Darren Jamieson: On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I’m speaking to Kevin Chesters.
Kevin was one of the people behind the legendary TV advert for Three’s Moonwalking Shetland Pony. So, I’m going to be talking to Kevin about how he got into the world of advertising, how that advert came to be, how it was nearly quite different, what he’s up to now, and what it’s really like at an advertising agency.
And are all those myths about advertising agencies true?
Spoiler alert, they’re not. But let’s find out firsthand from Kevin.
So, you’ve worked with some really high-level agencies, haven’t you? You’ve had some pretty high positions.
Kevin Chesters: Yeah. Many times I’ve had C before my name, and in a good way mostly.
Darren: What does C before the name mean?
Kevin: C-suite. I’ve been CSO, Chief Strategy Officer. Hail to the chief.
So, I was Head of Consumer Planning at BT on the client side. I then went to Saatchi & Saatchi here in London, where I was Planning Director. At Wieden, I eventually became Chief Strategy Officer jointly with a fellow called Paul.
I then went to Dentsu, where I was Chief Strategy Officer. Then my last proper job was as Chief Strategy Officer of Ogilvy here in London.
Then I set up my own place, sold my share of that, and now I am chief of me.
Darren: Your greatest challenge yet.
Kevin: Oh yeah. Also my worst boss. The boss is a dick, but we get on.
Darren: How do you get a position at something like Saatchi or Ogilvy?
Kevin: The way I would jokingly say it is that, in our industry, you either get good or old, or good and old. You get one of them or both of them, then you normally rise up and eventually become in charge of it.
How I ended up getting a job in the first place, and I don’t mean a senior job, I mean any job in the industry, was probably through perseverance.
When I get asked by a lot of grads or mentees I’m chatting to, I often say there are only really two things that matter in getting a job beyond luck.
One of them is that you actually have to want one, because it’s quite a difficult process. If you’re not really that bothered, then you probably won’t get one, because there’ll be people who are bothered.
The other thing is persistence. You just have to get used to people saying no to you.
One of the advantages of having autism is you’re sort of medically incapable of being offended. You often lack the self-awareness to know whether you’re being rejected or not, so you keep going.
I found that in the early part of my career. There was one month, and it was harder back then because there was no LinkedIn or email or anything, so you had to send people letters or phone them up. There was one month in 1996 where I think I had over 40 interviews.
Darren: Wow.
Kevin: You had to wait until you got home to see whether you’d got a letter or not.
You learned eventually that if you got an A4 envelope, it meant you’d got another interview because they’d sent you a brochure or something. If you just got a sort of manila envelope, it was one of those polite lies that said, “We’re keeping your information on file,” which you knew full well they weren’t.
But I suppose the one thing I would say, at least back in the day compared to what I hear now from youngsters, even if you got a polite “f off”, at least you got one.
You didn’t get ghosted.
It’s weird, isn’t it? In the days when it was harder to do it, you didn’t get ghosted. Now it’s fairly simple to set a round robin going that says, “You were very close, number two. We’ll keep your information on file,” even though it’s not true.
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.”
So yeah, it’s a bit weird. That was a very long non-answer as to how I got a job.
Darren: Well, I love the answer. 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.
We make sure now, whoever comes in for an interview, that we always get back to every single person to let them know one way or the other, because it’s just basic politeness.
Kevin: Thoroughly decent human being.
The astonishing bit is I feel like I should clap for that, when actually it’s just pretty bloody decent. Where’s my medal? I want a medal for that. Come on. Where is it?
It’s funny, isn’t it? Like I say, now it’s really easy to write back to people. It’s almost astonishingly simple to automate that process.
Whereas back in my day, you had to genuinely hand something to a secretary, because nobody had computers. Somebody actually had to type that up and send it to you in the post. Yet they always did.
I’m not saying I’m a poisonous holder of grudges, but I did, for years, have a lever arch file of every rejection letter I’d ever received, just so I could cross-reference it against people I might meet in later life.
It did happen to me once. When I finally got my job offer from Saatchi’s in 2004, 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 my offer letter was the same lady who’d signed my previous three rejection letters.
So I was able to bring them in on my first day and say, “Can we just have a quick little word about this?”
Darren: You actually did that?
Kevin: Yeah, I did. She was a thoroughly lovely lady, by the way, called Kate Morris, who was absolutely impossible to be angry with. So we just had a bit of a laugh about it.
I suppose, considering I actually had a job offer at that point, it was very easy to laugh about it.
Darren: What did she say?
What were the reasons you got rejected?
Kevin: I know the reason I got rejected the first couple of times. I was a bit shit.
Genuinely, at that time, after the recession in the early ’90s, so 1993 when I applied, I know because I found this out later from a friend who worked there at the time, there were 1,800 applications for two jobs.
So you were going to have to be pretty good, and believe me, I wasn’t even half good.
I suppose the one thing that was quite useful, a bit like if you’re a trainee boxer getting endlessly battered around the ring, it did at least teach me one or two things about the application process and how to get a bit better at getting through it.
But it still ended up as total luck.
I ended up meeting a girl at an all-you-can-eat curry night in Birmingham, who genuinely, I’m not even making this up, was the girlfriend of a friend of a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of mine.
I had nothing else to do that night, so I ended up at this curry. Because I didn’t know anybody, I ended up on an obscure table that wasn’t near where the person was whose birthday it was.
She told me about this agency in London where their recruitment process basically involved giving anyone a job for a week if they wrote them a letter.
So that’s how I got my start in advertising. I wrote a letter, and I got a job for a week.
The punchline there is, I got a job for a week. I didn’t. I got a job, then I got promoted, and it was all right.
From that I got my job at Ogilvy. Not the one I subsequently had as CSO. That would be an amazing progression.
Darren: That would be very quick.
Kevin: Yeah, I got one as an Account Manager. It was good fun. Through that serendipitous letter.
What was quite funny about it was I ended up going into Ogilvy way higher than I would have done had I got the graduate job I’d applied for originally.
Darren: Wow.
Kevin: Because obviously then you would progress from graduate to Account Executive to Account Manager, whereas I just went in at Account Manager because I’d done 18 months tarting around at an agency you never would have heard of, that no longer exists.
Darren: So you got this job from this letter because, as you said, they basically hired anybody that applied. Presumably, you had to display some level of competence in order to keep that job.
What were the requirements? What did you have to do?
Kevin: I genuinely think, and I’ve given this advice to any young person, including both my own sons right now, my grandmother, who was a proper Downton Abbey kind of person, and I don’t mean in the good part, I mean the bad part, left school at 12, couldn’t read, became a servant, lived off the scraps from the master’s table, all the classic upstairs-downstairs bollocks.
She would give me loads of advice about work, which is slightly bizarre. What did this woman know about being successful in an advertising agency in London in the mid-’90s? But her advice was absolutely golden.
What she’d always tell me was, “You think you’re very clever, don’t you, Kevin? Think you’re very clever. You won’t get anywhere in this life being clever.”
She said, “People don’t like clever people, Kevin. People like useful people. People who get things done.”
She’s now morphed into Brian Clough for some reason. I don’t know why.
I always learned this. I had a boss back in my hometown, when I just had a job before getting a real job. I was just helping him out on stuff, and he gave me the same advice. Just get known as somebody who helps people out who need help.
So I spent a lot of my time in the first couple of months at that agency just going up to people and saying, “Have you got anything that needs help?”
Or if there was a creative team doing stuff at the photocopier, I’d say, “Give me that. Let me do that. Why don’t you get on with something more useful?”
If someone was setting something up, and this is something that stuck with me years later, if one of our receptionists was setting up a meeting room for a big meeting, just go and help.
Years later, when we were hiring an intern at Wieden, there were about 10 very smart interns who’d come in for a day to crack a task that Paul and I had set for them.
We noticed one of our TV producers, Emma, dropped a load of polyboard when she was walking down the stairs. Only one of the 10 interview candidates got up to go and help her.
Paul and I looked at each other and just went, “Yeah, we’ll hire him.”
Because obviously they were all bright. They’d all got through the process. But we were thinking, “At three in the morning, when we need someone who’s going to be really useful, that kid is going to be useful.”
Whereas everyone else was too obsessed with getting a job to actually realise what you have to do when you’re in a job.
Darren: Yeah.
Kevin: That was the thing. How did I progress? I think I was actually just quite useful to people.
I was also given all this advice that sounds really silly. It’s not about presenteeism, but if you’re the youngest in the team or the most junior, it won’t do you any harm not to be out of the door at five. It won’t do you any harm to be seen when your boss comes in, and you’re already there.
Just these little things that my nan told me, or that this guy Mike, my first ever boss, told me, stuck in my head.
I’m not being arrogant about it. I’m quite bright. The difference between arrogance and confidence is arrogance is assumption. Confidence is validated.
I’ve got a lot of things to show that I’m quite bright. Back then, academic qualifications. So I didn’t just turn up and photocopy, although I did do an awful lot of that.
I think I helped people out and spoke up when I was supposed to speak up.
I progressed in my early career pretty quickly, if you think about it. I had my quite senior client-side job at BT, which at the time was the largest single advertiser in the UK, when I was 28. That’s probably pretty young for quite a senior role in a client.
I got my Planning Director job at Saatchi when I was around 30 or 31.
We’re all encouraged these days to have binary thinking. It’s got to be all this or all that. If I was made to pick between clever and useful on my gran’s dichotomy, I’d definitely go useful first.
Darren: That’s a valid point, because we hire on a similar principle, to be honest with you. Once you’ve got people of very similar skills, it’s hard to choose between them.
You can teach skills. You can teach knowledge. But you can’t teach attitude.
Kevin: Yeah, you genuinely can’t bluff character. You’ve either got it or you haven’t.
My assumption is always, particularly if you use a good recruiter, and when you do find a good recruiter, hold on to them, because a lot of them are a bit cookie cutter. They won’t really go outside the quickest way to put buyer and seller together for the fewest number of hours.
If you find a good recruiter, one that really understands people, and I’ve met a few in my time, what I always assumed was that every candidate who was in front of me could do the job. Otherwise, why would she have put this person in front of me?
So I very rarely asked questions about communications or advertising.
Darren: Wow.
Kevin: One of my main go-to interview questions is always to ask respondents what their favourite biscuit is and why.
I’m really interested to see whether people can get really animated over a topic that isn’t very important, and whether they can actually defend a position where there are a thousand right answers.
I always ask people what their favourite biscuit is, or what their favourite chocolate bar is. There’s no right or wrong answer, apart from the fact it’s a Double Decker. That is the right answer, of course.
But I can defend that on a thousand different levels. If someone wants to come in and come up with a wrong answer, like a Twix or a Dairy Milk or something, knock yourself out. I’m very interested to hear the argument.
Darren: Okay, well I am curious now. What is the best biscuit? Not your favourite, the best biscuit.
Kevin: I’ve tended to go classic when it comes to biscuits. There’s a top two, but I’ll explain why one of them rises above.
Honorary mention for the Tim Tam, but I’m going to go for British biscuits. An honorary mention for the Tim Tam, which is a great biscuit.
I would say a very close second is the Bourbon. Very good dunker. Two biscuits in one because you’ve got the level of cream in the centre plus two. In fact, it is two biscuits as well. It’s astonishing.
If you have a malted milk, it’s always going to start behind because there’s only one biscuit. Whereas you’ve got two biscuits with a Bourbon.
Darren: I haven’t actually thought about this.
Kevin: As you can probably tell, I have.
The absolute, not even close, is the dark chocolate Hobnob. Dark chocolate.
The milk chocolate Hobnob is very nice, probably sits somewhere, I would say, a bit like a British Olympian, between fourth and fifth.
Darren: Now, you see, I would pick biscuits based on the occasion.
Kevin: Very good.
Darren: If I was going to be dunking something, it would be different from if I was just eating a packet of biscuits, watching TV without a cup of tea.
Kevin: It’s a valid thing. As a client would say, usage occasion. Category entry point.
Darren: Exactly. If there’s a party or picnic going on in the garden, then I would go, and it’s controversial, Party Rings.
Kevin: I was about to say the Party Ring is astonishing.
Again, to get slightly off topic.
Darren: What topic? We haven’t got a topic. This isn’t off topic. Carry on.
Kevin: One of the absolute greatest, game-changingly brilliant things about being an adult is the fact that all the things that restricted you as a child no longer do.
In the sense that you can go to a shop, buy a box of After Eights, empty every one of them out of the envelopes and eat the whole lot in one go. You don’t have to have one or two.
You can eat all of them, then go and buy another box and do it again.
Darren: I thought you meant mash them together, like an apple. Put the whole lot together.
Kevin: No, I do mean eat them singularly, but you can put two or three together. It’s quite an interesting experience.
The Party Ring is a very good example of this.
When you go to a party and you’re a child, your mother or father will be like, “Kevin, have a sandwich. You’ve got to sit there and eat your way through a disappointing egg sandwich before you’re allowed anywhere near the sweet stuff.”
I realised this was amazing when I first started taking my children to kids’ parties, that I could eat the entire plate of Party Rings and eat nothing savoury at all.
Darren: You’re your own boss.
Kevin: I did leave some. I did leave one or two for the children sometimes.
Darren: Not the pink ones, though.
Kevin: Those pink ones were going. And they do all taste the same.
Darren: Yeah, but it’s the experience when you look at it as you eat it.
Kevin: Yeah. The other thing with the Party Ring is, and I’ve overthought this, which is not like planning, the Party Ring is much better at a party in the winter than the summer.
They’re much better biscuits if the icing on the top has a little bit of crunch to it. In a colder room it goes a bit snappy, compared to in the summer where it gets a little bit soft.
Darren: I haven’t looked at it like that, but I do like to take the Party Ring, put it on my tongue, and absorb the top layer of the icing so that it comes off, just leaving the biscuit. But that’s a bit weird.
Kevin: My wife found this a bit strange. She’s French, you see, so it’s culturally different.
There is a way to eat every biscuit. She’d be sitting there watching me eat a Bourbon going, “Why have you snapped the top layer of biscuit off? And you’re eating that, and now scraping the cream off with your teeth so you can eat the second biscuit in the same way you ate the first?”
“Why with the Twix have you nibbled all the caramel off the top to leave the biscuit, then nibbled all the chocolate from around the biscuit, and then eaten the biscuit?”
I’m like, because there is a standard way to eat every single biscuit.
Then I must admit, she decided this had gone slightly, possibly having me committed, when I was explaining the only way to eat a Mr Kipling Bramley apple pie.
Anyhow, where do you stand on the Jammy Dodger?
Darren: Welcome to Biscuits with Jam. Where do you stand on the Jammy Dodger?
No, I’m a big fan of the Jammy Dodger. You nibble around the top, then you nibble around the base, leaving a mini Jammy Dodger in the centre with minimal biscuit and the jam.
Kevin: That’s interesting. I like that.
Darren: Okay, let’s move on from biscuits momentarily. I’m sure we’ll circle back to such an important topic.
Kevin: Hopefully.
Darren: Whenever I’ve seen TV programmes, films, or read stuff about working at big advertising agencies like Saatchi, I imagine it as just people completely high on coke, 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. You can’t do that. You can’t do that.”
But then something sneaks through, and it’s just absolute chaos. Nobody knows what’s going on. There are showers of champagne flying around.
Is it anything like that? And please don’t destroy my image.
Kevin: Yeah, 100%. The answer is yes.
Darren: Brilliant. Thank you.
Kevin: I do a presentation now, as you know, in my new world. I work directly with clients and agencies, and I do a lot of training and seminars with them.
I have one called Two Worlds Collide, which is how to burst the minefield of fallacies that exists about agencies and clients with the other side.
The minefield of fallacies about an agency is pretty much how you described it.
By the way, I didn’t mean to grab my nose there when I said that’s what some people think of agencies.
What I would say is, agencies are like any organisation or any enterprise. There are good people, bad people, average people, people who are really into it and conscientious, and people who are dialling it in.
One of the biggest fallacies is that people just sit about all day going, “Oh, I wonder what would happen if somebody decided that market sounded a bit like meerkat?”
There is genuinely an astonishingly difficult process.
The story I always tell is when we were doing the Dancing Pony ad for Three at Wieden. I led the pitch and then was the Chief Strategist on all that stuff when it came on telly.
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.
We didn’t know when we put it out. I think it launched during The X Factor from memory, in one of those big Saturday night windows that still exist, despite what very boring old art directors will tell you about no one watching telly anymore. What will they do?
When we put Pony out, I was monitoring the tweets. I was amazed at how many of those were, “What are they doing at these agencies? I bet they just sit around all day smoking crack pipes, coming up with this shit.”
I just wanted to tell them, not that it would change their mind, that I did four months of quantitative analysis with what were then known as BrainJuicer, but are now known as System1, to sell that in to the client, who was an Austrian mobile phone salesman who’d never spent more than about 10,000 euros on an ad before.
We had to go through ranges of stuff, even to the point where I had to write some 50-slide deck about why putting Fleetwood Mac on it was a good idea.
They were like, “We’re trying to go for young people. Who’s going to give a shit about a band from the ’70s?”
So I had to go through the scientific analysis of nostalgia.
I had to write a paper on why hashtags would be effective, because the client was saying, “Why put a hashtag on it? No one’s going to use it. No one knows what it is.”
I had to write them a paper telling them and showing them that there were hashtags at the end of Antiques Roadshow. This wasn’t something for Steven and C-3PO.
The amount of work that had to go in to sell that was huge.
The amount of analysis that went into how people used memes. The whole ad itself, the idea, is based on a PhD thesis on the science of LOLcats, if you can believe someone was paid to do that.
This thing that everyone thinks is just people sitting about pissing about all day, I mean, that might have existed in the ’80s, when there were three TV channels, they were all shit and the ads didn’t have to be very good to cut through.
If you’ve got to be better than Wayne Sleep’s 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. But they’re just as good now. They just have to work a hundred times harder to beat the incredible content that’s out there and all the platforms you can get it from.
So people aren’t pissing about. It’s increasingly getting harder and harder to come up with something great and something distinct.
Ultimately, yes, somebody of a creative bent normally has to make that leap at some point, and whatever stimulant has allowed them to do that, from Jammy Dodgers to whatever, I’m not suggesting anybody does pharmaceuticals. I haven’t been in an agency really for about 10 years, so I don’t know.
The myths exist, and there’s a reason the myths exist. It’s because less than 10% roughly of people who work on the client side ever work in an agency, and it’s the same percentage the other way round.
So all these fallacies, although they are based, like all clichés and tropes, on a grain of truth, persist.
Agencies do care about awards. There are quite a few people there who spend a bit of time recreationally drugging it. Allegedly.
These things do go on. In the same way, agencies have these myths about clients, that they’re all so logical and somehow wake up every morning and think, “Hang on a minute. How can I mess up the agency’s creative today?”
These myths persist because there’s no cross-pollination.
I’ve tried over the years to get the Advertising Association 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, unfortunately.
Darren: That is a shame, because it would promote a much healthier and more trust-based working relationship if they did.
Kevin: It really would.
It would help to break down this adversarial thing that goes on between the client and the agency. I find it very strange having been both.
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, mate. It’s not the SS.
Just pick the phone up. Have a conversation. If it’s going to be late, phone up. They’d rather you told them it was going to be late than find out.
All my best relationships with clients, all of them, and you’re happy to phone any of them up and check this, have been based on two things, honesty and trust.
Just be honest.
I can honestly tell you, when I was a client, my first week as a client, I sat in a room with my agency. I’d spent my whole career in agency until this point. I sat in the room and just thought to myself, “Christ, I didn’t used to sound like that, did I?”
Honestly, you’d be like, “Here’s the scary idea, here’s the shit idea, and here’s the one we want you to buy.”
And I know, mate. I know how managing a room happens. It was just annoying.
Darren: With that Pony advert then, because that did quite well and it’s quite well known, where did the creative idea for that come from? Because it’s very left field from what the product actually was.
Kevin: Once you explain it, it kind of isn’t.
Like all good things, my closest creative partner is still Mick, who I wrote my book with, who I set up a company with, who I’m about to do a second book with that comes out later this year. We do a lot of projects together for clients.
All of the best things were collaborations. It was strategy and creative working together.
I didn’t do Pony with Mick. I did it back at Wieden. The two driving creatives on it were Dan Norris and Ray Shaughnessy, and they worked with a team, Freddy and Holly.
Where did the idea come from? It starts with a proper analysis of what the client’s challenge was.
They were the number five out of five network in the country at the time. Three were five out of five by miles. Not very well liked. Terrible reputation. Awful Net Promoter Score. Not doing very well.
But they were number one of five for mobile data. People used them for data, because it’s Three.
Most people don’t know this, so to geek out on it for a second, voice and text go over 2.5G. Data goes over 3G.
If you use the 3G network for talking, then the calls drop out all the time. Most people were using Three for data, but because of various historical things to do with how the market was, people who wanted a cheap tariff used to keep getting rejected by the big networks.
So they’d apply to Three. One in three of them would fail the credit check, and it would cause terrible customer satisfaction. Then, because they also wanted to get cheap calls, they were putting cheap calls over a 3G network and the calls were dropping. So that was doing terribly for reliability.
Go back to the client’s problem. They wanted to get known for being the network you used for the internet.
Remember, this is nearly 15 years ago. It was quite expensive to use the internet on your phone. Three had the only all-you-can-eat internet tariff in Britain, and they wanted to launch it.
So you go, “Okay, cool. If we tell everybody you’ve got the only all-you-can-eat internet tariff, everyone will be asleep by the time you finish that sentence. It’s just boring. No one gives a shit.”
If you tell everyone you’re reliable or whatever, no one cares.
When we were sitting in the room, it’s difficult to know where the actual genus of this idea came from. I can tell you where the pony idea came from, but I’ll tell you where the genus of the overarching idea came from, which was “Keep on Internetting.”
When you love something, you want everyone else to love it too. You genuinely do.
If you were going to give the internet away for free, which is what Three did, you’d say, “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.”
But love is one of those weird words. Everyone uses it in everything. So you go, “You can’t love the whole internet. Is there a bit of the internet you love more than anything else?”
Genuinely, we printed out the whole internet and put it on the wall. We were looking at it going, “There’s kind of work, there’s porn and gambling, there’s sport.”
Then we looked at this corner, which was essentially fannying about. Waving bears and all the old memes. We thought, “That’s the bit that’s actually quite funny, isn’t it?”
Freddy Powell, who’s now a brilliant director and a lovely man, found this PhD thesis someone had done on LOLcats.
Like all creatives, he didn’t read it. I read it.
These days, you’d just drop it into ChatGPT and it would summarise it for you in a second. Back then, you actually had to read the bloody thing.
I read the whole thing. What that thing proved was that people thought you sent silly stuff around on the internet to make yourself look good. “Look at me, I’m funny. I’m great.”
What the PhD thesis proved was that people pass stuff around on the internet to make other people feel good.
So it actually wasn’t silly stuff at all. It was really important. It was a great way to fundamentally connect to other humans. Hence, silly stuff matters.
Once we came to this, what we wanted to tell people was that we loved the internet and we wanted as many people to have as much of it as possible.
Then Dan Norris, the Creative Director on it, said there were two ways you could go.
There was a script that was written that was a 90-second dummy TED Talk explaining the idea. In the original creative presentation, there were two ways to go.
One was that Dan said, “You could do this talk explaining the internet and why we think it’s so brilliant, or you could just do something like this.”
He literally had a picture of a horse.
He just went,
“Or you could just do a moonwalking horse.”
Then he carried on.
We were like, “Sorry, what was that about a horse?”
He went, “Well, you can either talk about the internet, or you can do something from the internet that people talk about.”
He said, “If you do an amazing ad with just a moonwalking horse, people will go, ‘Why the fuck are you running an ad with a moonwalking horse?’ 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.’”
You give people a reason to ask you a question.
The thing most people don’t know about that ad was that until pretty much just before it got finished, it used to have a voiceover on it.
There was a voiceover all the way through it, going, “Imagine this little horse, and then imagine this horse drops in your inbox,” explaining it.
Then, I don’t know whether it was Dan or Ray or Freddy or Holly, but somebody went, “Would you take the voice off? It’s a way better film.”
So now the only four words that appear in that film after 60 seconds of moonwalking horse are the words, “Silly stuff. It matters.”
Then you put on a Pony Mixer at the end.
The best thing to say is that the client, Tom, embraced the idea so much that he allowed us to spend £200,000 making an online Pony Mixer so you could make your own version of the ad at home.
People have to remember how this was before iMovie, before TikTok, before creators. 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 is that the ad itself, the Moonwalking Horse, only ever ran on television for 12 days.
Darren: No.
Kevin: After 12 days, everything that ran on TV was a 10-second mix that people had mixed themselves. It was all user-generated.
Darren: That’s genius.
Kevin: You could argue, if you were the Finance Director, we probably spent their entire media budget in 12 days. But it worked. It really worked.
The positive sentiment was astonishing. They went to number three of five networks in the UK within the space of about a month. The Net Promoter was insane. The commercial impact of that campaign, and then what it led to, was huge.
We did the idea, and then they did it again with Sing It Kitty. Once we’d 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.
It all started with that.
It’s a very long answer to a very simple question, which is where did the idea come from?
Like all good ideas, there’s a lot of myth, a lot of things lost in the mists of time. This tedious myth of the creative Superman, this creative lone genius sitting in a room coming up with everything, is bullshit.
It might have existed in 1978, but it doesn’t exist now.
The modern world doesn’t need cowboys. It needs pit crews.
Where did that idea come from? It came from a lot of smart people working together, like all great ideas. It was a collaboration between lots of good, smart people.
The other thing to say about it, by the way, is that in some ways ideas are easy. People have loads of ideas all the time. Getting them made, that’s the hard bit.
Having a partner like System1, who enabled that to get onto the screen. Having brilliant TV producers at Wieden. Having a great client who would give you that level of trust. I know it’s an old cliché, it takes a village, but it really did.
That wasn’t one person sitting in a room coming up with something after smoking whatever. That was six months of astonishingly hard work.
Big shout out here to Helen Andrews, Helen Fereday as was, who was the main suit. She’s now Chief Exec at Johannes Leonardo in New York. 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.
Darren: Yeah.
Kevin: That’s where my shout out is always to account management, who are often the most derided department in any agency.
Account management are like farmers. 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.
What farmers do is create the conditions within which things can thrive. That’s the role of account management in any organisation.
Not to sit there spotting problems or kissing the client’s arse. They are there to create the conditions of trust, internally and externally, that can make great work happen.
It was everybody. From our Finance Director Bronwyn, who’s still there now by the way. Hi, Bron.
There were times when we didn’t have all the money we needed. So it was Bronwyn’s job to work out with the client what the best payment schedule was, and the best way of making sure this occurred.
It’s everybody’s job to get that idea over the line.
If people think it’s just the creatives’ job, or just the client’s job, or just the planner’s job, it’ll never happen.
Collaboration is everything. That’s why I get really angry about these silly myths. I read it a lot on LinkedIn, particularly from people who were in agencies in the ’80s, who go on about how it’s not about teamwork, it’s about one person.
No, it isn’t. It really is. It wasn’t even then, but even less so now.
Darren: I find it fascinating what you said about the voiceover being cut at the last minute.
Kevin: I’ve got it on my desktop somewhere.
Darren: You’ve got the original voiceover that was then taken off?
Kevin: Yeah.
Darren: There was a similar issue with Blade Runner, where Ridley Scott didn’t want the voiceover but the studio added it throughout the film because they thought the viewers weren’t going to get it as much without the voiceover explaining what it was about.
Obviously, you won your battle and had it taken off. How close did it come to staying on?
Kevin: Weirdly, paradoxically, it was the client, a guy called Tom Malleschitz, who suggested, “Why don’t we take it off?”
In fact, he went a bit bonkers. He wanted to take off the four words at the end and the logo. We were going, “No, then you’re just going to have a film of a horse. It is actually, eventually, a commercial. You do have to tell people who you are.”
But he got so into the whole BrainJuicer thing, the whole System1, Daniel Kahneman thing.
Fair play to the client. It was the client who probably convinced us to do it.
Darren: Wow. I was not expecting you to say that.
Kevin: That’s the other thing, right? Agencies can’t do anything if they don’t have the right client.
I think back to my Honda days and look at people like Ellie Norman and Ian Armstrong. Without them, what’s ever going to happen?
I can tell you right now, a hundred great ideas will die today. Brilliant ideas that would have changed the face of companies and how they approach their communications.
A hundred ideas will die today because a client has no bottle. Sometimes it’s no bottle. Sometimes they’re massively lazy. Sometimes they’ve got loss aversion. Sometimes they’re within an organisation that, for some reason, just doesn’t understand how communications works.
But honestly, without a brilliant client, no idea ever happens.
It’s also why you should stop seeing a client as the SS.
The reason I called that presentation about client-agency relations Two Worlds Collide was because I remember how it came about originally.
When I came back from client side to agency side, I was asked by my boss, “Could you 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?”
I was like, “I can’t really do that, because it’s not true.”
Clients aren’t from Venus and agencies aren’t from Mars. Clients and agencies are from slightly different parts of Venus. Everybody else is from Mars.
The Sales Director, the product people, the board, all these other people. Clients and agencies, to quote that astonishing thing from Jo Cox, have so much more in common than anything that divides them.
You have the same frames of reference. You should hopefully have the same ambitions and objectives. You certainly have the same frames of reference.
When we’re all going on about ponies and gorillas and meerkats, the Finance Director hasn’t got a fucking clue what you’re going on about, and also doesn’t care.
He doesn’t care what’s in the ad. He just cares, “Go build me an econometric model to say for every quid I give you, you’ll give me four quid back.” That’s what he cares about. Or she cares about.
Having a great client is the difference between getting good work and not getting good work, genuinely. Or having a great account management department.
It’s creating the conditions. Because those ideas, when they start, when they’re things like, “We’ve seen this PhD thesis and we think LOLcats are really interesting,” it is like a little baby chick.
Some nasty person can come along and stamp on it straight away, and it’ll never become a beautiful chicken, or horse, or pony, or meerkat, or gorilla, or whatever.
Darren:
By gorilla, you mean the Cadbury’s gorilla?
Kevin: Yeah. Playing the drums to Phil Collins.
Which again was another ad where everyone was sitting around going, “What have they been smoking?”
They’ve been sitting there working out an incredibly smart strategy 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, there’s a glass and a half of milk in our chocolate. Very boring fact. Half empty, half full. Imagine how happy you’d be if you were a glass and a half person.”
Joy. Glass and a half of joy. Glass and a Half Productions. Gorilla.
My favourite one was the balloon one, done by the genius that is Nils. That’s Nils Petter, not Nils Leonard, who is also a genius. Other geniuses are available.
But yes, the gorilla. It isn’t just someone sitting in a room coming up with some 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 Dilley.
This stuff happens because of the ecosystem that surrounds it.
Of course, you’ve got, I think it was Andy and Richard at Fallon, who came up with it. But you have this astonishing ecosystem of people like Nikki Crumpton, Lawrence Green, Karina Wilsher, sitting around an idea like that, protecting it, nurturing it, making sure it gets to the finish line.
It’s a bit like American football. The idea is the ball the quarterback is running with, but he needs all his linebackers to get every sod out of the way in order for him to reach the end zone.
That’s what’s happening to an idea. Ideas are easy. Making them happen is almost impossibly difficult.
Darren: So there are probably some amazing adverts that we’ll never see, or never existed.
Kevin: Genuinely.
Somewhere on my phone, I’ve got, in the last year at Wieden, which was my least enjoyable year of my career, I really wasn’t enjoying myself. I really had to get out, if I’m honest, and it was good that I did.
One of the things that frustrated me the most in the last year before I left was I had six world-class ideas. Not me, sorry. There were six world-class ideas that, for various reasons with various clients, never got made.
Every one of them would have been as famous as Pony. Every one of them.
Incredible ideas from brilliant people like Stu Harkness, Ed Morris, Holly Newton. They were these incredible ideas.
For some reason, whether a weak client, or circumstance, or just whatever, they didn’t get made.
I 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?”
By the way, I always come to the conclusion, no, I did everything I could have done.
But genuinely, in the next hour, a hundred brilliant ideas will die because of circumstance. What do you do? Go again. Go again. Go again. Make something good.
This is 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 largely the thing, to go back to your original question that I think I had a very long answer to.
Darren: You did at one point.
Kevin: You asked me about how I got a senior job.
Darren: How do you get any job?
Kevin: Right, yeah. I remember.
I think it’s mostly about getting on with everything I’ve ever done. Just keep going. It’ll put you ahead of most people.
Darren: Wow. Incredibly, we are almost out of time. Would you believe?
Kevin: Would you believe? I haven’t plugged anything yet.
Darren: Well, go on, plug something. Also, for anyone who wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way for them to contact you? But plug something. Go on.
Kevin: The easiest way to find me is, I’m almost impossible not to find. I’m so needy on the socials.
You’ll find me quite easily. In any social situation, you’ll find me quite easily because I’m 6’4” and take up a lot of surface area. My wife always says I’m impossible to lose in a crowd, even if she tries.
Darren: People arrange to meet near you, do they?
Kevin: If you go to kevinchesters.com, you’ll find me quite easily. You’ll find me online there.
What do I do now? I think one of the saddest things about ad agencies, or agencies in general recently, has been this weird juniorisation of their talent.
They mostly got rid of a lot of very senior people, people who clients used to rely on for advice.
I’d moan about that if I worked at an agency, but it actually puts a huge smile on my face. It’s my largest commercial opportunity.
I now work directly with a lot of very senior clients who come to me for advice, and I do strategy work for them. 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.”
That’s what I do. If clients want to talk to me, I’m more than happy to do it.
The other thing I do is I have a training consultancy. I have 14 oven-ready modules that I can run for clients and agencies. I do that all over the world. I have clients here, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Iceland, Holland, Germany. I’m about to go and do my first work in Dubai.
All that stuff is on my site, kevinchesters.com.
And watch out for the new book.
Darren: The new book.
Kevin: The new book. Of course, you could get a copy of the old book, The Creative Nudge, available in all good bookstores and Amazon. Available in Turkish. Available in Mandarin.
The new book will be coming out in the late autumn. That is a book about the power of simplicity and partnership.
You’ve heard me talk about collaboration. We, as a world, have fallen in love with complexity because it’s how we make money, making people think things are more complicated than they are. Then they’ve got to come and ask somebody, when actually, in most cases, they’re a lot simpler than you think.
Mick and I have developed a very simple three-stage methodology for brand thinking that is way simpler than you would think. So we’re writing a book on that.
The intro to the book is really about partnership and how, in the modern world, the myth of the solopreneur or this individual creative genius is just utter bullshit.
So it’s about the power of partnership and also about the power of simplicity.
Darren: I completely agree with that. You can’t do it yourself. You need somebody else. You need other people.
Kevin: Everybody does.
Only 13 people ever stood on the moon, but there were 41,000 people in the Apollo programme.
When Ellen MacArthur sailed solo around the world, as she will tell you, she had 20 full-time staff on hand 24/7. They weren’t in the boat, but she couldn’t have done it without them, including a full-time psychiatrist.
Darren: Yeah, which you’d probably need if you were stuck on your own in the Southern Ocean.
Kevin: I imagine it would probably be quite useful.
But that’s it. We are connecting and connected creatures as humans. We all need our tribe. We all need our gang, because it’s what makes us survive and thrive.
Darren: Thank you, Kevin.
I will put links to all of those below the podcast.
We started with biscuits and finished on philosophy. I think this has covered everything, hasn’t it?
Kevin: Mostly biscuits.
Darren: Mostly biscuits. Yeah.
I am going to get some Jammy Dodgers now because I really want a Jammy Dodger.
Any links you’ve mentioned, I will put below the podcast. Anybody who wants to reach out to Kevin, scroll down, click on those, follow him through, follow him on social media, and remember, he’s extremely needy. So give him a like, give him a comment, send him some love, and he will very much appreciate it.
Kev, thank you. I can’t believe what I’ve learned today and the experiences you’ve just shared with me. Thank you very much, man.
Kevin: Thanks, Darren. It’s honestly a real pleasure.
I love talking about work, and I mean the work. I love how many myths there are about how things happen and when they happen. It’s always astonishing.
More about Kevin:
Kevin Chesters is a highly experienced advertising strategist, author and trainer, having held senior strategy roles at major agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Wieden+Kennedy, Dentsu and Ogilvy. He was part of the team behind Three’s famous Moonwalking Shetland Pony campaign and now works directly with clients and agencies on brand strategy, creative thinking and training. He is also the co-author of The Creative Nudge.
You can connect with Kevin here:
Website: https://kevinchesters.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinchesters/
Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B095HPMRMN/about
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kevinchesters/
X: https://x.com/hairychesters?
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
