Reloaded: Rupert Howell co-founder of HHCL on creating the agency of the decade

Summary

Podcast Summary: Uncensored CMO
Episode: Reloaded: Rupert Howell co-founder of HHCL on creating the agency of the decade
Release Date: January 2, 2025

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Introduction

In this special reloaded episode of Uncensored CMO, host Jon Evans revisits a classic interview from 2021 with Rupert Howe, the co-founder of HHCL & Partners. Released in early 2025, this episode delves deep into Rupert's journey in the advertising industry, his insights on agency operations, new business strategies, notable campaigns, leadership challenges, and reflections on media's impact on mental health. Spanning nearly two hours, the conversation offers a treasure trove of wisdom for marketing professionals and enthusiasts alike.

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Agency Operations in the 90s

Rupert Howe begins by reminiscing about the advertising landscape of the 1990s. He emphasizes the prevalent hierarchy within agencies, where creatives and planners often overshadow client service teams. However, Rupert underscores the critical role of client service professionals in fostering trust and ensuring the agency's ideas resonate with clients.

Notable Quote:

“The thing in advertising that matters the most is the idea. The creatives and the planners are the architects and builders of those ideas.”
— Rupert Howe at [01:30]

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Mastering New Business in Agencies

A significant portion of the discussion centers on new business development within advertising agencies. Rupert highlights the necessity of separating new business directors from client service roles to prioritize acquiring new clients over servicing existing ones. He shares his mantra of "never give up" inspired by stalwarts like Saatchi & Saatchi, illustrating the relentless pursuit required to win pitches.

Notable Quote:

“The purpose is to win the pitch. There is only one purpose from the agency.”
— Rupert Howe at [12:14]

Rupert recounts HHCL's impressive pitch success rate of 65% over a decade, a testament to their strategic approach and relationship-building prowess.

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Iconic Campaigns and Success Stories

Rupert delves into some of HHCL's landmark campaigns that defined the agency of the decade. Notably, the Tango campaign stands out as a monumental success, where positioning Tango as a "lager ad for kids" led to a staggering 700% sales increase and the eventual withdrawal of Fanta from the UK market.

Notable Quote:

“The best sign that your ad is working well is if it damages your key competitor, not just enhances you.”
— Rupert Howe at [31:20]

He narrates the creative brilliance behind executing audacious ideas like the AA's "Fourth Emergency Service" and Molson's controversial yet effective "Jim Dunk says don't drink it" campaign.

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Leadership and Management Challenges

Transitioning from entrepreneurial success to managing a public company presented Rupert with unforeseen challenges. He candidly discusses the complexities of integrating HHCL into Chime under the umbrella of WPP, leading to a dilution of the agency's ethos and eventual decline. Rupert reflects on the difficulties of succession management and the irreplaceable energy founders bring to their ventures.

Notable Quote:

“The sale to Chime happened for the best of reasons... But every sale of a great agency to a big multinational has led to a complete dilution of the ethos of that agency.”
— Rupert Howe at [60:28]

His tenure at McCann further exposed him to the stark cultural differences between European and American leadership styles, ultimately culminating in his departure amidst managerial conflicts.

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Media, Mental Health, and Personal Reflections

Rupert shares his critical views on the modern media landscape, emphasizing its detrimental effects on mental health. He advocates for reduced consumption of mass media news, highlighting how sensationalism and clickbait foster feelings of helplessness and anxiety.

Notable Quote:

“In the very beginnings of humankind, news was about topics that directly affect you personally. Now, 99.9% of our news is about stuff we can do nothing about.”
— Rupert Howe at [97:56]

He discusses his personal efforts to mitigate these effects by curating his news consumption, retaining only trusted sources like the BBC and selectively the Sun.

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Building Relationships and Non-Executive Roles

A recurring theme in Rupert's narrative is the paramount importance of building genuine relationships in the business world. Whether it’s fostering connections with PAs or maintaining friendships with key industry players, Rupert credits his relational skills as the cornerstone of his success in new business development.

He also touches upon his ventures into non-executive roles, emphasizing that genuine connections, rather than formal processes, have been instrumental in securing these positions.

Notable Quote:

“If you've got that ability to build relationships, everything flows from that 100%.”
— Rupert Howe at [59:36]

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Reflections on Founders and Agency Culture

Rupert contemplates the irreplaceable role of founders in shaping agency culture and driving success. He acknowledges that while professional management is essential for scaling, the unique energy and passion founders bring are often difficult to replicate. His experiences underscore the delicate balance required to transition from founder-led to professionally managed agencies without losing the core ethos.

Notable Quote:

“The secret with Tango was a client called Tony Hillier... It was one of those things where you have to come together and maintain the spark.”
— Rupert Howe at [26:09]

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Conclusion

Rupert Howe's journey through the echelons of the advertising industry offers invaluable lessons on the importance of relationship-building, relentless pursuit in new business, creative audacity, and the complexities of leadership transitions. His candid reflections on media's societal impact and personal strategies for mental well-being add depth to the conversation, making this episode a must-listen for those aspiring to excel in marketing and leadership roles.

Notable Quote:

“The best things are down to the people. The agency is run by the people, and it's run by the people you have.”
— Rupert Howe at [79:13]

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This detailed summary encapsulates the essence of Rupert Howe's insights and experiences shared during the episode, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted world of advertising and agency management.

Transcript

[John]

Foreign Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored cmo. Now, something a bit different. In this episode, I'm going to reload one of my favorite episodes all the way back from 2021. This is with Rupert Howe. Rupert is the founder of HHCN & Partners, one of the most famous and successful creative agencies of all time. And, and because it's quite an old episode of mine, a lot of you listening won't have come across it. So I want to put it back in your feed so you don't miss out. And I think the beginning of 2025 is the ideal time to have an episode like this. Now, a little bit of a warning for you. This is rather long, almost two hours. In fact, it is the second longest episode after one where I interview myself. So anyway, apologies for that, but I promise you it's worth it. Now, next week we'll be back to our normal schedule. In fact, not just our normal schedule, we're gonna be doing two episodes next week just to get us off in style. Firstly with Amazon and with Les and Sarah. So there's lots to look forward to. But in the meantime, sit back and enjoy Rupert Howell. Here it is. So I thought, obviously, if you don't mind, we'll start with the agency, the 90s. I mean, there's so much cool stuff there. And then I thought I would as well dip into new business. And the reason why is because, I don't know if you agree, but agencies spend a lot of time putting the creatives on a pedestal. The planners are like the clever, clever people in the corner. But, you know, the people that grow the business and work with clients don't tend to get much, much air time, do they?

[Rupert Howe]

Twas ever thus, isn't it? The salesmen are always the people who are down the pecking order in, in the roll call of glory. Unless they start winning a lot of sales, in which case they get pretty well rewarded. Yeah, so I never minded that. I mean, the thing in advertising is, the thing that matters the most is the idea. And the creatives and the planners are the typically the architects and builders of those ideas. And the job of the client service people obviously is to make sure you've got the best chance of those, the best ideas being bought and made. That comes from building a relationship of trust with the client. And that's what the client service people do. I had a mantra in the agency which, when honesty, trust, respect, and I used to say to everybody, the first thing you have to be with your clients is brutally honest. If you don't know, say I don't know. If something goes wrong, tell them it's gotten wrong. Don't let them find out. I remember very, very early on, one of our very, very first press ads had a typo in it, which for me was a killer, because I'm a typo female.

[John]

You are. I've noticed that already.

[Rupert Howe]

Yes, always have been. And I rang the client up and I said, look, I'm really, really embarrassed about this. We'll give you a refund. But there was a. A typo in the ad. It was a very minor typo. And the client said, it doesn't matter, nobody will notice it. I didn't notice it, but thank you for calling me. And the reason I did that is A, it's the right thing to do, but B, I think if you're honest with your customers in any walk of life, they begin to trust you. And if they trust you, and you build up proper trust between the two parties, you then get to that nirvana, which is respect, mutual respect. What mutual respect delivers is the ability to listen to and take on board each other's point of view. And clearly in the client agency relationship, there's always some tensions in that the agency sees the world through the lens of advertising. The client sees the world through the lens of business, where advertising is an important component, but certainly not the be all or end all. And you have to have mutual respect for those positions. And they only come from honesty and trust. And so I think that's what good account service people do. Funny enough, new business is a slightly different skill. And I know in different types of agencies, it's either part of the job of every client service person or it's a separate job. And certainly in the big ad agencies that I worked in, and when I became new business director, it was a separate job. I was literally taken off all my client service duties to become new business director. And it was explained to me. Excuse me. The reason for that was explained to me quite well, which is if you have client duties as well as new business duties, the client duties will always come first. And the reason for that is actually because they're easier than new business. So if you've got an excuse, you'll know this, John, as somebody who's new business, really, if you've got an excuse not to make that call, not to do that difficult thing, which is to talk to a person you've never met before, rather than talking to somebody you know, you'll always do the latter. And actually that's why, in big agencies or substantial agencies, the new business director role was separate because you've got no excuse, you've got nothing else to do but to try.

[John]

And that is so true, isn't it? Because also in your to do list, getting done what the existing customer needs doing is always going to be the immediate task is always going to trump the long term one, isn't it?

[Rupert Howe]

Exactly. So one of the advice I've given to lots of startup agencies who've asked my advice over the last 20 years or so or 30 years, is make sure you've got enough people looking after the existing clients so that you, the founder, chief exec, you know, whether that's me or Johnny Hornby at CHI or whoever, can actually spend not all their time, but the focus on their time, on developing the business.

[John]

Do you know, that's so interesting actually, because I think there's probably three, if I look at my own career, there's three parts of my own career where I've gone through lots of new business growth and every time it slowed down when I've had to get internally focused on organizing projects, prioritizing recruiting, and it's almost, you know, it slows down because I'm looking in, not looking out. And it's been the same pattern I've seen every time.

[Rupert Howe]

It happens every time, John. And the, you know, I had a great example towards the end of my time at Young and Rubicon before I set up hhcl, where I'd, I'd led and won the pitch for the British gas flotation Tell Sid, which is still the biggest campaign in British advertising history. And you know, that was, that was back in 1986 and I think we spent 27 million in three months. Now imagine what that is in today's money.

[John]

Wow.

[Rupert Howe]

I mean, hugely successful. I mean, it paid for itself multiple times over. As the Secretary of State was a wonderful man called Peter Walker said to me at the day of the flotation, he said, thanks to the strength of the telsid campaign and the demand out there, I was able to price the issue at the very, very highest level that Rothschilds said was possible. And he said every penny I added to that share price was worth 100 million. So you paid for yourself in spades. Anyway, so a little side story, but one of the things that happened after that is that British Gas wanted to reward the agency and gave us the British Gas Heating account. But they insisted as a condition that I ran the business as the management representative. So for the first time for quite a Long time. I mean, I'd run the gas flotation, but that was a project, not an ongoing account. And so I started managing the British Gas client and it just meant I had less and less time for new business. And the agency strike rate started to fall and I left shortly after that, set up my own agency, and the agency strike rate plummeted and a very good guy called Toby hall got his teeth into it and got them back up again because again, he was a 100% new business director.

[John]

Do you think there's a different new business skill set? Because I've noticed you've got established salespeople that are very good at keeping the account going, doing the admin managing issues, that kind of thing. But I generally find there's a different breed of person, isn't there, that is comfortable?

[Rupert Howe]

I think. So it's either a. It's either a great account handling on steroids, or it's a slightly different breed of person, I think the thing that marks out, and I have to be slightly careful here because in a sense, I'm talking about myself. And I was, I will remind you, voted the finest new business director of all time by Campaign magazine the last time they did a feature, which was about 25 years ago. So I'm sure there's lots of people who've done better since. But I think it's having that competitive streak and, you know, the joy was in winning. I've always been very competitive and I like to win, funny enough, less competitive in sport than you might imagine. When I played a lot of sport, I mean, I did like to win, but not at all cost, some people. But when it came to business, definitely, you know, it was the thrill of the chase and some people like that, and some people are scared by that. I loved it. I was inspired really by people at Saatchies and, you know, we may talk a bit about Tim Bell later, who became really my mentor and then we ended up as colleagues as well, the Saatchies machine, in the early 80s late. So, I mean, it was extraordinary. And they had this astonishing passion to win and never, ever, ever give up. Famously, Saatchies would win business having been told they'd lost the pitch. And then they literally work overnight, ring the client the next morning and say, we've just realized, as one of the ideas we never showed you. Can we show it to you? Oh, invariably would say, yes, of course. And invariably, because they'd worked out why the other ideas hadn't been successful, they'd come up with something that was good. So they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat just so often. And that inspired me. And one of the mantras I had when new business director at Y and R and then in my own agency is just never give up. Don't take no for an answer. There comes a point where you're going to piss the client off if you carry on nagging, and you have to judge that, but just never gave up. And quite often we have clients very doubtful about the ideas we put in front of them because we were always pretty radical and it took a lot of hand holding. And we just. We always recognized that a pitch started from the very first phone call they made to you and how you handled that, or the very first letter you got in the old days, right down to the moment the other agency was announced in campaign, which is the point you gave up.

[John]

It's funny, actually. When I started freelancing about three or four years ago, I was quite surprised, actually. I got quite a large number of calls from agencies who I used to be their clients and said, oh, can you come and do some pitch training? And, you know, because obviously you've been a cmo, you understand it from the other side of the fence, you know, help us understand. So I did this little presentation called the 10 things you never knew about a CMO, trying to get them into the. Into the head. And one thing I said that always I could never understand is whenever I sent the brief out for a pitch, I literally wouldn't hear from the agency for a week, two weeks, until they came in. And I just said, the biggest thing I can tell you to do is phone up immediately, you get the brief, ask to speak to the decision maker and just get them to talk you through it and say, well, what's the business issue we're trying to solve? What criteria are you going to judge this by? How could we guarantee we win it? And then 15 minutes, you could probably work out how to win it sort.

[Rupert Howe]

Of thing, but very wise, exactly what I used to do. So I'd get the brief and I just ring up and say, look, I just want to check that I've understood this. So can we just move through the brief together?

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

And, yeah, 15 minutes. And you got so many clues as to what the person was looking for. The other. The other critical thing from the agency perspective, and you can call this cynical if you like, I call it sensible, is there is only one purpose in pitching and that's to win the pitch. It's actually not to solve the problem.

[John]

Oh, that's a good distinction. I like that. Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

The purpose is to win the pitch. There is only one purpose from the agency. I used to say to everybody, if you sit around thinking that you can in three or four weeks solve the problem of this business, you are deluding yourselves. You can't. Okay, you might make a contribution towards solving the business, but you can't solve the problem. You might be able to solve the CMO's problem, which may be nothing to do with solving the business's problem. It may be with his or her relationship with the CEO. It may be all sorts of things I always used to want. The first question I used to ask when discussing the brief is what keeps you awake at night. It's amazing how often it would stray off the standard business discussion to personal issues. That and also I'd always find out the name of the PA and chat her up good, because it was always a her. I always chat them up so I'd know their name and I'd know all sorts of things. So that meant when it got down to the nearer the pitch or just after the pitch, when they're briefed to keep the agencies away by the cmo, I could always get through because I knew Julie. I'd say, julie, I'm so sad that spurs lost again this weekend because I know that spurs fan now, what's John doing today? When can I get it? Yes, you know, and they'd always have.

[John]

Yeah, oh, that's genius.

[Rupert Howe]

I'd always make friends with the receptionist, the pa, and I'd always focus on the decision maker and what his or her issue was and what was going to win the pitch. And, you know, there's a, many, many times you won the pitch and then when you actually sit down with the client, you properly say, look, the more we think about this, we're not sure what we put up in the pitch is the right thing. I also used to say to clients, because I obviously later in my career, I was often asked to buy clients to advise them on pitch processes. I said, honestly, you shouldn't be looking for the solution, you should be looking for the partner.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

The people you can work with, you know, the people you like. And I remember going with one client to choose an agency in Germany and we did the three pictures in one day and the client said to me, he said, you know, I really like, you know, what agency One did, you know, I did, I'm not sure about, like them, that Agency 3. What lovely people. But I wasn't, didn't think the pitch was very good. So I said to them, well, yeah, but you know, which one would you rather work with? And they said, well, number three. Well then you've made your decision. Yeah, because actually they're a very competent agency. You can see from their, you know, their showreel that they know what they're doing together with you. If you like each other, you'll work out the best solution.

[John]

I think you're right. Never underestimate the importance of the passion of the team. You want to believe that that team want, want to win and also that you can see yourself working with the people. I think that's really, really important. The other thing you said there as.

[Rupert Howe]

Well, the person who taught me the most about new business though, this single individual is a wonderful lady called Lindy Payne. And Lindy founded the advertising agency Register, the aar, which is now owned by Martin Jones, who I've known for donkeys years. But Lindy was one of my best mates and she became a big ally of mine when I was new business of Y and R again because she liked me for whatever reason. And then when I set up hhl, she was unbelievably helpful and I thought she had the best summation of everything really. She said to me, in one sense, she said, riga, what you have to understand is clients are looking for mates who understand their business. That's what they're looking for. If they think you could be a mate and that you understand the dynamics of their business, then you will win more pitches than you can imagine. So it wasn't, it wasn't a cynical attempt to make friends with clients, but I genuinely tried to do that as part of the process and sometimes that was difficult because sometimes I didn't like them and they didn't like me and guess what? We didn't win those pitches. But most of the time I got to a place with the, with the client where we go pretty damn well. So unless we blew it in the presentation, I knew we were going to win and occasionally we did blow it in the presentation, of course we did, but you know, we were, we were, you know, if you think on average in those days, it's, it's pretty much the same now. There are four agencies on a pitch list, maybe five. So on the basis that all are pretty competent, because they are, you've got a 20, 25% chance of winning. So if you strike above 25%, you know, you're doing pretty well. Well, throughout our 10 year full independent history, we struck at 65%.

[John]

Really? Wow. That's brilliant.

[Rupert Howe]

And when I was new business director of Y and R, we struck at nearly 50%. And it's, it's. And I measured it by the way. Most people never bothered measuring things like that, but I measured everything as well because, you know, I do believe following the data, which is a current mantra, is a pretty sensible thing to do because it tells you things. So, yeah, we measured it. And the other thing I used to do is when we didn't win, I'd send in my finance partner Robin Price to do a post pitch analysis with the client, which they always were happy to do to find out why we didn't win. And it was normally, even though they didn't express it like this, they didn't like us.

[John]

Yes.

[Rupert Howe]

You know, or chemistry or they couldn't, they couldn't see a way that we would be acceptable to their more senior management because we were radical and we were young and ballsy and so on. And so sometimes they were scared of what their senior management would think. Funnily enough, as time went on, we got into, you know, after we'd been agency of the year a couple of times, that problem went away because we had credibility. And also I started being asked to attend board meetings with the whole board, which was something that just doesn't happen nowadays and hardly happened in those days. So myself and my planning partner were the first outsiders ever, ever in history to attend a LEGO board meeting. So we were flown out to Billund by, by the, by the founders. I think he's either son or grandson. Celt Kurt Kristiansen, who was a delightful man, absolutely delightful man. And they basically owned Billund in Denmark. And we flew out. He has a collection of castles and private jets, but he lives in a two up two down in Billund Strawberry, or he did in those days. And we were invited in because he wanted an outsider to say what the computer games world was going to do to lego. We basically said it was going to kill it. We were wrong, by the way. But a lot of what we said, we did the old dance of death for them.

[John]

Yes.

[Rupert Howe]

But a lot of what we said, which is that they should embrace the online gaming world and allow, for example, kids to design stuff on their computer that then would print out a building plan using Lego, which they did, and so on, so forth. But the product, their product and their brand was stronger than we thought. But things like, you know, I went into with the launch of Go for British Airways, I wrote a tiny part of Barbara Kasani's business plan that when we went in to present to Bob Aylin, the boss of British Airways that became Go. I was with Mike Harris, the main board of Prudential, when we presented why they should launch a credit card called a. Yeah, you know, so I got invited up into those very seniors levels of companies and big companies, which just didn't happen to other agencies. And I think it was partly because my sort of balls and naivety. I just thought, well, why wouldn't they want to meet me? I love it. And actually I've got on pretty well with them. You know, Peter Davis, who was chief executive of the crew, the ex chief executive, Sainsbury's. We ended up getting on pretty well, although he wasn't a huge fan of my agency. He was a big fan of Abbott Mead, having been the Sainsbury's client. And, you know, Bob Aylin got on fine. I mean, but now the problem for agency, for agencies nowadays is they are further down the food chain. And that is a problem. But in those days, as I said, that was one of the reasons why we in particular in the early days, we sometimes didn't win pitches. But the critical thing was we went in and asked the question, so we always had the data, why did we won? Why had we not won?

[John]

That is so important. It goes back actually to what you said at the beginning, which was, you know, agencies are looking at the narrow communication, but their clients are looking at the entire business. And something I often say to people is really understand the business problem because if you can help the client solve the business problem, then you're going to be heroes.

[Rupert Howe]

Well, the first thing I said when I was doing these masterclasses, I don't do them anymore, but when I did them is I'd say to the agency team, I said, okay, what was the last pitch you did? And somebody would say, I don't know, doesn't really matter. Toyota cars. I said, did you read their annual report before the pitch? No. Not one of them ever. Never, ever had read the annual report. I said, well, why wouldn't you do that? Yeah, why wouldn't you read their annual report? I said, it's the most boring document on the planet report. But it has two really vital things in it and one fun thing in it, which are the only three things that you need to read in an annual report. The first is the chairman's statement because that will tell you what the shareholders and the board are concerned about, happy about, worried about. And then you read the chief executive statement because that will tell you what the Management concerned about, worried about, so on. You don't really need to look at all the numbers, maybe the headlines, then you just want to go to the back and read what the highest paid director is paid. A, because that's amusing, but B, because I used to use that whenever I used to then get into debates with procurement about how high our fees are.

[John]

Very good.

[Rupert Howe]

So I was to say, that's really interesting. So you're telling me that my agency's fees for the year, which are less than your chief executive was paid last year, are too high. That was always quite a good emotional blackmail 1.

[John]

Love it.

[Rupert Howe]

Because we were very premium price, I mean, very premium priced and you know, our margins were comfortably the best in the advertising industry because I said, look, you know, we're the best, we're good. So, you know, if you make the best pet food, you'd expect to charge more for it. Yeah, we make the best ads, we're going to charge more for them.

[John]

Well, something, something I think people forget as well is certainly in my experience and maybe because I didn't take responsibility for it, but the brief is often not written by the cmo, it's often written by someone on a bit more junior and it's often sort of almost everything we know or it doesn't often tell you. Exactly. Yeah. And so the first thing I say whenever I've done the pitch training is the brief is never actually the brief. Your first job is to understand what the real brief is and that's doing exactly what you said, get under the skin of the financial statement, talk to the cmo. And then the other bit of advice often give people is. Which came down to. I remember I was in Ireland on a trade thing for when I was working soft drinks and we had. The Tesco buyer flew over to Ireland to do a presentation on what Tesco's objectives were. And I was up late at night in the bar with him and he said to me, john, how are you going to get me promoted? And I'm like, david, what do you mean? He said, well, look, I'm only here for a short time. I've got my eye on the next role. What are you going to do as one of my top three, you know, top three suppliers to get me promoted? And it just, I thought to myself, you know what? Actually that's about right. What am I going to do for him that's going to make him so famous within Tesco and within the industry that's going to get help him succeed sort of thing, you know, and he suddenly realized that a lot of it comes down to you talking about this earlier. Personal, you know, what's the personal situation of the person you're dealing with and the decision maker?

[Rupert Howe]

I mean, I always knew that with, with all of my clients, I kind of knew where they were in their career and what they were thinking and, you know, a lot of them I helped into other roles.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

And in fact, and again, partly for business reasons, because they then, you know, went to a new company and reappointed us. So Jan Smith, the wonderful iconoclast Jan Smith, who was the person who appointed us to launch First Direct for hsbc, then appointed us at mastercards and then appointed us at the co op, she did three huge appointments and she did the other two without a pitch. She just moved it straight to us.

[John]

Aren't they the best situations where you don't even have to pitch because you got the reputation?

[Rupert Howe]

Yeah, because she knew we were the best and she knew we understood her iconoclasm, which typically was she always wore a big fedora and if she took the fedora off when she got into the office, she was in a good mood and if she left it on, she was in a bad. So we used to know she still had her hat on just to not just not get into any fights, but if she had her hat off, we could fight her tooth and nail on anything and every subject.

[John]

But you're right about you always follow the individual, not necessarily the company. I remember when I was in, I left Britvik, where I was for a few years and went in to do a startup and I hired a PR agency and they were, they were. I thought I'd try and find someone who's new, you know, gonna do work a lot harder for a lower fee because they want to prove themselves. So I ended up working with this agency for about three years and then I got the call to go, john, we're really sorry, we have to resign the account. I'm like, what's happened? What's happened? And they of course got a brief from a slightly bigger soft drink brand that was going to pay them twice as much partly off the back of the work we've done together. I was really upset. I was just fuming because I thought, you know, all that trust, we've built up the working relationship. I've supported you in the early years.

[Rupert Howe]

I would never, ever do that.

[John]

It really hurt me, actually. And then about six months later, I then became the CMO at Lucas Aid, which was about three times the size of the client that they had given me up to take on. And I just thought, look, there's a bit of karma in world, isn't it? But you know, that lost loyalty meant they weren't, you know, that you don't know where your client is going to end up, do you? And what they're going to be doing next.

[Rupert Howe]

But I've never done that, never do that, Dump a client for a bigger one. Just wouldn't do it. And it's interesting talking about Bricknet, one of the questions, because I do want to, you know, I want to talk about this, is that you, you asked about the nature of the client and, you know, buying good work and so on, so forth. And you mentioned Andrew Marsden, who's a friend of mine, actually, even though in the end he was the person who finally took the.

[John]

Well, I want to ask you about that. Of course, yeah, yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

He took the Tango account away from HR HCL and gave it to Chi. And I think, although I think Chi is one of the best agencies around and Johnny Hornby is a genius, they've never even touched the lows of the work we did for Tango, let alone the highs. And neither has anybody subsequently. So it wasn't Andrew who bought the good work. And yeah, he was uncomfortable with us. But the great thing about Andrew is he was always honest with me. He always told me right from the outset what his concerns were, why he, you know, what he was worried about. And therefore it never really came as a shock when the business went and it was fair enough and he was decent about it and all that sort of stuff. And so we managed to remain friends. But the secret with Tango was a client called Tony Hillier. So Brett, Vic Hard as marketing director, this guy called Tony Hillier, who had been the brand manager on Carling, Carling Black Label and had done or had been there when some of the great Carling Black Label work was done, like sort of Dam Busters and all that kind of stuff. And when Tony got to Britvic, he called the pitch. Straight away they. Tango had had a terrible campaign with kids, you know, right on kids playing street hockey with a can of Tango rather than a ball. And it was one of those ones which is, you know, so typically of a middle aged person trying to be down with the kids missing horribly. Anyway, and Tony called the pitch and I met Tony for the first time and I said, look, okay, why have you put us on the short list? Because by then we'd started doing some pretty notable work. We'd won the Grand Prix at Cannes for the best ad in the world in 89 for Max L tapes. And so we were pretty high profile. But he also said, look, you know, I thought Stephen Axe, your credit partners did the best ever calling black label ads. They did Hamlet 1, which was, you know, over here, son, on the edge, you know, bouncing the skull.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

And all that sort of stuff. They did some great Carling work. And he said, and the truth is, and this was the brilliance of his brief, he said, the truth is what I really want. He said, one of the things that used to really cause me problems at Carlin is that. And all the anti booze advertising lobby latched onto this is that the favorite ADs of 8 to 12 year olds was Carling Black Label and were not meant to appeal to anybody under 18.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

So he said, I suppose what I really want is a lager ad for Tango.

[John]

Lager ad for kids.

[Rupert Howe]

That's brilliant. No, I want a lager ad for Tango. Yeah, yeah. I want a lager ad for the brand Tango that's aimed at, you know, 10 to 15 year olds. And that was the genius of his brief. Whatever was written by some flunky. And if you deconstruct the semiotics of the great Tango app, it's a lager. And it just was incredible. I mean, sales increased by 700% almost instantly. So what was a can gathering dust on the back of a chip shop shelf suddenly became the coolest brand for kids to be seen with. And I mean, it destroyed Fanta.

[John]

It did.

[Rupert Howe]

Through Fanta.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

Coke withdrew. This is an astonishing fact, probably one of my proudest ever moments, because I used to say to clients, the best sign that your ad is working well is if it damages your key competitor, not just enhances you. So I said, look, there's two ways you improve your business. One is lifting yourself up, the other is pushing your opponent down. And I said the best strategies, the greatest strategies on any advertising or any marketing do both those things. So take the aa. If you're the fourth emergency service, what does the RAC do?

[John]

They're fucked.

[Rupert Howe]

They can't be the fifth or the sixth. And they can't say they're the second or the first because then they'd upset the police and the ambulance. Which is why we said it's the fourth emergency service and it killed the RAC. I mean, we went from 7 million members and declining to nine and a half million and growing inside two years. It mullet them. So that's what great strategies do. They elevate your brand. But they also, whatever the reverse of elevate is, they de. Elevate your opponent's brand. And that's what Tango did to Fanta. Suddenly Fanta became so uncool and they were still running ads with Californian, you know, kids, teenagers on the beach, you know, in the sunshine.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

And the Coca Cola company withdrew Fanta from the UK market. Yeah, I remember 18 months, because we killed it. How cool is that?

[John]

That's really cool. Yeah, I remember. I mean, I grew up with Tango as my favorite brand of soft drink as a kid. And then my first job after university was at Britbeck and back in 97.

[Rupert Howe]

So, well, Tony then got. Tony got kind of headhunted to join a sort of entrepreneurial business where he could be a shareholder in the furniture game, which. Which was fine. And I've forgotten his surname, to my utter shame. But Steve, somebody else took over who was brilliant as well. The bravest. One of the bravest people that I've ever convinced. I mean, for example, he let us do this for the Still Tango launch. We did the fake product recall. Massive trouble.

[John]

Yes, yes.

[Rupert Howe]

So we had. And we put him on camera. So it was him saying, I'm the marketing director of Britain, I'm really sorry. If you've seen. If you've seen bottles of Stiltango around, they're a counterfeit product, you shouldn't buy them at all. And it just went in two days. And we also did a whole campaign of planting empty bottles of Still Tango in rubbish bins all around festivals and event. So they were sort of full of these empty bottles and people think, where's that? Where can I get that?

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

He was incredibly brave. We got into a lot of trouble for that, for, you know, damaging the potential seriousness of product recalls.

[John]

Well, I wanted to ask you about this, right, because getting into trouble seems to be almost in the DNA of Tango, doesn't it? How much of that was like a conscious. So obviously you had a few. You had some ads banned, didn't you? And you had to recall the slap campaign. So how much of the strategy depended?

[Rupert Howe]

Well, yeah, they were slightly different. The first thing is, you have to believe this. We never deliberately got anything banned. So you can call that naivety or the triumph of optimism over realism. But it never crossed our minds that, for example, the Orange Tango slap would become a playground craze, because it was. It was meant to be an analogy for the fact, the hit of orange juice in Tango, because Tango was, believe it or not, the only orange soft drink.

[John]

It did. It Had a really high fruit content. Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

Yeah. Well, that was. That was. That was where it came from. The brief. The brief from the brilliant planner, John Leach, who did it, was. This is about the hit of real orange juice in the taste. Because everything else, like Fanta, was totally 100% synthetic anyway, and we had no idea. And it literally became a playground craze of going around slapping people. We'd seen it more as the sort of more common wise slack. But anyway, it became a craze and in fact, we pulled the ad, it didn't get backed. So there's a misconception about that. I got a phone call on about the fifth day of the campaign and the guy on the end of phone said, hi, I promise you, I'm not one of these usual people who complain I'm an ENT surgeon in Cheshire. And he said, I just operated on a burst eardrum and going into the anaesthetist, I asked the kid what an apple is and I got Tango Gut. Oh. So we called it that day and then replaced it with the Kiss, which was never quite as good, but it was still pretty good. And then we went on. So we didn't have. We had less ads banned than you might imagine, but we had lots of ads that caused controversy. So even the fourth Emergency Service, because what I'd done is I'd cleared it with the Chief of the Metropolitan Police, the head of the Ambulance Service and the London Fire Brigade. I actually talked to the boss man of each of those before we presented the idea to the pitch. Yeah, we did present it in a picture. Yeah. Because I knew that the first thing they would say when we presented.

[John]

Can't buy that.

[Rupert Howe]

You can't do that. So. And literally, again, a fantastic client at the AA who's unfortunately passed away now, but he was quite an old guy, he retired up to Harrogate. I went to see him even after he retired. He's a brilliant man and in fact, the Director General I kept in touch with until he retired as well, a guy called Bob Chase. And we got to the presentation and I said, I'm going to do an unusual thing in this pitch. I'm going to present you the idea before we present any rationale or strategy, right up front, because I know you're going to have a problem with it. So they looked at me like I was really strange. So I said, you know, I basically. We did a video cam, we took video cameras out. One of the things we did for any pitch is really, really kind of get under the hood of the product and what we did with the AA is we went out with the patrols, incidentally. Amazingly, we were the only agency that actually went out with one of the patrols and worked with the patrols for a couple of days and took a video camera and we had on camera people who, by the side of the road, who the AA was sorting out. And we interviewed them and they kept saying things like, you know, I can't tell you how happy I am that they're here. This was a real emergency. They kept using the word emergency. And I remember asking, one of them was a woman, I said, what do you mean a puncture is an emergency? She said, but I've got to get my kids to school. She said, look, my kids are sitting in the car, they're late for school, they're going to get into trouble. It's an emergency. And another person said, I've got to get to the airport, you know. And so I played this to the management of the AA and I said, you're not a breakdown service, you're an emergency service. In fact, you're the fourth emergency service in people's minds, alongside the police, the fire brigade and the ambulance. They said, we can't say that. So I said, hang on a second. And then I played them video on video ahead of the London Fire Brigade. Lend of things, saying, actually, we see these guys as another emergency service alongside us. And the client hit the table. He went, we can do this. And I knew I'd won the pitch 10 minutes into the pitch.

[John]

It's a great, great pitch. Destin that.

[Rupert Howe]

What an idea, though. What a great idea. And the idea, funnily enough, didn't come from a planner, it came from the art director. We were sitting in the room for the sort of first pitch, pow wow sort of idea sharing myself, the account director is called Misha. Liz and Dave, who are the creative team who went on to do some. They actually, Liz wrote, does what it says on the tin. And we were talking about this sort of what happened by the side of the road. And Misha, the account director, saying, yeah, now. And I talked to this person about that and that. And it was Dave suddenly, who never said anything. He was a classic art director who never, never spoke, just sort of sat there. He ended up being a very good ad director, actually. And he said, well, they're just another emergency service, aren't they? He said, they're like, you know, the fourth emergency service. And we all looked at each other and went, fucking hell, Dave, that is genius. And then the only thing we had to change is we. I always used to sort of try and have informal discussions with Clearcast. They weren't called that in those days. I can't remember what they were called but they're called Clearcast nowadays and I'd sometimes, if I thought something was controversial, would have a sort of off the record with them. And they said, well you can't say that because the thing about the emergency services is that they're available to 100% of the population and the AA isn't. So we added and it made it stronger to our members were the fourth emergency service which actually then made membership even more valuable. So the truth of the matter is it did take a brave client to buy quite a lot of our ideas and a very strong client and somebody had a very secure relationship with their boss because we would quite often have chief exec say to us, well on your heads be it to me and the client. And fortunately the vast majority of the time it was hugely successful but we had our failures, you know, and the great thing is I never ever, in the 10 years of the Independent History of HHCL when I was running it, I never ever, ever had a client turn around to me and say this is your fault, how dare you do this to me. You've ruined my career, you've ruined my life or anything like that. Literally never ever. And that was again because we had this relationship built on honesty, trust and respect. So I had never conned them into buying an ad. I'd always shared with them why I thought it would work and where the risks were. And I think I've talked to you before John, about again how we manage the research process because I used to say to all the clients, conventional research will reject many of our best ideas. And so we used to insist, we always had a pre research meeting if the client insisted on watching through a mirror and we always used to advise them not to because. Because it would pollute their thinking. And the whole point of having a moderator is they're there to interpret for the cloud. It's a bit like, well, I can't remember, can't think of a decent analogy right now. But there's no point employing a mechanic and then sitting there telling them how to mend the engine. The whole point of a great researcher is they could interpret what people were saying. If you watch through a mirror and you're not expert, you unfortunately believe people what I know say because most of the time, most of the time they don't mean what they say, they're just trying to be helpful. And their way of being, well, their way of being helpful is to bring you back to the norm or to the average, which in advertising is the biggest sin of all because, you know, when you're subjected to whatever it is, 1500 commercial messages a day and people only remember three. Being average is effectively like.

[John]

And the thing used to really, really bother me about it was when someone sees my poster for the first time, they have not just sat through two hours of focus group with someone explaining the strategy and the idea. So the only thing that matters is what do people feel and think the moment they see it? That's what you've got to capture.

[Rupert Howe]

Absolutely right. And of course that's slightly moderated in. If you see a TV ad five, ten times and so on. But even then, you know, the attention span is minimal. But I was always, you know, we'd always say to clients in the pre research meeting, so for example, it's not the best example, but fourth, emergency service, we said to the client, people will obviously say, you know, you can't say that, how dare you do that, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the moderator will have to show them what the head of the police think and all that, which is a bit unusual in a focus group. But there's no point doing the focus group unless you realize that this is all going to be. And then, you know, you ask the question of assuming this was supported by the police, the fire brigade and the ambulance, what do you think of positioning a. And then people just said, well, yeah, they are a bit like that, aren't they? And of course, the interesting thing is, the best thing of the lot is I got invited by the client to present. They had an annual sort of conference of all the patrols. I mean literally not all of them because they got some out on the road, but they'd have half a day and do the presentation twice. So they have half the patrols in the morning and half the patrols in the afternoon where they could get to Basingstoke. And I presented this idea. You could see the check because most of them are ex military, most of them are ex military. You could see the chests come out. It's like we're not just some fucking greasy mechanic who happens to have a yellow vat. We're like the police, the fire brigade in the ambulance. All of whom, particularly in those days, including the police, had amazing reputations. I mean, nowadays the police have a slightly less positive reputation, but nonetheless mostly very positive. Fire brigade and ambulance are the heroes of our country. And they were sort of Being put alongside this. So what it did for internal morale and employee stuff. And I used to say to clients a lot, I say, actually, just as important as your target audience is your employees, your employer. This ad is aimed at your employees as well. They should feel proud to be associated with this brand, you know, and we need constant. Therefore you need not to just assume because they work for Britvic that they're going to like the Tango ad. You need to take the trouble to explain to all the staff why you're doing what you're doing. Tony and Steve were brilliant at that, at bringing the company with them.

[John]

That is one of the most important. I think a lot of agencies miss that because in the pitch training I do, I often say, your customers have a customer. Don't forget, they may be the customer in this little transaction, but they have got to go and share the work. They've got to get sign off at a board, they've got to brief it to the sales team. They've got to show the service. There's a whole lot of people that depend on the success of what you're creating and the more you can arm them with what they need to sell it on and the better.

[Rupert Howe]

Really.

[John]

The other thing I think in your story, that really hit home for me, actually thinking about. I know we talk a lot about pitching here, but it's good. That hit home to me actually was the how profound it is when you see an agency really go out of their way to understand the real situation, like you did with going with the AA vans the side of the road and talk to somebody in an emergency. I think some of the best pictures I've been involved in have been where the agency on Gatorade as an example, where they've gone out and done five a side and they've been in this, you know, the situation with our target audience and really understand it and come back with the videos. And that, I think is just because you. You want to know that your agency understands the business and that they care.

[Rupert Howe]

Well, Robin White, who's a. Another great friend of mine and, you know, founder of wcrs, one of the great agencies, Robin always had a mantra which is interrogate the product until it confesses to its strength. You know, but that is true, you know, you can't do enough research on understanding the product and the people involved in the product and all those kind of things. So this sort of, you know, I still think a lot of agencies have this notion that, you know, that they, you know, have a look at the product, look at the Brief and then disappear into a room for two weeks and a puff of white smoke will come out and they'll come up with a genius solution. Well, of course it can happen. But the best agencies in history have always followed the old Gary Player mantra, which is the harder they practice, the luckier you get.

[John]

So true.

[Rupert Howe]

We were just incredibly hard working. I was explaining because, as you know, I share quite a number of businesses nowadays, including some startups and somebody, they weren't complaining is too strong, but somebody made some comment about working till midnight on Sunday to me the other day and I said, I didn't have a day off for five years. They said, oh, come on. I said, no, no, no. I went into my office every Saturday and Sunday for the first five years of the existence of hhcl, as did not all of our staff. And in fact we encouraged our staff, particularly as we got to years 3, 4, 5, not to come in. But the founders, we'd been doing stuff, we were there non stop and you can only do that if you've got an incredibly supportive family, which, you know, I was incredibly lucky. You know, my wife effectively brought up the kids almost on her own. We were in there every day. And in fact, my first two, the only two holidays I had in that first, I'm going to, I'm slightly exaggerating, I think it was three years actually, not five years. The only two holidays I had in those first three years were paid for by my clients. Oh, really? Yeah. So the first one, and there's a story behind this, was Thames Television. But the guy at Thames Television who was one of my first clients, in fact, he went into a contract race with Dame Pack to be my first client and won it. So it was actually our very, very first client was Thames Television and the sales director there, Jonathan Shire, about a year in, said to me, he said, I can't remember how the topic of holidays came up and I just laughed and said, well, don't be ridiculous, Jonathan, of course I'm not going on holiday. I started a business and stuff like that. He said, well, it's ridiculous, you've got to have a break. So I tell you, we've got a ski trip next week, why don't you and Claire come on it? This was for, obviously for media buyers, so there were a bunch of media buyers and me and Claire taken by Thames Television on a ski trip. So we had three days skiing all day and then about three years in, I was talking to the chairman of Molson, the Canadian brewer and their chairman of their Company was a wonderful man who became a good friend called Norman Seagram, who was from the Seagram family. And Eric Molson was on the board as well, but Norm was the chairman. He was a little sort of five foot six, pocket rocket bullet, bald, bullet headed, hard guy. And we did a great campaign to launch Molson in the uk which had the rather convoluted end line of Jim Dunk says don't drink it. And it was basically this guy, it was his real name, Jim Dunk, who basically was, loved Molson so much he wouldn't let anybody else have it. So in fact it was a precursor to the Walker's Crisp campaign with Gary Lee. It was exactly the same idea. They just copied.

[John]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Rupert Howe]

Jim Dunk says don't drink it anyway. And I remember I had a great client again, but very nervous who insisted I went out to Canada present. We'd won the pitch. This was not the idea that won the pitch, it was a development idea. And I went out to Canada to present to the, to the committee of the board with Norm, Eric Molson. So it's pretty, you know, pretty big wig types and presented the Jim Dunk idea. And I remember Norm looking, he sort of hunched down, he looked down the end of the boardroom table to me, said, well, river, he said, it's brave.

[John]

But I like it.

[Rupert Howe]

He was then going to run it and it was very, it was very successful. And you know, again, I'd explained to Norm that, you know, he was going up against a body of brilliant creative work because in those days, the lager advertising, I mean you had couldn't give a full name.

[John]

That was the heyday, wasn't it?

[Rupert Howe]

Yeah, you had George the Bear before it all got effectively banned. Well, having fun in lager ads got banned effectively. So now they're all poncing load of tosh. But they were brilliant. I said, you've got no chance with your budget against that lot unless we do something completely ridiculous. So my favorite execution of it was Jim outside a pub and he's drinking a Molson. And he said, you know, Molson, Canadian Lager, it's fresh brewed, this, that and the other. And the other said, why would you, why would you drink anything? He said, he said, no, that's right. He said, this all great. He said, it's all great. He said, but I do not think you should drink that. You'd be much better off drinking this. And you pan out and there's a tanker delivering lager through a huge fucking pipe to the pub. And he sort of goes on, he said, this is much better, he says, mass produced, you know, he said, it's fantastic stuff. This so upset the rest of the lager community. And of course, what that did is lift the profile of Molson amongst publicans and everybody else, because that was part of our target audience. And again, that comes back to, you know, the ad didn't get banned, but it was controversial because it basically said all other lagers come out of a tanker, which they do.

[John]

Yeah, as it happens. As it happens.

[Rupert Howe]

Whereas ours was bottled. Ours was not drafted, bottled and imported. Yeah, it was totally imported moles from Canadian. And it was the original stuff. No, in fact, it was made in a huge fucking brewery in. In Toronto. And Montreal is beside the point. It arrived in nice little bottles.

[John]

It is.

[Rupert Howe]

And, you know, we got. We. You know, I think the thing we were really brilliant at was when we got into trouble was turning the tables and making it a benefit to the client. Not a problem.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

So I always remember on Tango, you may not know this one, but we had one execution which had a sort of Giles cartoon granny with orange balloons, but she comes out with a hat pin and you think she's going to burst the balloons, but she blows up instead. Okay, so Exploding Granny, it was called. And it was. And you go, whoa, Troy, I wasn't expecting that, you know, and hit on real oranges and she was all dressed in sort of orange played and she blew up, not the balloons. Anyway, so I get a phone call from the sun and the. So the sun didn't know me, but they found the agency, obviously, it got cut through to me and it said, look, we've had. We've had complaints about, you know, explaining Granny that this is sort of ageist and, you know, and is disrespectful to old age people. So I said, really? Have you got any comment? I've got no comment. I said, honestly, I mean, I said, who made that complaint? They said it was somebody from Age Concern. I said, oh, okay. Anyway, so the sun, that Day Prints has in its comment column, third, you know, they always used to have three comments and their comment, the third one saying, you know, Tango's taking it too far now. Age Concern are very concerned, you know, blowing up grannies. Disrespectful. We should honor our old people. Anyway, so I phone up the Age Concern and get through to the Director General of Age Concern. I said, I've only got one question for you. Have you actually seen the ad? He said, no, I haven't. My Son phoned me up and explained it to me. It sounds absolutely horrendous. I said, have you got a video recorder? He said, yeah. I said, can I bike one round to you? He said, yeah, of course, I bike it around. So anyway, I phoned him up and I said, what do you think now? He said, it's hilarious. I'm so sorry. Anyway, I said, okay. So I rang the sun up and I said, just so you know, Age Concern have withdrawn their complaint and it's not a problem. Oh, okay. They said. The next morning their lead leader column said, have Age Concern got nothing better to do? So first off, that taught me about tabloid newspapers, which is they create the controversy and then comment on the controversy.

[John]

And then, and then complain about the controversy they've created.

[Rupert Howe]

Oh, but it also taught me you can turn things around just by doing a little bit of homework and having the balls to call somebody up and say, and in the end, Tango got great PR out.

[John]

But you've just described what's wrong with social media, haven't you? Which is everyone's commenting on the comment and no one's actually done the research to find out whether the original thing is right or wrong.

[Rupert Howe]

Well, the classic one was the instant, I mean whatever you think of it, the instant sort of attack on the government's race report which came within a minute. They cannot have read it. They cannot have read it. So these were pre prepared complaints and their complaints may be valid, but at least have the intelligence to wait for as long as it would take to read it and analyze it.

[John]

I read a lot of comments and listened to a lot of discussion on LBC from people that had had a strong opinion who hadn't read it and admitted they hadn't read it. Now they're reacting to what they read about it, which I think is very sad state of affairs.

[Rupert Howe]

The secret to pitching new business agency success, agency failure. I mean in the end you have to have the talents in place. But it does come down to relationships. And you know, I think the reason why I was good at new business and HHCL was successful at new business rather than then successful at the ads, which we were as well, was because I'm good at building relationships and I like, I enjoy building relationships and I am not remotely interested in the status of who I build relationships with. Never have been. Yeah, sure it's sexy to meet Jeff Bezos and Jerry Yang and all that stuff, but I'm just as interested in building a relationship with their PA because I know in the end they don't give a fuck about me. But if the PA might, because most people don't bother to take the time to get to know them. And I enjoy. But I enjoy that I don't just do it for the effect, although I like the effect, I enjoy doing that. I find that a good thing to do. It is. It's one of those. It's one of the reasons why I probably would be a very bad politician. And it's the big flaw, the big flaw in Boris Johnson, which is I like to be liked. And the only way you can be liked is if you put yourself out there and you create those relationships. And I like. I like to be liked. I'm perfectly happy to accept not being liked. In which case then I just. That becomes somebody I completely blank out in my life. And to me they don't exist anymore. But if I get on with people, then I'll do anything for them. And I find that people will do things for me. And I think it's that that is at the core of being able to build those relationships. If you look at any successful service business, which the advertising business is, if you haven't got that, you never reach the heights you might be able to hit. If you've got genius, you can do well, but you need to do really well. I think. I think you need that ability to build relationships and, you know, everything flows from that 100%.

[John]

I've so seen that in my career, the people I respect most that have really transformed businesses have just had that ability to convince anybody of anything and build trust really, really quickly and authentically. And everything else follows from that, doesn't it? If you've got that, the business will flow afterwards. So this probably explains, doesn't it? Because one thing I was going to ask you about is you had this incredible 10 years, sold the business, and then it hit a challenging moment and we were talking a bit earlier, weren't we, about the. The moment Andrew pulled you off the tango work. So how did that conversation go? How did he. I mean, I think you said that he was very good at sort of managing, you know, back. And so I wasn't.

[Rupert Howe]

You see, by that stage, I was running Chime. Yeah, the agency. And I've been asked many, many times why the decline in HHCL happened and did I regret the sale to Chime? I mean, the sale to Chime happened for the best of reasons. We had turned down every offer in town. I mean, everybody was trying to buy us, every major agency. So I turned down the Y&R deal that became Rainy Kelly Campbell, Rolf Y and R, which was Robert Campbell and MT Rainey's terrific agency that did the Y and R deal. I was offered that deal two years before. In fact, I was offered a bribe by the senior management of Y and R in New York of a million dollars if I put the deal across the line.

[John]

Wow.

[Rupert Howe]

So I said, well, no, I said, well, I don't do that. You just put a million dollars on the price that will be shared equally amongst all the shareholders. But I turned it down because every sale of a great agency to a big multinational that I'd ever seen had led to a complete dilution of the ethos of that agency and only a marginal increase in the performance of the other agency. I do think Adam and Eve with DDB might be the exception to the rule in recent times, but there are very, very, very few that have ever managed that process. So we were reluctant to do it, but we had to do something. And the official line we always gave is we were made an offer we can't refuse, which is true. Just Chime and WP Bold Martin Sorrell. Because Sorrel put the cash element of the deal in, they paid 12 times profits for us, which is about as rich as it gets. And I used to say publicly, well, we couldn't turn that down. But that wasn't the real reason. The real reason was that Adam Lurie, our planning partner, wanted to get out of the business. And we'd always said, you know, if any of us wanted to get out, we commit to each other in five year chunks. So five years in, we all committed. The five of us who founded the company, we all committed to each other for another five years. And in fact, we then pulled in when we became HHLM Partners. Chris Satterthwaite, who went on to be chief executive, Chime after me. Chris is one of my best mates. We pulled him in as a founder of the new HHLM Partners and him and his team committed for five years. So we were approaching our 10th year anniversary. Are we going to recommit to each other for another five years? And Adam said, no, I don't want to do it anymore. I want to go and write books. And we had long hard discussions about could we replace Adam with somebody in house? And in fact, the guy who was the planner on Tango would have been the candidate, John Leach, who's brilliant. But I started feeling it was more me than anybody else, that I'd sort of had enough of it. I'd been carrying this business from a Business perspective, all the stuff we talked about earlier for 10 years. And I was tired, you know, I'd done it from the age of 30 to the age of 40. I'd had three years of no holidays. I then had, you know, another seven years of certainly no days off even when on holiday. And just sort of constant, constant work. And I was sort of. I was ready for a. Not a change of pace, but a change of context a bit. And Tim, who had founded Chime by then, Tim had constantly been saying to me, come on, come on, we could put our businesses together. You know, he had what was regarded as the best PR business in the uk, independent. And we had the best at, comfortably the best advertising business. And we were mates and so on. So it made so much sense. The issue had always been, how are we going to run things and how's he going to pay for us? Because we were bigger than Bell Potter.

[John]

Oh, right, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

I mean, in terms of profits and revenue, we were bigger, even though China was a public company, so they could have raised money on the markets and so on. And then Sorrel came in because Sorrel had been trying to buy HHCL for ages and wanted.

[John]

Me.

[Rupert Howe]

Wanted to put it into Ogilvy's or Thompson's or. I see any of those. I offered all of those.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

So Sorrel said, look, I will fund the deal effectively. So basically the money we got for hxl, we got half in Chime shares and half in cash, which is what Sorrel put in. And then he ended up with 21% of the enlarged Shine, which he still had work, not. He still has WP still. And Tim and I thought, this is going to be great. He didn't want to do any of the PLC stuff. I was fascinated by taking that on as a new challenge. I'd never done it before. I'd only worked for a big multinational or been an entrepreneur. I'd never run a public company. And suddenly I was going to be chief executive of plc, listed on the main market as well. Not aim, it's main market. And Tim hated all that. He hated the City and he just, he loved being with clients and politicians. And so I thought, this is going to be great. And we had a year's earn out that went brilliantly well. We smashed it, got another 3 million on top of the price. All great. I handed over then to, you know, other people and I suppose this is, this is sort of blowing my own trumpet. But it was never the same without me and I think what I gave it was I gave the company its daily energy and without that energy, it lost a bit of the sparkle. It still had the genius, but less of the sparkle. And I'm not brilliant at multitasking. It's why the new Business director role being taken off existing clients worked so well for. Yeah, I love that sort of single focus. And my attention turned almost exclusively to the City and sorting out John, which was a bit of a mess because Tim didn't care about that stuff. He cared about the clients and I thought, this is going to be great. He cares about the clients, I'll claire about the City. All good. And actually, for a year, we thought we were geniuses and we cracked the code, particularly because we did together the whole creation and launch of Go for British Airways. So I'd won the Go pitch. Barbara Kasani was based in our offices because she wanted to be physically away from British Airways. The pilots were all interviewed in our agency and all that stuff. We got involved in the naming. We. I introduced her to Wolf Olins to do the design because I'd done First Direct with Wolf Olins, who were brilliant. And then I said, right, and, you know, and Bel Pottinger should do the pr. And they did a brilliant job. And I remember Tim and I sitting down after the successful launch ago saying, we fucking cracked it. At last. We can go to a client saying, we can do everything for you from naming, design, advertising, PR could. Now, Tim. I'm a good salesman, but Tim was a great salesman, the best I've ever seen. Could we. Could we get any other clients to give us the totality of their comms business? No, we could. And of course we realized the impediment was that in the vast majority of companies, the advertising and marketing budget was held by the cmo, but the PR budget was held by the Director of Corporate Affairs. And typically they hated each other. I mean, properly hated each other. Everyone used to say, oh, CFOs and CMOs hate each other. No, they don't. They don't always understand each other. But CMOs and corporate affairs always hated each other because it was jealousy over the budget and we could not. The only time we ever got it to work was startups where you didn't have those people, you just had the founder and got on with it anyway. So that was the first problem. So there were three problems that happened that caused the demise of hxl. So first is that I took my eye off the ball and focused on the City. The second was that the Proposition, although beautiful on paper, struggled in practice. And then third, wpp, that had promised us interested access to its networks, shoved the agency, and I should have known better, into Red Cell, which was a dog's dinner run by an idiot. And it just never worked and it never could have worked and I should have not allowed it. But I had my eye on other things, so it was my fault to a great degree. And then once it became clear that HHCL was not going to flourish in that regime, it was too late really to rescue it. A lot of the talent had seen the writing on the wall and had gone. I was to go back in and rebuild it, which was one of the options. I just personally couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. And then later down the line, the thing that led to me leaving China was, and I should have guessed this, much as I loved him to his dying day, he was astonishingly conservative in both the small C and a big C. I didn't mind the big C bit, but small C conservative. He hated change and Chime needed to change in so many ways. And I particularly was interested in building up sport marketing. He didn't want to do that, so in the end he didn't want to do any of the stuff I wanted to do as chief executive. And I had two options, either to oust him, which I was never going to do, A, because he was not a good enemy to have, and B, because I liked him, and C, because it was his company to start with. And so I just. On the anniversary, I'd done a five year handshake with Tim and Martin Sol to say I'd do five years minimum. And I left. On the anniversary of the fifth year of selling HHS to China, I left. And they tried everything to keep me, I mean, everything. But I was. I'd had it. And that's because I couldn't do it. And in fact, Chris Athwaite was a much better chief executive Chime than I ever would have been. And he built Chime into the biggest sport marketing business and all that, because after I'd gone, Tim sort of retreated a bit into his own world of just looking after class. He actually let Chris do all the things and more, not all the things that there were a few things I wanted to do that Chris was allowed to do. And then Chris had much bigger and better ideas that he was then also allowed to do to do, and built it into very successful business till it was bought by private equity, which I was delighted about because I still had lots of Shares.

[John]

Oh, good, excellent. Well, this is a good happy ending in that sense.

[Rupert Howe]

Yeah. And Chris is a great mate as well.

[John]

But you've touched on something I think really important is the role of founders and how you can't. You know, it's very rare to be able to replace founders or integrate into bigger networks, isn't it? I mean, you see it so often as. Because a book I've read, which I love, is a founder's mentality looking at the difference in market valuation between founder led businesses and management led businesses. And it's quite profound, isn't it? You talked about the hard work, the relationships you've got, you just can't easily replace that.

[Rupert Howe]

Well, it's true, that is true. But on the other hand, then look at examples like what Bill Gates did with Steve Ballmer, what Steve Jobs did with Tim Cook is there comes a point, actually where all of that flips on its head and a founder is an impediment to a business growing. Because the nature of founder entrepreneurs is that they're control freaks, they care too much about everything.

[John]

Yeah, that's true.

[Rupert Howe]

And there comes a point when you get to a certain size where you need professional managers and the founder needs to get the hell out of the way or go into an advisory role. And in fact, Sergey and Bryn have done that, haven't they, at Google, so letting Larry take over and run it. But we're talking there about companies that got into the billions. The problem with ad agencies is they never get to that size. And so where's the point in the timeline and size line where you can actively hand over? And the trouble is it hardly ever happens, hardly ever reaches that perfect inflection point because they never get that big. I mean, BBH have probably done it better than anybody else handing over, but they did that by only selling 49% to publicists and therefore keeping control. And they got to a big enough size by opening their own international offices to be able to fund out the founders, you know, because John Bartle went first and then effectively Hegarty and then effectively Nigel, all of whom are good mates of mine and were very helpful to me in my advertising building the agency. That's the other weird thing about advertising is we compete tooth and nail during the day. But people were incredibly helpful aside that, you know, Mike Greenleaf Gold Greenlee's Trot was just down the road from us. Mike Greenlee is one of my best mates, you know. Now, you know, they lent us a photocopier when I was broke, just before A pitch, you know, it's kind of agencies help each other. It's weird. It's kind of nice little community. But that's partly because it's a village and it's small.

[John]

It is, yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

And therefore that, that notion of handing over to a second tier or so on is very hard to manage.

[John]

Very, very hard.

[Rupert Howe]

Very hard to manage. And I, you know, I've got that in my, in one of my existing chairmanships. And at some point we'll have it with System One group.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

Which is, which is. How do you manage, how do you manage that process? Because it's difficult. Very few people do it. And it needs two sides to tango. It needs the founder to let go and it needs the management team to really take up the slack. And the slack is multi dimensional and deep.

[John]

It is, isn't it? And you need to get the individuals that can replicate that founder's behavior. Like you talked about, the obsession with customers, the hard work, you know, all that, all that energy that you bring, you know, you have to try and replace that.

[Rupert Howe]

Yeah, I'm not, I wouldn't use the word replicate, John. I would, because if the time is right, unless it happens because they get run over by a bus, which is different. But if it's a voluntary and timely handover, it should be because some of what's needed has changed because you've grown to a certain size where it needs different skill sets. So, yes, you've got to keep the passion and energy, but there might be, there might be some skill sets that are no longer needed and others that are newly acquired. And you know, the interesting thing about, I mean, I don't know if you've watched the Gates documentary, it's quite old now, but it's called Inside Bill's Brain. It's fantastic. You know, he hasn't left Microsoft, he's still there chairing the board, but he's really genuinely let the management run it and he's gone off. And what, like any obsessive like him, he had to get obsessed with something else. He's obsessed with his foundation and, you know, and eradicating polio and et cetera, et cetera. But he's still got his wisdom in there. And, you know, founders getting ousted is not a good idea unless they want to be ousted. It's much better to somehow harvest their wisdom in a, in an, in a more informal way going forward.

[John]

That makes sense.

[Rupert Howe]

And that's why you end up with, you know, advisory things or whatever. Anyway, let's not get sidetracked what I've.

[John]

What I've seen in my career happen time and time again actually, is that that professionalization management takeover happens too early in so many cases in the life stage of the brand. And actually what was on a rocket fuel growing quickly starts to slow down because you behave like a much bigger corporate organization and you lose the entrepreneurial kind of low bureaucracy, fast moving, great culture that made the company a success. So I think for me spending a lot of time looking at this and looking at different companies, I think it's timing and it's understanding life stage and that kind of thing. You can often kill something, particularly when it's small.

[Rupert Howe]

Definitely. There's no question that in retrospect the sort of handover HHCL happened too early. And if we'd done another five years, I think we would have been able to open international offices and we'd have had a path more similar to bbh. But do I regret it? Well, no, not really, because hhcl achieved, I mean, I have moments where I think, oh, that'd be interesting. Hhcl achieved astonishing things. I mean, it was agency of the decade, won Grand Prix at Cannes. Still talked about in reverence, still. Everybody, and I mean everybody who worked there says it's the best place they have ever worked, ever. It was an amazing environment we created to let talent flourish. We were diverse before it was required in lots of different ways. And you know, I'm very proud of all that. But if we hadn't done what we'd done, I would never have been a public company chief executive, which taught me a huge amount that I was able to bring to bear in other things, but also has prepared me for what I do now. The McCann thing would never have happened. I mean, what a weird thing that was for me to go from the best agency in the world to probably the worst. And just to see why the biggest agency in the world could be so good in some places and so bad in others. And it was the worst agency in the world in London, but it was the best agency in Norway, in Italy, you know, in. I mean, in loads of places, it was the best agency in that country. And of course, what is it down to? It's down to the people.

[John]

It is.

[Rupert Howe]

It's down to the people. And I discovered, which is why I ended up leaving McCann, there was an inverse relationship between the engagement of the Americans and the success of the Office.

[John]

Yeah, makes sense.

[Rupert Howe]

So every time the American, the Americans came over, who were the two top Americans were two of the biggest assholes it's ever been my misfortune to come across deeply unpleasant human beings. Big chips on both shoulders, come from wrong side of the tracks. Greedy beyond anything I'd ever seen. Didn't give a fuck about the clients, didn't give a fuck about the work. Only cared about their own personal wealth. I mean, honestly, I'm not exaggerating. Horrible people. And every time they came across to Europe, which fortunately was only once a year for the big tour round to do the budgets, it took me a month, and I was only there three years. Took me a month to repair the damage because they. I would have grown men come out of meetings crying because they were so foul. You know, I had one guy, I mean, just. This is. This is actually a minor example. I had a brilliant bloke, lovely man who ran the office in Belgium, which was a pretty successful office. But he had a comedy Cluso accent. So his French, his English accent was, I mean, really extreme, like Clouseau. And about three minutes into his presentation, the first time I'd been in these grand presentations, the global chief executive American said, I can't fucking understand you. Why don't you fucking speak English, you fucking cub? Oh, no, right. And I said, hang on, hang on, John. I said, hang on, hang on. He speaks a lot better English than we do from French. Yeah, I. I can't understand it, right? And this guy, I mean, I had to pick up the pieces for a month after that. He said, you know, I said, no, he doesn't hate you. Come on, he's just a stupid Yankee. Let's forget that. You know, you. You know, in the end, you. He did, did he approve your budget? Yes. Well, then it's all. And I had to do that. And after three rounds of doing that, I just couldn't take it anymore. They were such. And so. They didn't like me either, by the way, so he used to call me that damn limey. Literally.

[John]

Really?

[Rupert Howe]

Believe it or not, they'll use that word.

[John]

The damn lining. Jeez.

[Rupert Howe]

My final death knell came because the holding company IPG were forced by Wall street, because at that time, McCann had been under an SEC, or Interpublic had been under an SEC investigation. So I had to make 104 offices, Sarbane Oxley compliant, which, I've got to.

[John]

Tell you, that's a joke.

[Rupert Howe]

Well, it's hilarious. Particularly in places like Greece and Turkey where you have to say, you can't bribe clients anymore. And the bloke in Greece who was a really top bloke, he Opened. I kid you not, this is not exaggerating. He opened a drawer in his desk and it had a array of Rolexes. He said, well, what am I going to do?

[John]

Oh, that's brilliant.

[Rupert Howe]

He said, these are what I give the clients, you know, to win pictures in Greece. And he said, I bought loads of jet skis to give them as well. What am I going to do with those? I said, you don't have to sell them. You cannot ride primes anymore. I then had to fire the boss in Turkey. And I put in a lovely guy called Tanker, who's American educated and kind of understood why we had to be Sarbane Oxy compliant. He rang me, he said, rupert, our biggest client is up for review in Turkey. It's Turkcell. And he said, I've got a slight problem. He said, because I've discovered that part of the arrangement is $50,000 in a brown envelope, goes to the Prime Minister's office.

[John]

Oh, no.

[Rupert Howe]

I said, well, you can't do it, Tanker. He said, well, we'll lose the account. I said, you can't do it. We have to be saving Oxy compliant. So he rang me 24 hours later. He said, what, man? We've lost the account. Wow. And so I had to do all of that as well. And I got it all done. I got it all done. So every McCann EME office became Sarbane Oxy compliant. We had record new business for three years. Doubled the margin to 7 to 14%. But I ended up hating the Americans with a passion and they hated me. And I said, IPG did this succession management study, and I was told this by the CFO of IPG later, is that they came around to McCann and they said, well, obviously, you know, John, your replacement would be Rupert Howell. And he said, oh, my dead body with that fucking line. He get my job. And I was out within three months. But the good thing is, I was technically fired because the only good thing about American companies is their severance is spectacular. I bought a boat and a DB9 as with part of my settlement.

[John]

Oh, well done.

[Rupert Howe]

Well done.

[John]

Okay.

[Rupert Howe]

But I mean, he beat me to it by about a month. He said, it's so funny. The Americans are so funny. He said, can we go out for a cocktail after the board meeting? And I know that's like their language for let's go for a beer or, you know, you signal, don't you, with alcohol. What kind of discussion you want for the Americans? We're going for a cocktail means man to man.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

And going for a Beer means having fun. Going for a cocktail means we need to have a man oh, man discussion. So he said, look, Rupert, he said, I can't argue with your record in Europe. It's. It's terrific. You've hit every target, but, you know, you. You just won't follow, you know, my. My directions. And I said, well, John, I've explained why not. Because if I followed them, everything that I've achieved in Europe would go in the other direction. And he said, well, I don't, you know, he said, in the end, I don't care about that. You know, I'm the boss. You know, you know, it's my way or the highway. He said that? I tell you, he said those.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

So I said, okay, well, what would the highway look like? And he pulled a letter.

[John]

Oh, really?

[Rupert Howe]

He said, look, you know, this is what the highway would look like. So I opened the letter and read it and was. I'm not very good at poker face. I was pretty good that day. I nearly choked on my cocktail because it was treble, what I would have asked for. Wow. So I said, can I have a think about it? He said, tonight, can you decide? So I phoned him up and I said, I'll take the highway.

[John]

Isn't it amazing? I know. Oh, I haven't been. I've been quite in that situation. I mean, I've been in a similar situation. Not, not with those sums of money, but you just look at it and go, not only they're paying a vast amount, they're also letting go of someone that's delivered the results just because of ego.

[Rupert Howe]

And the other thing is, the amazing thing is about. And I, you know, I literally left straight away. I cleared my desk on the Monday, and about three weeks later, I get a call from him. He said, rupert, can you. Can. Can you. Can you help me with something? I said, what? He said, well, the Opel client in Germany is refusing to talk to anybody other than you.

[John]

Yeah, exactly.

[Rupert Howe]

Could you just try and, you know, pacify him? I said, john, you fired me. I know, I know, I know, but could you just do that? I said, I'll tell you what, I'll do it this once, but please don't ask again.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

Anyway, so I did. I found the client. I said, honestly, the guys in the Frankfurt office are terrific. This is who you need to talk to. This is who you can trust. So I did that. And then ITV came out the woodwork. And Michael Grade is my best mate in media and had been for donkey's years. So he's an old friend and he said, look, I've just got to itv. It's a dog's dinner, you know, I need somebody who understands the media and advertising world to sort out the commercial side of it. Would you come and join me? And I said, well, no, I'm going to take the whole summer off. He said, well, would you come and join me in September? Because this was. I think this was. I can't remember when it was May or something like that. And I said, yeah, well, I'll have a think about it kind of thing. And Michael's. Michael actually is probably as good a salesman as Tim Bell was and so persuaded. He's brilliant and utterly brilliant. I love Michael and he persuaded me to go and join itb and that would never have happened if I hadn't sold. The way I look at it. And, you know, that was. That was a. It was a brilliant eye opening but bruising experience. I was on a Main Market plc FTSE 100 plc board, a totally dysfunctional board, half of whom hated each other. I mean, really, it was a board split right down the middle, which. So one of the most obvious learnings from that was you. That just cannot happen. You cannot have it unless you've got a united board. You can have dissent on issues, but if you've got a board that, where dissent is on personality, you've got no chance. The board was terrible, but we did great things at itv and I met lots of famous people which was entertaining and one or. One or two have remained friends. But most of them, of course, as soon as you leave, would walk past you in the street. But one or two, actually quite a few, are not like that, to be fair, but I would say the majority are like that. Literally. People who were all over me like a rash, you know, a month later. No, not a month later. Six months later, I'd be in the Ivy Club and say hi and they'd look at me like they didn't know who I was. And there are some others who are genuine and wonderful. Incidentally, the best of the lot is Anton Deck.

[John]

I hear that so often. So many people say that.

[Rupert Howe]

Yeah, I still see. We still see Deccan, his wife Ali. Yeah, a bit. I see Ant less because after he split up with Lisa, but Dec, we still see and we go to the theater together when that was allowed. And he's come to things of ours. He's a lovely, lovely lad. I took him to the. My end gig at ITV was the Football World cup in South Africa 2010. So I had the boys down there with me for a week. We had a great time.

[John]

Brilliant. Brilliant.

[Rupert Howe]

And so they're great. And Amanda Holden's great. I still see her occasionally because I was involved with her with Bassey Dogs and Cats Home. Phil Schofield. Only because his daughter's one of my daughter's best mates. Oh, really?

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

I've been on the sidelines in all the fallout.

[John]

Oh, yes.

[Rupert Howe]

In him coming out.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

Which there wasn't a single person in show business that didn't know he was gay. But anyway, it didn't matter. It still caused a ruckus and actually a lot of upset for his wife and kids. Not the fact, but how he did it. So that was fun. And then, you know, I would never have done Reach because I met Simon Fox through ITV because we tried to hire him to run the PLC overall and he turned us down. But I stayed in touch with Simon, which I think is an example of how I only met Simon once because I was asked to interview him as part of the selection process. I thought he was fabulous. Exactly what we wanted, what Michael Grade and I wanted to run the plc. I was never going to run the plc. I run the. I ran the channels, but I wasn't experienced to run enough to run a FTSE 100 PLC. And Simon had come from HMV that he rescued a couple of times. Really liked him. Nicest. He's on. He's the most. Has the most integrity of anybody I've ever worked with. He's incredible guy. Really liked him. And, you know, after I left itv, I sort of messed around in all sorts of things. And then he turned up at Reach and one of the ideas I was looking at was to take over the intellectual property of the News of the World and create an online version. So I still own URLs, like World of the News and all that kind of stuff. Oh, yeah. And I had had a lot of high level support, but in the end the numbers just didn't work unless we did it with an existing title like the Sunday People signed by then Trinity Mirror that became Reach. So I rang up Simon and I took him through the idea. He said, it's a great idea. We don't know what to do with the Sunday People. Let's talk about it. And again, we spent six months doing that. Could not make it work financially for both parties. And so we had a breakfast where we called it, you know, he's. He said, come on, let's have a breakfast. Just to put the seal on it that we're not going to do this. And so on. And I was, yeah, okay, that's very nice. And not thinking he might have an ulterior motive. And at the breakfast he said, honestly, I've been here six months at Reach, it's a total mess. Would you help me turn it around? Because you understand media and advertising. Almost the exact same conversation I'd had with Michael Grade, you know, five years earlier or four years earlier. And because I liked him and because I wasn't doing anything else particularly interesting, and because he said I didn't have to work full time, I could do four days a week. And then at my request, after a year, we went down to three days a week and I could start taking on other outside chairmanships. I said yes, and the rest was history. We did a great turnaround. It was fascinating. And I learned how, really how the tabloid media works, which is a whole nother topic.

[John]

I was going to say there's an episode in that one, isn't there?

[Rupert Howe]

But all I would say is they're not bad people at all. In my entire time there, I didn't meet a single journalist who I would classify as an unpleasant or bad person. But the pressure they're under nowadays, particularly to break stories and to get eyeballs, is causing all sorts of damage to their profession, to their integrity, to them personally, and to their victims or subjects, depending on how you want to call it. And I was quite pleased actually to retire when Simon got ousted and the new chief exec came in. It was a perfect time for me to say, that's enough. Because I was starting to get uncomfortable with what the journalists were being asked to do for commercial reasons, quite understandably, because they will not survive unless those commercial targets are met. But there's damage being caused by that.

[John]

You're right. It's a machine, isn't it? Is incentivized to work in that way.

[Rupert Howe]

Well, if you put a story up online with a headline that says reasonably good news, Reasonably good news, very good news. Astra Venica AstraZeneca vaccine gives 90% immunity to this, that and the other, you'll get, you know, 500 clicks. If you put up shock horror, 50 year old woman dies of blood cough after vaccine, you get 8 million totally. And that is the be all and end all of the whole process, which is there's been an inflation of shock tactics in the headline writing to grab the eyeballs. Because if you don't, somebody else will. And if you don't, as a journalist, you get fired. You've got targets of the number of clicks you have to get. And they talk about clickbait. And unfortunately, clickbait is driven by shock and horror, massive exaggeration. Celebrity, however, vacuous nudity, sadly, still. But it's true. And violence. They won't put it up. The only thing that gets you up a click list that doesn't fall into those categories is in football. So any story about Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal, they're the four get much bigger clicks from around the world than any other story. So for example, if the story was spurs by Lingard from Man United, that would get 1,000 clicks. Man United sell Lingard to spurs, would get 10,000 clicks. Oh, really?

[John]

Same story, different angle.

[Rupert Howe]

Wow. So think about that in the context of any story you read. That's what's going on in social media. And that all starts with the online news sites. And so we turned Reach Trinity Mirror from a bit of a basket case into a viable machine. But I think the next thing you know, the, the challenge is how do you, how do you police that?

[John]

That's another whole episode, isn't it? Because we know for the benefit of society, how do we wean ourselves off that drug?

[Rupert Howe]

Well, there's been a book, there's a. There's a pamphlet book written by a Norwegian psychologist that my wife gave me for my birthday that's called why you should give up the news. And it's brilliantly argued that actually it's deeply damaging to your mental health. If I could summarize the book, which I won't do it justice, but if I could summarize it in one sort of idea. He said, basically, in the very beginnings of humankind news, the news you got from, you know, whether it's from the beating drums or the smoke signals or whatever word of mouth was about topics that directly affect you personally. So the volcano is erupting, we should probably leave the cave is a personal. It affects you directly. And what's happened with mass media news is that 99.9% of our news is about stuff we can do nothing about, and therefore it makes us feel helpless. And helplessness is very damaging to mental health. So his solution is do not read any newspapers and do not read any online news sites. Anything that's local to you, you will get to hear about through neighbors and friends and so on. And anything that really matters, you won't be able to avoid, however hard you try through water cooler conversations or whatever. And if you really, really can't give it up 100%, give up everything except read the week once a week.

[John]

That makes a lot of sense and.

[Rupert Howe]

It'S very well argued. And so what I do know what it was affecting my mental health and the number of people who said to me, I don't watch the news anymore and I very, very rarely watch the news anymore. And I have deleted everything. I've deleted every news app apart from two. So I've kept the BBC, which, even though you get a metropolitan elite left of center view, is less exaggerated, biased and frantic than anyone else. And then to counterbalance it, I've kept the sun, which I know it's a naughty thing to do when you've worked for the Mirror, but the reason I kept the sun is that the sun is actually slightly right of center. It's not rabid right wing, actually. It really is.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

I've only really just started reading it online.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

And I get. You get the slightly different point of view from the sun, but I'm about to delete that too, because it's starting to annoy me. It's exaggeration. And I think I'm happier for having. I'm genuinely happier for having deleted Mail online, which, I mean, I've talked to the guys at the Mail. You know, I knew Paul Daker well and I knew the guys at MailOnline. Their strategy was to irritate people, is to wind up middle Britain. I mean, that's the genius of the Daily Mail is they know how to wind up. Paul said to me once, he said, rupert, if ever you see a front page story about the BBC or the eu, it's because I've got nothing else. He said, because I know that if I put an anti BBC or anti EU story on the front page of the Mail, it will sell and my readership will get appropriately wound up. I mean, it was totally open about it.

[John]

You just think, have we really come. Is this where we've really got to.

[Rupert Howe]

It's the danger of a free press. And the critical thing is that you allow free press with different points of view. And that's why Andrew Neal's new thing is important, because on television, all the. The news is left of center, only slightly, but it is. And he's going to do something. He's not doing Fox News. He'll do very slightly right. He's just hired my old friend Alistair Stewart. Alastair's a Labor voter all his life, so, you know, he's not just. He's hired Pierce, who's the Labour voter all his life. He's not going to, you know, it's not. It's not, you know, he's not going to hire fucking Katie Hopkins.

[John]

No.

[Rupert Howe]

So. But we need that because there isn't balance. The alternative, though, John, you have to think about the alternatives. You know, is do you want to. Do you want a poodle press like they've got in France or Germany, you know, where then, you know, I mean, French and German governments, they're just going at them now, but they. They've literally got away with murder over this vaccination, incompetence.

[John]

Oh, I can't believe people have died. Yeah, people.

[Rupert Howe]

I mean, thousands of people in France and Germany have died because of decisions taken by their politicians for political reasons. Not 100%. I mean, can you imagine if Boris had done that here? He would have been in court by now, including by the Telegraph. That's Tory supported. So the question becomes, which do you prefer? And that's what I learned at the. At Reach, you know, because it had the Express and the Mirror and the Star, so that, you know, the Mirror always took the left of center line, the Express the right of center line, the Star took the pits. And that was kind of how it worked. And then we had all the regional papers and titles like the Liverpool Echo Man Street News, who had to remain centrists because their business model couldn't allow them to be either left or right. They had to be in the middle and therefore, you know, more focused on, and obviously more focused on important local news. Local newspapers are really important things and they've gone. They're in real danger because they actually contain the news. That does matter to you.

[John]

Yes, they do. And I think you've touched on the most important thing, which is mental health, actually. And like you say, you're deleting apps and you understand the industry, you know what's going on, you're still deleting the app. I've done the same. I think I only I'm down to two now and I've whittled my social media down to two as well because I just found myself, you know.

[Rupert Howe]

Yeah, I mean, I don't use social media at all. And that's because of what I learned about it at itv. So I had a Twitter account, a Facebook account and account, and I deleted all of them. And I've done that partly for self preservation, because I would be arrested, I'm sure, because I'm an obsessive, you know, and I've said this to you before, John, and when we were talking about business is email's my Medium, which you've seen, I'm very quick on email. I'm on it all the time. Email's my medium, so those things aren't my medium. I'm not naturally at home on that social media, whereas somebody of your age would be. But I know that I would get into trouble, particularly on things like Twitter and Facebook, because I get so cross at the fucking morons and the moronic things they say. You know, I'm of that generation that shouts at the telly.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

But the joy of shouting at the telly is nobody else can hear you.

[John]

Yes.

[Rupert Howe]

And the danger of shouting at the telly on Facebook is it's never, ever, ever deleted.

[John]

It's there forever.

[Rupert Howe]

I remember saying to Lloyd Embley, the editor in chief of the Mirror of the Mirror Group, I said, honestly. And he knew I was not labor supporting. I said, honestly, Lloyd, I'm going to get rid. He said, I would root, because, you know, he said, it's fine, you and I having banter, but you, you know, the banter he said, I have with you, I would. On Twitter.

[John]

You cannot. No.

[Rupert Howe]

And I say to my kids, my kids are off Facebook now. They don't know interest in Facebook is, you know, Facebook's for kids they think, or old.

[John]

It is. It is. Yeah. It has gone that way.

[Rupert Howe]

Those are all around TikTok, Instagram and all that. But they don't. They don't put anything up that is anything other than completely anodyne. And therefore my argument is, well, what's the point? If that's what you're going to do, just get rid of them.

[John]

I know I've had to do the same for my own.

[Rupert Howe]

Do you really want to see what your mates are having? No. No. I don't know. Give a fuck.

[John]

Well, I get to that point where I want to jump in and have a rant and I think, no, no, no, no, no, I can't do it. See, but you just get that stress. It actually creates a bit of stress in you because you're feeling the anxiety of the issue or the point of view. And you got to make a choice. Either you're in it or you're not, you know?

[Rupert Howe]

Well, you know, my version of that is whenever I got really angry, I'd write an email, but not send. And every single one of those I've saved a draft in my history, I've never sent.

[John]

Well done.

[Rupert Howe]

Because basically you vent and then realize to send them is only going to be prolong the argument, upset somebody and get you nowhere.

[John]

Yeah, that's good advice. Well, listen, I think it's been absolutely brilliant. I mean I was going to ask a little bit about your non execs and what you see, you know, are the big issues coming, coming up in the future.

[Rupert Howe]

Well, you know, people will say, you know, they plan their non executive life and so on, but that's not how it happens.

[John]

I was going to say how do you get a non exec role? Because I mean I've been approached for.

[Rupert Howe]

A couple through relationships and again this, you know, I'm an old white male, okay, I'm an old white male. You will come become one of those at some point and the game has changed for us and most people would say, well about time too. So I'm not complaining. I've had a very privileged life and privileged. I didn't have a wealthy upbringing but I ended up having a privileged upbringing only because my dad was in the army and in those days they paid to send you to a school like Wellington which would never have happened otherwise obviously because we had no money or anything. But I'm aware that as a well educated white male I've had every advantage in life so I ain't complaining. So very early on I worked out that I wouldn't get any non exec roles by talking to a headhunter or putting myself on a database or any of that because nobody, nobody actively wants a anonymous old white male. So that meant by definition had to be either people I knew or people where I had very, very specific skill sets. And actually all of them, all four have come from people I know. So my first one of my current lot and in fact every non exec I've ever had has come from people I know well. So my first one which is Roxy, the music streaming business is I was introduced to the chief exec by not a close friend of mine but a sort of acquaintance called Michael Mazinski as a really interesting ad agency called the London Agency. And Michael had approached me about becoming a London ambassador just because it's a hilarious title, I countenanced it and also a great friend of mine called Bruce Haynes is non exec chairman of the agency. So I went to meet Michael a few years back, liked him a lot and said well I'll help you if I can, but I don't want to be paid, I don't want any sort of title but you know, you can give me commission if I help you get a new client, something like that anyway. And we sort of ended up chatting a lot and then suddenly ran me one day and he said I'm great friends and a shareholder. Great friends with the chief exec, founder and shareholder in Roxy. I think you'd be perfect for them as a chairman. And he's looking for a chairman. So I went to meet Rob Lewis, the chief exec and we just, it was one of those things, we hit it off instantly. I'd won the pitch within 10 minutes and he won the pitch for me by showing me the product which is spectacular. I just fell in love with it completely and the rest is history. So that's how that happened. Then the next one, well, System one happened because of Simon Bridges at Canaccord. So Simon I met when I was a non executive chairman of an Israeli ad tech business called Matomi, which was founded by my former McCann Israeli country manager who was my favorite country manager, became a very good friend. Ilan Shaloa, genius, absolute genius. Top Israeli businessman, not just in advertising. And Ilan asked me to, he was ipoing it on the London market, asked me to join the board. I did. He then didn't want to be chairman so I took over as chairman and our brokers were Canacorn. Simon Bridges did a brilliant job, really liked him. We became good friends. We both like cricket, so we go to Lords together. And then he said to me about a year ago, I've got a little company that I like a lot who I think, you know, will be looking for a new chairman. Would you be interested? Because it's kind of in your, in your sector. So I said, oh, tell me about them. I said, oh, that looks interesting. I'd heard of it as brain juicer and I didn't know John but I'd come across him and Orlando. So I said okay, well you know, they're interested, sure. And then again the rest is history. Then my medicinal cannabis business is a very old friend of mine, the founder, chief executive. Funny enough, we just got the 9 million euros this week is the to start to buy the site that we've got optioned and build the greenhouses. But the founder, CEO Simon Crane is a very old friend of mine who I met when he was chief executive QPR and Wasps and he'd worked at the Coca Cola company as head of strategy in Atlanta and then came back to the uk, ran QPR and wasp and I met him then because I chime had a sport marketing business and we became good mates and he rang me up just out of the blue and said I've got this company, I need a non exec channel. Would you like to do it. I said, yes. And then my final one was, which is Pinwheel, which is the sustainable living app. It was the guy I was a consultant to, a guy who founded Smart Energy gb and when he was thinking about what he wanted to do next and started talking about this idea two years ago, he said, would you be my chairman? I said, yeah, sure. So I've helped him build the whole thing. You know, one of the things I. My advice, I gave the wonderful Zoe Harris, who's now marketing CMO of On the beach, the travel company.

[John]

Oh, yes, I've met her. Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

I just. I discovered she. She's left. She was CMO of confused but didn't like it.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

And she's gone to. On the Beach. Well, I trained her. Trained her. I discovered her at Trinity Mirror.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

As a sort of marketing manager there, ex planner from wcrs. She was the planner on sky at White Collins and then cross sides to become a. She'd been on both sides of the agency client equation and one of the few people who did it comfortably. Absolutely wonderful woman, super smart, great fun, brilliant in every way. And I sort of took her under my wing. She was reporting to me to start with, and she was one of those people who'd completely hidden her light under a bushel all her career. So the thing I forced her to do was to start building a network. So I got her, I introduced her to Wackle, the Women's Advertising Club of London, because my old friend Sue Farr sort of runs that. So she's now a prominent Wackle member. I got her to join the marketing society, she's now a prominent member there. I got to do her. I said, you just got to get out and meet people and start speaking at conferences. Of course, it turns out she's bloody good at it. Everybody loves Zoe when they meet her because she's a very colorful, vibrant, you know, sort of slightly out there character as well as super bright. She's. She's more a planner by mentality than anything else. And you know, that led to her Getting offers for Confused.com and now on the beach and so on. And her, she will go right to the top of anything she does. Her. The only thing she needed to do that she hadn't done and she credits me with all of this is learn how to network.

[John]

Yeah.

[Rupert Howe]

And it's just, you've got to do it. You got to, you've got to do it.

[John]

Well, I think that's a very, very, very good point to end. Thank you, Rupert. That's been wonderful.

[Rupert Howe]

Very happy. No, I enjoyed. Well, it's been fun to chat.

[John]

Awesome. Thanks, mate. Yeah, really good.

[Rupert Howe]

Cool. All right, we'll see you soon.

[John]

Take care, mate.

[Rupert Howe]

Take care. Ra.