The Greatest Play

In 1997 I stumbled into the creative department at Hunt Lascaris in Johannesburg. And that agency both saved me - and ruined me. 

The agency was in full ascendency and reaching the height of its powers. It was producing one knock-out campaign after the other that took the world by storm. Daring work. Smart work. Sophisticated. Funny. And all of it - charming, entertaining and memorable. Creative people from all over the country and the world were queuing up to come and be part of the story. To ride the wave that the agency was making on the global advertising stage. 

I fell into it, by accident, and in no way did I deserve my spot there. I got in because they needed a bilingual copywriter to translate English copy to Afrikaans. Not the most glamorous job - but to borrow a phrase from property business - Location! Location! Location! - and this is what I thought as settled at my small desk in the broom cupboard inside the finest advertising powerhouse in Africa. 

I was close to the action and I was able to pick off opportunities by making good friends with the traffic department (the division in an agency responsible for scheduling and planning projects) and knowing about new briefs that were coming on. Eventually I got noticed by the laconic and genius creative director, John Hunt and slowly found myself doing less translation and more origination and that’s how I got teamed up with brilliant art directors like Erich Funke and Anton Crone and really learnt how to make proper work.

John, who was also an accomplished playwright, had some simple rules, underpinned by a fairly audacious vision. He and the founding partners set out to build the first world-class agency out of Africa. And his singular challenge to was to make work that was better than the content it was interrupting. 

When I say us, I mean the creative department of the agency. The writers. The art directors and the designers. And this was in the days when you still had to dial-up the internet so we also had some CD-ROM nerds and Flash geeks amongst us. They wore funny pants and nobody, including themselves, knew what they were doing.

There were dreamers and doers. Poets, fashionistas, makers and ravers. Maniacs, who would work through the night to get the kerning on a line of body copy just right. And even though the environment was the most competitive I had ever seen in my life, there was a binding spirit of collaboration. Every great piece of work that got made was met with a crazy mix of jealousy and admiration. Every gold award, every Grand Prix, was welcomed by the whole agency as a victory for everyone.

People floated in and out of each other's offices, walls, brimming with scamps full of crazy fantastic ideas and discussing them, figuring out together how to make it better. One art director, Kevin Watkins, had such an encyclopaedic knowledge of advertising that he could look at any of your ideas and tell you within seconds if it had been done before, and also tell you in which advertising festival annual to cross-reference. Sometimes, even with the page number. Kevin ruined many of our dreams with a phrase like it was great when so-and-so did it in 1989.

We were a bunch of crazy, wannabe geniuses who didn't fit in anywhere else, making the greatest work of our careers, getting people to buy stuff they don't need. Yeah, we were selling, but we were also entertaining, delighting and making people think.

There was a way of doing things. Beyond the chats in each other's offices, we also always showed our works in progress to other creatives in the agency. Visitors to the creative department would often see ten to twelve people, huddled around a TV-set, watching an off-line cut (a rough-edit of a film before applying colour-grading and visual effects and with a place-holder soundtrack) of a new commercial, with heated debates about the length of a shot, or the pace of a cut. The producers would often have to call production companies then with the news that we're not there yet and stretch the favour and relationships yet again.

But really, those production companies didn't mind. They were as attracted to the success as the creatives were. The fortunes and successes of many commercial directors and photographers were shaped there too. The producers knew this and they knew which page to turn to in their little black books when one of the teams would come up with a cracker proactive (a generic term agencies give ideas that are made without an official client brief and that exists purely to try and win an award) idea. Many directors, building their careers, would pay to be briefed by Hunt Lascaris. That is what a big deal the agency had become.

Many of these creatives left eventually to go and do other amazing things. Someone could probably draw an amazing family tree of all the agencies and creative ventures that were founded by people who cut their teeth at Hunt Lascaris, up to the third and fourth generation.

For myself, The path to the world I travelled and the door to all the incredible people I met, led through that little broom cupboard, 20 years ago. The years I was there, the experience I gained, still shapes me today as a creative professional.

Sometimes when I reflect on all the agencies I been in since, I wish I could reconnect with each one of those creatives who were in there too. Sure, to reminisce like people are do, but mostly to ask: How was it for you on the outside? How do you survive this age where clients disrespect agencies, precisely because too many agencies didn’t have the vision to make good work that respects the people it is meant to touch. How do you cope with people who don't understand that you can be both competitive and supportive, those who have a basic disrespect for the power of the ideas or simply don't understand that most basic of advertising truth: make it better than the thing it interrupts. 

Because today I realise that the power of Hunt Lascaris wasn't just the brilliant creatives, or even just the ambition to win. Most agencies have that in too many spades. What made Hunt Lascaris different was that it consisted of a perfectly blended alchemy of characters. Strategists who could pose the right questions. Account people who knew good work as well any creative and knew how to sell them. There were the willing clients who understood the power of creativity. And of course the producers who could make the impossible possible.

You could take any of those people out of that agency and put them somewhere else and they could not consistently produce the great performances they did on that stage that John Hunt so fastidiously set. 

Because beyond a vision, the agency was a powerful play, and each character contributed their verse.