David Abbott. Photo Julian Hanford |
I was saddened to hear that David Abbott, probably one of the greatest copywriters in the English language died on Saturday.
Easily the boss who inspired me the most, not just for his work, but the air of calm and professionalism that he carried with him.
I found myself shedding a tear, just like I had done when I stood listening to his 1998 goodbye speech as he bid farewell to the agency he was retiring from.
Luckily, a colleague posted the complete speech on Facebook. I had chance to look at it in text for the first time, and it's pasted below.
As a piece of speaking it was gripping, and looked to the future with the concern of a CEO as much as to the past with the regret of a 60 year old retiring.
It was a powerful moment for all of us in the room even the people who hardly knew him. Not surprising, because he found a way of acknowledging everyone in that room, in turn, without making it seem like a list. He sort of wove it into his story.
(That was one of the things he reminded new writers. Never make a list feel like a list.)
I was very glad to see the transcript today, some 16 years later.
Perhaps the most powerful bit comes at the end, as you'd expect. With a little David Abbott magic, he put his hand face down on the lectern he was speaking from, and took us all from an advertising village to an African village. This, he told us, is how they do stories there:
"In an African village when the storyteller comes to the end of his tale, he places the palm of his hand on the ground and says: 'I put down my story here.' Then he adds, 'So that someone else may take it up another day.' I’ve been privileged to help write the first few chapters of AMV – you will write the next few – it wont be my story, but it will be a good one. And so I place my palm on the ground – AMV will be fine, you will be fine."
The adverting village has lost a great elder.
www.thecopycourse.com
David Abbott's leaving speech,
Wednesday October 7th 1998
“Thank you.
Running into such kindness is a bit like
running into a brick wall. It knocks the wind out of you and leaves you
speechless.
Lucky then, that I have one with me that I prepared earlier. I only
hope I have the composure to get through it.
There are some people in this room
who know me very well – and yet have still decided to turn up.
I thank
them.
There are many here who know me quite well.
There are others who know who
I am, but look at their feet when I get in the lift with them.
Then there are
Louise, James, Paul, Justin, Becky, Matthew and Lucy – the new graduate
trainees who are not yet quite sure whether I’m Peter Mead or Adrian
Vickers.
Dear graduates, this must be a bizarre evening for you and I’m sorry
that we overlap by only a week.
You have arrived at a mature, fully formed
agency, so you’ll be surprised to hear that we were once an agency where
everyone had to work far too hard trying to satisfy difficult clients and
management’s outrageous targets.
How times change.
You’ll be surprised to
learn, too, that in AMV’s first year the total billings were less than the
price of Peter Mead’s latest car. (Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn
that.)
But don’t let’s start at the beginning, let’s start before the
beginning.
It is 21 years since Peter and Adrian persuaded me to join
them.
Their seduction technique, I later realised was one that they had honed
on various girlfriends. It was a two-pronged attack and consisted of a
relentless succession of Indian meals and a steady flow of lies and
half-truths.
“Our clients are secure,” they said. ”You’ll be joining a happy
family,” they said. ”Financially, we’re more than stable.”
Something must have
alerted me because I turned them down and in doing so sealed my fate.
I don’t
know if I ever told Peter this before, but it was the grace with which he
accepted my refusal that made me change my mind.
“Here is a man,” I thought,
“whom I would be happy to have beside me in bad times.”
If you’re looking for
incidental wisdom in these words of mine tonight, perhaps there is something
here. Perhaps we most accurately define ourselves when things are going against
us.
All I know is that if things were ever going to get tough, Peter is the
kind of man who would immediately trade down to a Porsche or a Ferrari.
I jest,
of course – in the long tradition of joshing and teasing that has marked our
friendship and that has fooled no-one.
Adrian, Peter and I have transparently
loved each other and looked after each other through all the years.
And this,
above all, has made us the kind of agency we are.
And then came Michael
(Baulk). Double-breasted, fast talking, his semaphore hands sometimes
caressing, sometimes slicing the air to add weight to his words – he brought
order and discipline to our affairs.
Somehow he made company growth and
personal restraint a desirable banded offer.
On the drive to and from Wentworth
mansion he practiced the mantra that saw us throught the 89-93 recession, “Of
course it hurts but we’re all in the same boat.”
Old-timers here will recognise
earlier hymns to Michael and such jibes are the fate of those whom we ask to
chase the income and watch the overheads for us.
But in truth, that was never
the real story of Michael. He is more architect than accountant and deserves to
be the fourth name on our notepaper.
Some of you will know that we once offered
to put his name there, but he declined. ”You are the brand,” he said, “you started
the agency.” That may be true, but in my mind Michael’s name is above the door,
anyhow.
We are three who became four – I feel no less for him than I do for
Peter and Adrian – he is a man with a good brain and a good heart. Look after
him, I urge you.
Now, where do I go from here? I could haltingly run down the
phone list and stop at scores of names who are special to me; but it would be a
long night if I did. Some of those people I paid tribute to at a creative lunch
last week – including my dear friend and partner, Ron.
Over the next two days I
hope to say in private to many of you what there isn’t time to say in public
but it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t pick out a couple of names tonight.
First,
there is Angela (Porteous), formidable gate-keeper and extraordinary friend.
My
children blame Angela for the fact that I have never used a cashpoint, don’t
know their phone numbers and can’t work a PC. If all this makes me seem pretty
feeble, I plead guilty.
All I know is that Angela and I have been a wonderful
team and somehow, between us, we’ve shifted a great deal of work together. I
thank her from the bottom of my heart and rejoice in the fact that she is still
going to be around to help me in my new life, even though she remains at the
agency.
And, of course, I should mention Mr. (Jeremy) Miles. Despite the vast
difference in our ages, Jeremy and I have become friends, cricketing companions
and, if it’s not too painful a word right now, ‘confidants’.
There haven’t been
many days in the 18 years when we haven’t sat down for a chat – and through
Sainsbury’s, BT and The Economist there haven’t been many days when we haven’t
been in the trenches together, either. He is everything you could wish for in a
friend, steadfast, cheerful, loyal, funny, generous.
Andrew (Robertson) and
Peter Souter are next on my list. As I’ve stepped down progressively over the
past 3 years their sensitivity and kindness to me has made the process
bearable. It wasn’t easy to let go, but they in the best traditions of the
agency have continued to involve me, treating me with tact, understanding and
affection. I hope they know that I return that affection in full.
Finally, I
would like to thank Terry Green (organiser of the company cars) who over the
years has aided and abetted me in my ambition never to see an MOT certificate.
Thank you, Terry. I can’t promise that you’ve heard the last of me.
So, here I
am – about to leave not just an agency, but an industry that has supported me,
entertained me and stimulated me for 40 years. I have truly been a lucky
man.
If I could still remember things, I’m sure I’d have some wonderful
memories. You know, the cliche is true, I often remember the distant past more
clearly than the recent past – so let’s start there – in the distant past.
The
first great hero of mine was David Ogilvy and I saw him for the first time in
the early sixties.
I was a junior copywriter at Mather & Crowther and David
had just merged our agency with Bensons. The combined workforce was summoned to
the Connaught Rooms to hear a pep-talk from our new leader.
He spoke to us in
shirt sleeves, red braces brilliantly visible even from the back of the hall
where I stood with the rest of the small fry. He was informal and inspiring.
Soon after, we received his written wisdom, too: a blue-covered manual called
“Observations” – it became my first advertising bible and I never really
escaped its strictures.
For the next 40 years I felt guilty if I couldn’t get
the client’s name into the headline, and I could never write long copy without
putting in crossheads. Why there is a Lord Saatchi and David remains a Mr.
seems to me to be one of life’s more inexplicable mysteries.
Another distant
scene pops into my head. In July of 1966, I flew to New York with Eve (his
wife), who was six months’ pregnant, and Jenny and Matthew who were both under
three.
DDB had sent me to New York to be groomed to take over as Creative
Director in London when John Withers returned to the States. The process was
meant to take six months, though we ended up staying nearly a year.
We
travelled on a Friday and arrived in the middle of a New York heatwave. We were
booked into a small service apartment in the Gramercy Park Hotel – on the sixth
floor with a single air-conditioning unit that made a great deal of noise but
no cool air.
On Monday morning I walked the 20 blocks to the office, leaving
Eve and the kids behind in a sweltering hotel room in a strange city. What were
they going to do all day? How was Eve going to cope. I walked to the office
crying, although it was so hot my tears passed for perspiration. (At this
point, David had to pause for a moment. 300 of us watched as he seemed
overwhelmed by this recollection.)
Of course, it got better. In six weeks we’d
found a flat, in November we’d had our second son, Dominic, and I got to know
Bill Bernbach.
Bill Bernbach was the most persuasive man I ever met in
advertising. His voice was soft but emphatic and when he sat at the boardroom
table his small hands would delicately underline the point he was making.
He
had the authority of a college professor and the showreel of a genius. I sat
mesmerised – how could any client resist him? Most of them didn’t.
When I
became MD of DDB’s London office in the late sixties, I would arrange a lunch
party whenever Bill was in town. A few of us would sit down with him to eat and
talk about advertising.
On one occasion I referred to the agency as Doyle Dane
– a common abbreviation at the time. Bill gripped my arm – Doyle Dane Bernbach
he said gently as his fingers tightened.
It was a courtesy he richly deserved,
though I was surprised he insisted on it – perhaps he was teasing me. perhaps
there’s a lesson there – never underestimate the vanity of an agency owner.
One
more memory. I have a Polaroid somewhere, taken on my first day at AMV – we were
in our little offices in Bruton Place – Ron took the picture. I am in my
overcoat, viewed from the back, round shouldered as I fill the kettle from a
tap that for some reason is high on the flaky, plastered wall, 3 foot from the
sink which is out of shot.
It is a photograph of a refugee in a halfway house,
the saddest, most melancholy photograph I’ve ever seen and it almost certainly
reflected the way Ron and I felt that day. And yet, look what happened
later.
And now I’m saying goodbye in the good times and some of you may be
wondering why. Let me try and explain.
I always promised myself I’d do
something different before I was sixty and I’m making it by two days.
I like to
think it’s a happy omen that I am leaving the agency, as near as dammit, on its
21st birthday.
My own 21st was on October 11th, 1959 and it wasn’t a great time
for me – my father had died in June and I was about to go back for what I knew
would be a futile last term at Oxford, before I took over the running of my
father’s shop.
I went to the pub that night with some friends and at
turning-out time I went on to a coffee bar with one of them – really just to
delay going home.
We walked in and my friend stopped at a table where he knew
one of the girls. One of her friends was Eve and she says that she wanted to
marry me there and then. I just knew that I wanted to see her again, which
proves just how much smarter woman are than men and how much more
determined.
In a very real way on that 21st birthday I got the key to my
future, so I’m hoping that this 21st will be lucky, too.
I want to try and
write fiction of some kind; maybe I’ll write jokes, maybe I’ll write about
gardening, maybe I’ll write scripts. I want to spend more time in my garden,
more time with my children and grand-children, more time traveling, more time
doing things I don’t even know about yet. But no, I don’t believe I’ve written
my last ad for AMV.
I’ve found this a very difficult speech to write – I
suspect it shows. I’ve felt the burden of your expectations – I felt you wanted
the speech of a lifetime – quite literally – that you wanted me to plunder the
past 40 years and come up with gold – golden advice, a set of bliefs and canons
that would keep the agency the way it is, protect it in the future. And for
some reason I haven’t wanted to do that – I’ve done it before so why not
now?
Perhaps this explains it:
When I say good bye to my children I give them a
hug and a kiss and say: “See you soon.”
I don’t say “And here are a few tips
and principles to help you get through to Thursday.” I just give them a hug and
a kiss.
If I were a giant I would cross the road and put my arms around the
building opposite (he was giving the speech in the Landmark Hotel, across the
road from AMV) and say “Goodbye, see you soon.”
I hope to do just that to many
of you, too. It doesn’t seem the time for a lecture and anyhow you all know how
to run a great agency.
You care about two things. You care about quality – in
everything you do. From the chairs in Reception, to the way you answer a phone,
to a piece of Typography, to the ideas you have, to the research you put your
name to, to the meetings you hold, to the way you hang a picture, to the way
you crop a photograph or write a line.
Quality is always possible and always
under threat, but if you don’t seek and defend it you won’t be satisfied and
you won’t be happy.
The second thing you must care about? That’s easy. It’s
each other.
Take care of each other and nearly everything else will take care
of itself. It’s pat, but it’s true.
Both these things take effort and boldness.
I’m retiring now because I want to take charge of my future – however long or
short it may be – I don’t want to be passive and let the future happen to me –
what I’m doing is risky, I could be very lonely in my little office, I know I
will miss you, I will miss the fun and the talk. I’m giving up something I’m
good at to try something I’ve never tried – I’m going from guru to novice, from
safe to uncertain. And I’m happy.
A few months ago I read Peter Brook’s
memoirs. I’d like to end by quoting something from his book.
“At any moment we
can find a new beginning. A beginning has the purity of innocence and the
unqualified freedom of the beginner’s mind.
Development is more difficult, for
the parasites, the confusions, the complications and the excuses of the world
swarm in when innocence gives way to experience.
Ending is hardest of all, yet
letting go gives the only true taste of freedom. Then the end becomes the
beginning once more and life has the last word.”
That is how I feel.
In an
African village when the storyteller comes to the end of his tale, he places
the palm of his hand on the ground and says: “I put down my story here.”
Then
he adds, “So that someone else may take it up another day.”
I’ve been
privileged to help write the first few chapters of AMV – you will write the
next few – it wont be my story, but it will be a good one.
And so I place my
palm on the ground – AMV will be fine, you will be fine. ”Courage, mon brave,”
as Jeremy would say. God bless you all.”