“Going back to when I was cutting up bits of Letraset 40 years ago to cutting together other people’s voices to be replicated by a machine 40 years on – it’s the same thing,” he says. “I just think it’s a tool.”
He says he was “petrified, not knowing what I was doing” – however as we’ll see, feeling that worry and feeling singularly clueless, however having a go regardless, is a sample that we’ll see repeated all through Andy’s profession. It’s there whether or not he’s taking his first steps as a artistic, turning into a chief artistic officer for the primary time or, certainly, relearning what it means to be a artistic director within the AI age with a high-visibility, reside venture.
“I’ve never lost the fear of a first brief,” he says. Andy has been within the promoting world for over 40 years. In that point, he’s been concerned in numerous iconic campaigns, honed his craft underneath the scrutiny of Sir John Hegarty, and has led a number of companies to success. And but, he says he nonetheless can’t shake the sensation that anyone goes to faucet him on the shoulder and say “‘Enough of this now, go and get a proper job!”
“I think that’s a good thing because if you get complacent and think you know it all, maybe you won’t come up with the best ideas. I always have that nervousness. And then – and I think any creative person will say this, not just me – I love it when you feel you’ve got something … and you can’t wait to show someone.That’s a great feeling.”
In 2021, Andy grew to become a founding accomplice at Publicis Groupe’s elite artistic collective, Le Truc – the proper home for somebody who’s pathologically incapable of complacency. It’s a crack workforce of about 60 that works throughout the Groupe, often fronting artistic work however usually parasailing in to assist companies that want some additional oomph, or including recent perspective to massive pitches. Andy’s one for 4 chief artistic officers within the workforce – he’s joined by Julia Neumann, Bastien Baumann and Marcos Kotlhar – and the CCOs are a lot nearer to the work and the workforce than they might be in a extra hierarchical arrange. Every job is totally different (Andy describes Le Truc as a ‘shapeshifting thing’) and so they’re inspired – no, anticipated – to be unconventional of their strategy.
Given Andy’s personal lower than typical journey into the promoting business, it’s maybe unsurprising that he’s discovered a home someplace as idiosyncratic as Le Truc. As we’ll see, Andy’s somebody who’s discovered the whole lot about promoting on the job, usually dealing with as much as, accepting and even, finally, having fun with these scary challenges that lie a number of steps past his consolation zone.
Andy was taught to attract by his grandfather, who was a time commissioner within the shipyards in Newcastle, within the North of England, who stored his personal artwork a secret from others. His different artistic training got here courtesy of his cousins, who’d been punks within the ‘70s, who got him on a musical diet of new wave, art and watching Newcastle United home and away from the late 70s onwards (see Andy’s well-known BMX 4 Sale banner beneath at FA Cup recreation towards Monaco in 1997, his favorite piece of “work.” At 15, he was heading out to observe bands, moving into soul and funk music too.
Andy’s notorious ‘BMX 4 Sale’ banner on the European cup recreation towards Monaco vs Newcastle in 1996. Now on everlasting present at Newcastle United 28 years later, his ‘proudest’ achievement.
Despite now having the ability to recall a whole lot of advertisements from his childhood, on the time Andy had no concept that promoting as a job or an business was a factor. When he left college at 16, with little or no {qualifications}, he received a component time job as a cleaner in a bakery. The ‘80s were a time of high youth unemployment in the UK and Andy soon found himself on the YTS (Youth Training Scheme). Having told the careers officer that he could ‘draw a bit’, he was placed in a B2B company.
“I was the art studio dogsbody. I didn’t know what advertising was. I didn’t know how things got made,” he says. It was the primary of many instances that Andy would discover himself feeling out of place and out of his depth. “During that time I applied for a few other jobs – I applied to be a postman three times. To get a real job, because what I was doing wasn’t getting paid like a real working job.”
But then, he ended up staying in that ‘not real job’ for 2 years, absorbing the whole lot he may within the studio, the place the sort was designed and the posters laid out. By that time he’d moved all the way down to London and he received wind that McCann Erickson was searching for a junior. “I spent a couple of years there and that’s where I first realised how an agency was built and how things got made, and I was exposed to a creative department – and I was paid. I think by the time I was 20 I decided that I was going to do this. I was petrified because I didn’t know what I was doing, and they didn’t expect too much of me to be honest. I was just this kid,” remembers Andy.
He was studying the craft of typography within the manufacturing studio, rigorously tracing letters out by hand and creating what he describes as an ‘anal’ consideration to element which means even to this present day, poorly laid-out punctuation makes him twitchy. McCann’s head of design Rob Wallace ‘humoured’ him, he says, as he used the company’s new Apple Macs to make artwork on the weekends.
Andy’s design and artwork path work from the Nineties and 2000s.
(Throughout his profession, Andy’s at all times appreciated to have artistic aspect initiatives on the go – for years he ran a style journal on the aspect referred to as The Rig Out, which is now a artistic manufacturing studio in London. These days he ‘plays the guitar badly’. “I think it’s great to have an interest that keeps you creative outside of the advertising world,” he says.”)
It was, he displays, a unique world. “That job is long gone. There are designers who are far more expansive in what they do. But back in the day, what I did was put words on ads. That’s simply what I did. I had no influence on what the ad was. It was just designing beautiful typography – if anyone could be bothered to look back, in the ‘70s and ‘80s there were legendary typographers in advertising in the UK, who made art, really. But they didn’t influence the concepts as much as designers do now.”
Now, creatives have each doable media to play with however when Andy was developing, there was radio, TV, press and poster – and Andy very positively didn’t contact radio or TV. Starting on the backside with such a slim focus has, although, formed his appreciation for the expertise and groups inside companies and the truth that behind the artistic work there’s so many expert craftspeople and specialists that assist deliver it to life.
Next got here a possibility that will show to be a crucible for young Andy –the possibility to work at BBH. It was a pay reduce however he didn’t assume twice. There he was immersed in a deeply visible tradition underneath the management of John Hegarty. Andy discovered himself not in a typography division, however a design division. Within eight months he was head of stated division. Not unhealthy going on your early 20s, however in contrast to the graduates simply coming into the business at that age, Andy had been working and honing his craft for a great 4 or 5 years by that time.
It was a time of nice success for the company. Andy describes the creativity as ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘expansive’ and ‘adventurous’, although it was underpinned by an intense rigour. Andy reels off the creatives who surrounded him and it appears like a who’s who of London promoting with folks like Rosie Arnold, Tiger Savage, Ed Morris, Tony Davidson, Bruce Crouch, Graham Watson and Nick Gill.
“We’re in an era now of multi-layered departments – lots of titles and you have to share the work up. But then, it was John, a few CDs and us. There was no hierarchy. It was very much you had a direct link to him and he had a strong point of view about work. I got from him: clarity, singularity and a maniacal focus on the detail of the work, which, if you look at that period of time for BBH, was everything about them. It was a craft centre.”
Andy remembers that it was about that point that he had his first expertise with fashionable artwork. He was about 22 or 23 and wandered into an artwork gallery in Whitechapel, with no clue what he would see. It was an exhibition of Franz Kline, an American summary expressionist and, he says, the expertise left ‘an indelible memory’. “Art has had a major impact on me… I’m passionate about art. I don’t do it enough. I used to do a lot of it,” he says.
That expertise coincided with Andy beginning to actually get his head across the conceptual aspect of promoting. When he was finally provided that nudge – or shove -–over to artistic, that acquainted uncertainty kicked in as, as soon as once more, Andy discovered himself dealing with an unknown problem. “Back then it was like, you are just making brilliant look even more brilliant. That was my job. But to go in, and now you’ve got to think about the ads… I remember saying, ‘I don’t know how to do TV ads’.”
What didn’t assist was that when he did lastly land his first TV advert – a Levi’s spot that took six months’ work and an enormous worldwide shoot – was canned by the shopper (although it did finally run in Australia). Speaking candidly, Andy says the expertise actually dented his confidence. But it additionally proved to be yet one more useful lesson.
“I learned so much in that place. I didn’t go to college, but that was my university. What a stroke of luck, what a fortunate person I was to be able to learn that.”
From there Andy went to Ogilvy, the place he spent 5 years as an ECD working with Sue Higgs, after which the subsequent massive terrifying check got here. He was supplied the function of CCO of Publicis London. “Again, I’m petrified. Like, what am I doing?” laughs Andy, incredulous. “Nobody teaches you how to be a leader.”
And, as soon as extra, Andy rose to the event. “As raw and green as I was, I took over Publicis London. Maybe it’s wild naivety but we created a really strong culture. It was funny, we had a laugh, the work got better and we won awards for the first time in a long time.”
As a artistic chief, Andy remembers very effectively what it’s prefer to be that inexperienced young artistic and so he takes a particular curiosity in giving a hand as much as the subsequent era. “[It] gives me as much pleasure as any award,” he says. “To watch people understand how to cultivate an idea is something I think is really special. It’s our job, in my role, to do that and help that and not criticise them.” He’s underneath no phantasm that it’s at all times simple to remain open and understanding once you urgently have to get concepts for a shopper and none are forthcoming. However, he says the hot button is sitting down and dealing along with folks and taking as a lot stress out of the state of affairs as doable.
He’s an enormous believer in giving folks house to be adventurous and determine issues out their very own manner. “It’s down to freedom, isn’t it?” he says.
While at Publicis London, Andy’s workforce created a marketing campaign for the charity The Pilion Trust wherein a person makes an attempt to shock folks into donating by walking round London sporting an indication that reads: “Fuck the poor.”
It’s the job of the artistic chief to identify the potential within the half-formed concept, to sift by means of and discover the nuggets as newer creatives are nonetheless determining learn how to flex these muscular tissues. “I guess learning to edit your work and know what’s good… that takes a while. I made tons of mistakes, thinking something’s brilliant and I show someone and they go, ‘are you joking?’ You need people around you to help, that’s why I like the studio-based thing where you can show things around,” he explains, reflecting that the individual workplaces of the ‘80s and ‘90s were perhaps less conducive to that more collaborative way of working.
Which takes us full circle to Le Truc, where it’s all about working collaboratively and freely. Notably, the construction at Le Truc is comparatively flat, once more an echo of Andy’s early days at BBH. He remembers his naive shock when he first moved to the United States as CCO at Publicis NY the place he was confronted by the hierarchy and complexity of company buildings in North America. “I think it’s got better, but when I first arrived there was a lot of hierarchy of creative sign off, which I think is not good for the work. And it’s certainly not good for the morale of the younger team. The less check-ins you can have the better. The worst thing you can have is when you show somebody an idea and then they’ll take it away and show somebody else, and then they’ll take it away and it will come back and somebody’s written all over that. I never had that as a creative because I worked in more flat structures.”
With this flatter construction and better leeway, Andy’s happy with making a tradition the place creating expertise can flourish, getting a style of the adventurous ambition and excessive requirements that formed Andy as a young artistic. “It gives me huge pleasure to see young teams get that opportunity because I think kids come out of college and can get stuck in a rut and sometimes the creativity can almost get drummed out of them when they have to do the same thing over and over and over again. That’s not the case here.”
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After 40 years of throwing himself into the unknown, the creativity actually hasn’t been drummed out of Andy. These days he’s in amongst it, palms on and throwing himself into scary new challenges each day.
“I write all the time, I art direct a lot of the time. I spent probably 13 years as a traditional CCO, where I didn’t have the time to do that. Le Truc has been a gift – for better or worse, I’m back on it. Back on the tools. I love it.”
