In 1990, pirate radio station Kiss had been granted its official licence to broadcast legally. It was a big moment, and it needed an impactful launch to go with it. “Everybody asked the same question: ‘What music are you going to put on it?’” recalls creative director Walter Campbell. He and creative partner Tom Carty were pitching with BBDO against London’s other heavyweight agencies and knew the idea had to stand out to “dislodge” the competitors. Since Kiss FM was home to a range of genres, he realised it would likely be difficult for the station to agree as to what kind of music would best represent the station, particularly at this pivotal stage. Campbell’s solution? Don’t use any music at all.
Around the time he was pitching for that spot, Campbell was weighing up saving for a car or buying a Sony video camera. He went with the camera. It was a worthy investment since it allowed him to go into presentations with the ideas already shot, something he believes helped him win the work.
Directed by Patricia Murphy, the resulting spot showed clips of people dancing silently before an instruction appeared: ‘Find out what they’re dancing to. Tune your radio to 100 FM.’ The line featured on the side of trucks that had transparent walls showing people dancing inside, which toured around London as part of the launch. It was clearly working: “You could see people changing their radio stations in their cars,” Campbell says. In just a few months, Kiss FM smashed through its yearly listener targets.
“That’s one of the best-selling thoughts I’ve had,” reflects Campbell. While he says people consider him to be someone who “likes to do these flights of fancy”, turning a message into results is a genuine goal, something he’d been honing since his early days selling pots and pans on a market stall – an experience that taught him “the importance of stopping people”.
The Kiss FM spot caught the attention of director Matt Forrest, who nominated Campbell to be featured in CR’s Creative Futures scheme in 1992. Campbell was struck by the fact that he was chosen by Forrest, someone he had admired for his storytelling abilities and how he worked “in a very dynamic way to create something that was bigger than the sum of its parts”.
Over the following years, Campbell went on to create work for brands including Dunlop and Volvo with director Tony Kaye, with whom he developed a strong creative relationship. “You know when two strikers know where they are on the pitch? I hate using football analogies, but it’s a little bit of telepathy that comes into play if you get the right people.”
Campbell then embarked on a series of seminal projects for Guinness in the late 1990s. The first brief he got outlined that the pitches should avoid highlighting the time it takes to pour a Guinness. So, naturally, Campbell revolved the entire pitch around it – “a lot of the guys I hung around with drank Guinness and I knew they actually quite like the fact that it takes a bit of time to pour it.”
The ‘good things come to those who wait’ campaign began with 1998 spot Swim Black, directed by Jonathan Glazer, which was shot in the Italian town of Monopoli and starred the locals as extras. Campbell’s crowning moment would come the year after in the form of multi-award-winning Surfer, also directed by Glazer, an intense, mythological epic scored by Leftfield’s Phat Planet, laden with references to Neptune’s Horses painted by Walter Crane. The ad is often still hailed as the greatest of all time.
While at AMV BBDO, Campbell would receive his most important piece of advice from Peter Mead, who embedded in him the notion that the best time to re-evaluate your career is when you’re at your most successful. “That’s the time to improve. It’s about a constant tweaking of detail and constant reattachment to the hunger,” he says of Mead’s advice.
Campbell later teamed up with Glazer once again on 2014 sci-fi feature film Under the Skin, writing a screenplay that sought to explore “what makes a human a human”. It’s Campbell’s deep-rooted connection to film that he feels has influenced his approach to creating ads over the years, striving to draw in viewers as much as movies do.
“Part of my little game is, can I make the advert resonate more than the film it happens between? Could it stay there? Could it find a place in their consciousness in a way that beats the film they’re watching?” he says. “You might not get a sale that week, but you might say, ‘I like Guinness. I’ll have a Guinness.’”
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