesters
Yeah, I’ve got it on my desktop somewhere.
[46:14] Darren Jamieson
Oh, you got the original the original voice over that was then taken off.
[46:18] Kevin Chesters
Yeah, because there was a similar issue with Blade Runner where Ridley Scott didn’t want the voice over, but the studio added it throughout
[46:27] Kevin Chesters
the film because they thought the viewers are not going to get it as much without the voiceover explaining to them what it’s about. But obviously, you won
[46:34] Darren Jamieson
your battle and had it taken off. How close did it come to staying on?
[46:40] Kevin Chesters
Um well it was weirdly paradoxical actually that it was the client
[46:47] Kevin Chesters
um a guy called Tom Malishitz he was the one who suggested why don’t we take it off I mean in fact he went a
[46:56] Kevin Chesters
bit bonkers he wanted to take off the four words at the end and the logo and we were going no no then you’re just going to have a film of a horse you I
[47:04] Kevin Chesters
mean it is actually event you know ultimately is a commercial you do have to tell people who you are. But he got so into the whole brain juices thing,
[47:12] Kevin Chesters
the whole system one, Daniel Cannaman thing. Wow.
[47:16] Kevin Chesters
You know, but no, fair play to the client. It was the client who probably convinced us to do it. Wow.
[47:24] Darren Jamieson
I was not expecting you to say that.
[47:28] Kevin Chesters
Yeah. But that’s the other thing, right?
[47:32] Kevin Chesters
Agencies can’t do anything if they don’t have the right client. I think back to my Honda days, you know, and look at people like Ellie Norman, Ian Armstrong.
[47:42] Kevin Chesters
Without them, you know, what’s ever going to happen? I can tell you right today, a hundred great ideas will die.
[47:50] Kevin Chesters
Brilliant ideas that would have changed the face of companies and how they approach their um their communications.
[47:57] Kevin Chesters
a hundred ideas will die today because a client has no bottle and no or sometimes it’s no bottle, sometimes they’re massively lazy.
[48:07] Kevin Chesters
Um, sometimes they’ve
[48:09] Kevin Chesters
got loss aversion. Sometimes they’re within an organization that just doesn’t for some reason understand how communications works. But honestly,
[48:18] Kevin Chesters
without a brilliant client, no idea ever happens.
[48:24] Kevin Chesters
It’s also why you should stop seeing a client as the SS. Um, I mean, the reason I called
[48:32] Kevin Chesters
That presentation I do about client agency relations, two worlds collide was I remember how it came about originally when I came back from client side to agency side. I was asked by my boss,
[48:43] Kevin Chesters
could I do a presentation called clients are from Mars and agencies are from Venus and make it really funny about all the differences between the two sides.
[48:52] Kevin Chesters
And I was like I can’t really do that because it’s not true.
[48:56] Kevin Chesters
And I said, “Clients aren’t from Venus and agencies aren’t from Mars.” Say,
[49:02] Kevin Chesters
“Clients and agencies are from slightly different parts of Venus. Everybody else is from Mars. The sales director, the product people, the, you know, the board, all these other people, you know,
[49:14] Kevin Chesters
clients and agencies to quote that astonishing thing from Joe Cox have so much more in common than anything that that that divides them, right? You have
[49:23] Kevin Chesters
the same frames of references. You should hopefully have the same ambitions and objectives.
[49:29] Kevin Chesters
I mean, you certainly have the same frame of references. When we’re all going on about ponies and gorillas and mircats, the finance director hasn’t got a [ __ ] clue what you’re going on about. And also doesn’t care.
[49:39] Kevin Chesters
He doesn’t care what’s in the ad. He just cares, you know, go build him an econometric model to say for every quid he gives you, you’ll give him four quid
[49:47] Kevin Chesters
back. That’s what he cares about or she cares about, right? So I think that’s the thing you know having a great client
[49:56] Kevin Chesters
is the difference between getting good work and not getting good work genuinely or having a great account management
[50:04] Kevin Chesters
department. It’s creating the conditions because those ideas when they start when they’re things like,
[50:11] Kevin Chesters
“Oh, we’ve seen this PhD thesis and we think LOL cats are really interesting.”
[50:17] Kevin Chesters
You know, it is like a little baby chick. Some nasty [ __ ] can come along and stamp on it straight away and it’ll
[50:25] Kevin Chesters
never become a beautiful chicken or horse or pony or mircat or gorilla
[50:32] Kevin Chesters
or whatever. By gorilla, you mean the the Cadbury’s gorilla? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[50:40] Kevin Chesters
Yeah. Yeah. Playing the drums to Phil Collins.
[50:44] Darren Jamieson
Yeah. Which again was another ad with everyone sitting around going, “Oh, what have they been smoking? What have they been smoking?” They’ve been sitting here working out an incredibly smart strategy
[50:53] Kevin Chesters
that goes, “Right, well, there are some people in this world that are glass half empty. There are some people in this world that are glass half full. Well,
[51:01] Kevin Chesters
there’s a glass and a half of milk in our chocolate. Very boring fact. Half empty, half full. Imagine how happy
[51:09] Kevin Chesters
you’d be if you were a glass and a half person.
[51:14] Kevin Chesters
Wow. Joy. Glass and a half of joy. Glass and a half productions gorilla or
[51:22] Kevin Chesters
whatever. Or my favorite one which was the balloon one uh done by the genius that is Niels. Um that’s Nils Petal and
[51:30] Kevin Chesters
not Nils Leonard who is also a genius by other geniuses are available.
[51:38] Kevin Chesters
Um, but yes, the gorilla, it isn’t just someone sitting in a room coming up with some
[51:46] Kevin Chesters
bollocks. It’s got incredibly smart thinking behind it from a planner like Lawrence Green. It’s got incredibly great clients behind it like Sandy Dila.
[51:56] Kevin Chesters
Do you know what I mean? This stuff happens because of the ecosystem that surrounds it. Yeah. Of course, you’ve got um I
[52:04] Kevin Chesters
think it was Andy and Richard, wasn’t it, Fallon who who came up with it? But you have this astonishing ecosystem of people like Nikki Crumpton, Lawrence
[52:12] Kevin Chesters
Green, Karina Wilshshire sitting around an idea like that,
[52:18] Kevin Chesters
protecting it, nurturing it, making sure it gets to the finish line. It’s a bit like American football. Do you know what I mean? Probably not at this moment, but
[52:25] Kevin Chesters
I’ll explain. You know, the idea is the ball that the quarterback is running with, but he needs all his linebackers
[52:34] Kevin Chesters
to get every [ __ ] out of the way in order for him to reach the end zone.
[52:38] Darren Jamieson
Yeah. That’s what’s happening to an idea. Ideas are easy. Making them happen is almost impossibly difficult.
[52:47] Kevin Chesters
So there there’s probably some amazing adverts that we’ll never see or never existed.
[52:54] Kevin Chesters
Oh, genuinely. Oh, somewhere on my phone. I’ve got in the year.
[53:03] Kevin Chesters
So the last year, my last year at Widing Candy was my least enjoyable year of my career, right? I really wasn’t enjoying myself. if I really had to get out if I’m honest, you know, I did and it was
[53:12] Kevin Chesters
good. But but one of the things that frustrated me the most in the last year before I left was I had six worldclass
[53:21] Kevin Chesters
ideas. Not me, sorry. There were six worldclass ideas that for various reasons with various clients never got
[53:30] Kevin Chesters
made and every one of them would have been as famous as Pony. Every one of them,
[53:38] Kevin Chesters
right? incredible ideas from brilliant people, right? Like Stu Harkness, like Ed Morris, like um Holly Newton. They were these incredible ideas.
[53:49] Kevin Chesters
And for some reason, whether a weak client or circumstance or just whatever,
[53:57] Kevin Chesters
they didn’t get made. And I look sometimes look at those as an inspiration to go, come on, Kev, what could you have done? Could you have done more? Could you have made this happen?
[54:06] Kevin Chesters
By the way, I always come to the conclusion, no, I did everything I could have done. But um of course genuinely there are literally in the next hour a 100
[54:15] Kevin Chesters
brilliant ideas will die because of circumstance and you know but whatever what do you do go again go again go again make something
[54:25] Kevin Chesters
good what I mean about persistence you’ll get a job in this industry if you’re persistent enough you’ll make great work in this industry if you’re persistent enough just keep going it is
[54:34] Kevin Chesters
largely the thing to go back to your original question that I think I had a
[54:42] Kevin Chesters
you did at one point. You asked me about how I got a senior job and I think how do you get any job? Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, I remember. Yes.
[54:50] Kevin Chesters
I think it’s mostly about just, you know, getting on with everything I’ve ever done, you know. It’s just just keep going.
[54:58] Kevin Chesters
It’ll put you ahead of most people.
[55:02] Darren Jamieson
Wow.
[55:03] Darren Jamieson
Um, incredibly, we we are we are almost out of time. Would you believe?
[55:09] Kevin Chesters
Would you believe? I haven’t plugged anything yet. Well, go on, plug something. And also,
[55:14] Kevin Chesters
for anyone that wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to contact you? But plug something. Go on.
[55:19] Kevin Chesters
I mean, the easiest way to find me. I’m,
[55:23] Kevin Chesters
you know, I’m literally I’m almost impossible not to find. I’m so needy on the socials. You’ll find me like quite easily. In in any social situation,
[55:30] Kevin Chesters
you’ll find me quite easily because I’m 6’4 and take up a lot of surface area.
[55:34] Darren Jamieson
So, my wife always says I’m impossible to lose in a crowd, even if she tries.
[55:38] Kevin Chesters
people arrange to meet near you, do they?
[55:42] Kevin Chesters
If you go to kevinchesters.com, you’ll find me quite easily. You’ll find me online there. Um,
[55:50] Kevin Chesters
yeah. I mean, look, what what do I do now? You know, I I think one of the saddest things about ad agencies or agencies in general recently has been
[55:59] Kevin Chesters
this sort of weird juniorization of their talent. you know, I mean
[56:07] Kevin Chesters
you know, they mostly got rid of a lot of very senior people, people who clients used to rely on for advice. And so I mean, I’d moan about that if I
[56:16] Kevin Chesters
worked at an agency, but it’s actually I put it puts a huge smile on my face. It’s my largest commercial opportunity.
[56:23] Kevin Chesters
I now work directly with a lot of very senior clients who come to me for advice and I do strategy work for them because
[56:30] Kevin Chesters
they all say to me, “We used to get that from our agency, but there’s no one there anymore. either the senior people are pitching 24/7 or they’ve all been fired. So yeah, I mean that’s what I do.
[56:42] Kevin Chesters
If clients want to talk to me, I’m more than happy to do it. And the other thing I do is um I have a training consultancy. So I have 14 oven ready
[56:50] Kevin Chesters
modules that I can run for clients and agencies. And I do that all over the world. I have clients here, US,
[56:58] Kevin Chesters
Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Iceland,
[57:02] Kevin Chesters
Holland, Germany. I’m about to go and do my first work in Dubai. Uh training stuff and so yeah, all that stuff’s on my site, kevinchesters.com.
[57:13] Kevin Chesters
And watch out for the new book. The new book.
[57:16] Kevin Chesters
The new book. Now, of course, you could get a copy of the old book.
[57:24] Kevin Chesters
Here he says, “The Creative Nudge,
[57:27] Kevin Chesters
available in all good bookstores and Amazon.
[57:31] Kevin Chesters
available in Turkish, available in Mandarin. Um, but yeah, the new book will be coming out in
[57:39] Kevin Chesters
uh the late autumn. Um, and that is a book about the power of simplicity and
[57:46] Kevin Chesters
partnership. You’ve heard me talk about collaboration.
[57:50] Kevin Chesters
Uh, we as a world have fallen in love with um complexity because it’s how we make money, making people think things are more complicated than they are. So
[57:59] Kevin Chesters
then you’ve got to come and ask somebody when actually in most cases they’re a lot simpler than you think. And Mick and I have developed a very simple
[58:08] Kevin Chesters
three-stage methodology for um brand thinking that uh is way simpler than you would think. So we’re writing a book on
[58:15] Kevin Chesters
that. But it the intro to the book is really about um partnership and how in the modern
[58:22] Kevin Chesters
world the myth of the soloreneur or this individual creative genius is just utter
[58:30] Kevin Chesters
[ __ ]
[58:33] Kevin Chesters
Um so it’s about the power of partnership and also about the power of simplicity.
[58:40] Darren Jamieson
No, I completely agree with that. You can’t do it yourself. You need somebody else. You need other people.
[58:45] Kevin Chesters
Everybody does. I mean, you know, only 13 people ever stood on the moon, right?
[58:50] Kevin Chesters
But there were 41,000 people in the Apollo program.
[58:55] Kevin Chesters
You know, when when Ellen MacArthur sailed solo around the world, as she will tell you, she had 20 full-time
[59:03] Kevin Chesters
staff on hand 24/7, they weren’t in the boat,
[59:07] Kevin Chesters
but she couldn’t have done it without them, including a full-time psychiatrist.
[59:14] Darren Jamieson
Yeah. Why you need which I love which you’d probably need if you were in the stuck on your own in the Southern Ocean. I imagine it would probably be quite useful. Yeah.
[59:23] Kevin Chesters
But that’s it. You can’t everybody we need we are you know we die alone. We are connecting and connected creatures as humans. You know we all need our
[59:31] Kevin Chesters
tribe. We all need our gang because it’s what you know makes us survive and thrive.
[59:40] Darren Jamieson
Thank you Kevin.
[59:42] Darren Jamieson
I will put links to all of those below the podcast in the We started with biscuits and we finished on philosophy. I mean I think this is quite you know it’s covered everything, hasn’t it?
[59:52] Kevin Chesters
Mostly biscuits.
