Advertising

More Fun in the Philippines

Tony Harris

• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9789712730399
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

At the heart of the recent increase in tourism numbers to the Philippines lies the advertising campaign that became a social media phenomenon—"It's more fun in the Philippines." The campaign by BBDO Guerrero, the Philippines' most awarded advertising agency, has garnered awards and acclaim all over the world and is seen as a benchmark for international tourism communications.

After over two decades working at some of London's most successful advertising agencies, Tony Harris packed up his collections of bass guitars, vinyl 45s and Dr. Martens and joined BBDO Guerrero as Chief Executive. This is the story of what happened next.

CHAPTER 1

THE FUN STARTS HERE

I still find it strange that, in a country with so much beauty, vibrancy and camaraderie, and people with such genuine warmth and charm, it causes such surprise when I say I live and work here.

It’s greeted almost every time with a bemused “why?”

One would imagine that I had said that I was starting a new life in Helmand Province in war-torn Afghanistan or the snow-swept suburbs of Siberian Irkutsk or even Sunderland. But to the average Filipino, it often seems incomprehensible that I would choose to live in the Philippines rather than in some of their seemingly more glamorous neighbors.

Sure, Singapore has an enviable traffic system and Bangkok has a truly unique cultural flavor but Manila, for all its Jollibees (every 5 meters) and EDSA snarl-ups (every 5 meters), is a great place to work and live.

Of course I would say that—because that’s what I chose to do.

The following comment is inevitably more surprising because, after I have explained my job and my love of living in the country and spending time with the people, the response is always, “Thanks.” I certainly have never felt that I am doing the Philippines a favor in coming here—quite the opposite in fact.

The smiling welcome and genuine interest I have experienced since the day I arrived should surely reverse the situation and put me in debt to the nation instead.

I was originally going to subtitle this book as “A Stranger In a Strange Land” but in truth, I have been made to feel anything but a stranger so it seemed hugely inaccurate. However, I am not going to argue with the fact that this is a strange land, a very strange land—one in which every day is a school day.

The adventure (for adventure it is) begins at the tail end of 2010 in London at my previous agency—Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Young and Rubicam (RKCR/Y&R). As you can imagine, we used to get through quite a few exhausted switchboard operators who had to deliver that mouthful all day everyday. I always think it’s quite funny that agencies who would always preach brand brevity and succinct single-mindedness to their clients are often the worse culprits.

The office was based in Camden Town, an area slightly removed from the more familiar West End. Indeed, it was the most northerly of the main London agencies, so we used to joke that it was the last chance to fill up with ads before one hits the M1—the main motorway out of the city. The building was something of a landmark for the area—Greater London House, also known to every cab driver as the Black Cat Building. There were two large black cat statues outside as a symbol of its former role housing the Black Cat Cigarette company. It was an incredible Art Deco, Egyptian-looking building built to mimic the stylings of the recently discovered Tutankhamun exhibits.

In fact, the building had something of a notorious history. It had been built after the First World War, when a property speculator bought the gardens of the beautiful Georgian Mornington Crescent. He proceeded to build the largest office building in Europe at the time (Greater London House), thus blocking out any natural light to the now less beautiful Georgian crescent behind. Such were the complaints from the occupiers that it was decided never again to allow a building to be built without planning permission for what the actual structure would eventually become. A riot of local government red tape and bureaucracy for every loft conversion or garden shed thus began because of this very building.

Furthermore, as it was such a formidable size at the time, it was also allegedly where the Germans planned to put their General Staff, had they successfully invaded Britain in the Second World War. Strangely, this is not a fact that is often publicized to prospective tenants.

We were on the third and fourth floors.

RKCR/Y&R (as we shall now refer to it, in deference to the overwhelmed telephone staff) had an exceptionally good reputation in London, looking after many prestigious clients such as Virgin Atlantic, Marks & Spencer and Land Rover, as well as many high-profile government campaigns. It was also the leading UK creative agency in 2010 and had just been singled out in Ad Age for its performance on the international stage. When it was judged one of the five agencies in the world that had stood out that year, they wrote, “The agency demonstrated a propensity to leave the confines of advertising as we know it.”

In an industry where innovation has truly become a must-have and the larger network agencies are felt to be falling behind, this was high praise indeed. It was also the kind of reputation one wanted to be publicly attached to one’s output.

I was fortunate enough to be employed there as deputy chairman, having joined them 12 years previously as an associate director. The majority of my time was devoted to looking after key client relationships—ensuring that the output of the agency (strategic and creative work) and the input of the client (their fees) were all working out to everyone’s mutual liking.

I had previously held the role of chief operating officer, which seemed to involve a lot of time either ensuring that we had enough toilet paper or ballpoint pens or dealing with the everyday antics of an advertising agency. To be fair, these had included an anthrax scare in the post room which turned into a fully-blown police investigation, but was in fact an envelope of talcum powder sent through internal mail by one of the copywriters to his friend, an account manager, as part of a long-running practical joke. So, on reflection, it was not really that everyday.

I loved dealing with clients—I still do. It’s what makes the advertising world so varied. We are constantly dealing with vastly different businesses or issues so there’s very little overlap or feeling of sameness about what we do. Genuinely, no two days are the same. My special areas of expertise were our big international network clients—by which I mean those handled across many different offices and territories of the Young & Rubicam network. These included Accenture and Xerox, and some of the aforementioned government campaigns which covered issues as varied as fire safety (which had just won a gold at Cannes Lions), the Home Office’s crime reduction campaign (which had given me my first real experience of a co-creation campaign, working with disenfranchised teens to create a campaign against the carrying of knives by teenagers) and another award-winning campaign for Visit London (the tourism authority for the UK’s capital city). The last would come in very useful later on, as you can imagine.

Advertising networks talk a good game about exporting talent and spreading best practice around the globe but in truth, they are really better described as some fairly small businesses linked together by the transcontinental contractual arrangements of their significant clients. Therefore, the associated costs of moving and transporting people can sadly be very cost-prohibitive and hugely time-consuming unless there is a financial upside. You have families, schooling, accommodation, climate, language, and tax implications to consider. These are left to HR departments who normally spend their time sorting out complaints about desk placements and the tearful aftermath of the annual Christmas party (and believe me, that is a subject that could run all year).

I hate to say it but Young & Rubicam was probably one of the worst at non-transference at the time. I had asked regularly, from about six years into my career at RKCR/Y&R, whether there might be any opportunity to try working abroad in another Young & Rubicam office.

London is a city whose advertising appetite is a weekly feeding frenzy of pitches, career moves and most prominent of all, start-ups. The start-up is often held up as the pinnacle of achievement. The means by which a successful fledgling agency can take on the might of the big advertising networks, win significant business from them, then be bought by one of the aforementioned big agency networks, thereby turning themselves into multimillionaires. Rainey Kelly Campbell and Roalfe had done just that when they had been bought in 1998 by Young & Rubicam. Indeed, the succeeding management went off and did exactly the same, launching the incredibly successful Adam&Eve, who sold themselves to DDB. So within the DNA in which I was operating, there was a particularly strong entrepreneurial start-up culture. This is a spirit I have never wanted to lose. It keeps you hungry and keeps you permanently alert for the right opportunities. It is the key to all agencies’ success or failure—especially when you consider that they are not massive businesses.

On the other hand, I also firmly believed that this spirit could be accommodated within the network structure. I wanted to operate within that and gain experience as a multi-territory operator. I was single, had no dependents and no commitments that could prevent a move. But I didn’t move.

No offers were forthcoming and no opportunities were presented. I loved RKCR and its unique culture (I really did) but I wanted to take some of what existed there in probably their most successful office and inculcate it elsewhere where the local Y&R reputation was perhaps not so strong. Apparently, my love of the agency was believed to be so strong that no one wanted me to leave and that really, in everyone’s mind, I never would.

Advertising is an industry that I have never regretted joining. I have already spoken about its variety but the people you meet and the experiences you have are difficult to replicate. If, like me, you are something of a magpie, picking up bits of information or trivia or using your experiences to help craft new solutions further down the line, it’s an incredible way to spend your working day. Boredom is never on the cards. The flip side is that it leaves you always wanting to find new ways to put what you know to use and gain even greater fulfillment.

I was portable and wanted to try something different but I was very much landlocked. Thus, I had come to terms with the fact that it was going to be in London forever more.

Then the phone rang one morning in the autumn of 2010.

“Hi Tony, it’s Charlie.”

Charlie Thomas had worked for me at Rainey Kelly as an account director and was the brightest of all bright young things. Clients loved him, creative teams loved him, the four founders loved him (and that wasn’t an easy “full-house” to accumulate). He had a real talent for advertising, and being such a grounded individual, never showed off that he knew it. In a world dominated by titles and advancement, Charlie is one person who refused a promotion because he felt it was unjustified. On that occasion, he was wrong and we ignored him but small wonder that he was sorely missed after his departure.

I had always tried to keep in touch with Charlie, albeit only occasionally, and looked forward to any opportunity when we would get together, normally at some industry function, when we would reminisce about drinking whiskey late into the night in some hellhole bars off Regent Street. I never knew whether it was that agency life no longer attracted him or, more likely, as a keen sportsman, he loves a challenge. He had given up account management and become a headhunter, initially in London and then he had started a practice for his employer in Singapore.

Now, I always tell the story of Charlie’s phone call in the following way. Is it true? I’ve told it so many times it must be.

“Hi Tony, it’s Charlie.”

“Hey, Charlie, how’s it going in the Wild Wild East?”

“Good, good. Listen, I’ll get straight to the point.”

“Okay.”

“What do you know about the Philippines?”

“I hear they’re a lovely couple.”

Truth be told, as something of a geography geek in my pre-teens, spending hours poring over atlases and globes, I of course knew that Manila was the capital, the peso was the currency and that the flag was a bit like the Czech one but with a sun on it. That, however, even for an information magpie like me, was about the lot. It might just get me through a game of Trivial Pursuit but it was not going to challenge “The Recordings of The Rolling Stones 1963–1981” as my specialist subject on Mastermind.

At this point, Charlie reassured me that this would not necessarily be a problem and asked if I had ever heard of David Guerrero.

Now, I told you I was a magpie and from the dim rolodex of my brain (in which you’ll find I can name Bond films in production order, British kings and queens by succession and the first hundred numbers in Thai, among other largely unnecessary things), I recalled reading an article that he had written in a section of Campaign magazine about the advertising scene in various overseas markets. Ironically, I would later be asked by them to do a similar article several years later. I am now shame-facedly going to admit I could not remember a word of what David had written.

Charlie proceeded to tell me that it might be something of a flyer but David’s agency, BBDO Guerrero, was looking for a new chief executive. Knowing that I had had desires to try my luck in foreign climes, he asked whether I might be interested.

He continued that BBDO Guerrero was a particularly successful agency in the Philippines and that David, as the founder and creative chairman, was highly regarded both locally and internationally for his work there. Furthermore, he was raised in England and had worked in the London industry before heading back to the Philippines, via a spell in Hong Kong.

This felt to me as if the stars were aligning: an Anglophile creative director with an international reputation; an opportunity in an emerging market with a respected agency; and BBDO—don’t forget BBDO. It still is one of the most admired networks around the globe and one that really does believe in the power of networks and the contributions individuals can make.

Then Charlie told me that David was looking for a “digital wizard in his 30s with significant technological background.”

I “politely” reminded Charlie that I was none of these things.

Charlie acknowledged this but that I might still be just what David needed. Now, I confess the situation all gets a little bit murkier because doubtless you, as I did, are wondering how did Charlie know so much. His brother had given him some extra background to the brief!

I have already told you that Charlie is one of the most popular and energetic people I have worked with. The person I know who can equal him for popularity and even beat him for energy is his brother, Chris Thomas. He also happens to be the head of BBDO in Asia.

Chris had also been in London and had been a very successful agency head. We had in fact met once, when he had interviewed me for a role at Lowe. I would love to say I had rejected his overtures then but in truth, I was still in the full throes of my love affair with RKCR/Y&R and had no real ambitions to move and I think he knew it, so we took the conversation no further.

If Chris isn’t racing through any of the world’s busiest airports, opening new ventures for BBDO in Africa or speaking at conventions in India, he is relaxing by kite-surfing. I simply do not know where he gets the energy from, but his universal reputation as a charming tornado of activity made the prospect of this potential opening in the Philippines even more enticing.

Although Charlie is always the sole of discretion in his professional dealings, because David’s brief was on his brother’s turf, he had asked Chris for some background about what might be really required. So it’s not that murky, really.

Eventually, the conversation finished with our agreement that he should set up an opportunity for David and I to chat over the phone.

As opportunities went, this was an unconventional one but then the best antidote to unconve...