Visuals: https://getbehindthebillboard.com/episode-114-axel-chaldecott

Episode #114 features Axel Chaldecott, art director, creative director, agency founder, Global CCO and now award-winning printmaker.

Axel spent nearly four decades in the industry, creating and overseeing some of the most iconic campaigns this country has ever seen.

Ronseal: ‘Does exactly what it says on the tin’
AA: ‘The fourth emergency service’
Pot Noodle: ‘The slag of all snacks’
‘You Know When You've Been Tango'd’

These were just some of the campaigns from Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury (HHCL), the agency Axel co-founded in 1987, which went on to become ‘Agency of the Decade’ as voted by Campaign magazine in 2000.

We started the chat at Gold Greenlees Trott (GGT) where Axel, along with long-term partner Steve Henry, worked on the London Weekend Television (LWT) account and we discovered why the campaign was so ground-breaking: Gordon Smith’s idea of retaining the outer sheets of a poster in full colour, while changing the internal b&w sheets, gave the illusion of printing a new 48-sheet colour poster every week. That in itself was genius. But then the actual posters that sat within the frame were also brilliant, each one telling a story of the TV show it was advertising, like writing a topical ad every week.

Next up three cracking posters for Time Out, before First Direct and a unique approach to posters for a bank … everyday objects with the line: ‘Banking without branches, it’s extraordinary’.

We ended on the HSBC Points of View campaign, which ran all over the world, winning awards and much pr. An academic once cited the campaign ‘as a post-structuralist concept of 'mise en abyme’, that cognitive moment when we realise when presented with two binaries, that neither is defensible and the actual meaning lives in the gap between.’ Again, Axel explains it best, with his infectious laugh, possibly the greatest giggle in advertising.

Thanks so much Axel for coming on. A real treat.

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