Mark Denton: The Way I See It

During Mark Denton’s 30-plus years in design and advertising he’s bagged more than 476 awards – including a Bafta – been president of Creative Circle, a partner in his own agency Simons Palmer Denton Clemmow and Johnson, and is now the director of his own production company Coy! Communications. He’s been sharing the way he sees things at his now legendary talks, but here gives Carol Cooper his personal view on shoehorns and room deodorizers, his compulsion to design everything – even his own socks – and the similarity between today’s creatives and battery hens

I was born and raised down in the deep South during the smog-cloaked 50s in a land that black cab drivers seldom venture to… Greenwich, south-east London.

One of my earliest memories is being planted in front of the television. I can still remember programmes from more than 50 years ago, and the adverts have stuck in my mind even more. I can still sing most of the popular jingles of the time. Actually, memories from the gogglebox seem clearer to me now than those from real life.

Access to screen time was made easier because our family was privileged enough to have two tellies when a lot of people didn’t even have one. That was down to my dad having a few bob as a result of running his own scrap-metal business since he was a teenager. In fact, my whole family were in scrap metal. Dad, mum, grandad, uncle, godfather and, eventually, both of my brothers and my sister would end up working at the Denton yard in Peckham.

I tried working there in the school holidays and I didn’t like it much. It was hard work and, worse than that, it was dirty.

When I was a kid I remember there was a lot of shouting, and occasionally a memorable graphic image like a smashed plate and my dad’s fried dinner sliding down the kitchen wall.

My mum loved us but she had a terrible temper. Maybe that’s why I blocked out reality and got lost in the relatively safe world of television.

I got by at school by being good at drawing, sport, and making people laugh. My essays were often read out in front of the class because they were full of jokes about my classmates. Using humour to get on the right side of people was one of the best lessons I ever learnt.

When I reached 16, proper art school wasn’t an option because I didn’t have enough O-levels. As a result, I ended up at the Ravensbourne School of Vocational Studies, where I learnt practical stuff such as architectural drawing, typography and photography. At college I was on the outside, the only sharp dresser surrounded by hippies. I was obsessed with fashion, but like most students I was broke most of the time (despite being well-off, my dad wisely chose not to give me too much of his hard-earned wedge). I ended up doing three part-time jobs to fund my fashion obsession and when that wasn’t enough, I enrolled on dressmaking and tailoring evening classes to learn how to make my own clothes. I even designed knitting patterns and press-ganged my aunties and granny into service.

I sort of got into advertising by mistake after starting out as a paste-up artist working on Knitting Digest magazine. Once I was in I wanted to make the sort of commercials that would tickle my mum’s funny bone. Along with the temper, my mum had a great sense of humour. There were a lot more funny adverts back in the 60s and I used to love to see my mum fall about laughing when a good one came on the telly. The first proper agency that I worked for was Leo Burnett, who I joined in the late 70s.

It wasn’t easy to begin with as I was painfully shy and I felt out of place with my common south-London accent. Everyone else not only sounded posh, but also most of them seemed to be Oxbridge graduates.

I compensated for my lack of confidence by pedalling very hard. I wasn’t just driven by the thought of success, it was really exciting coming up with ideas. I was like a kid with a new toy. The office security men would complain to the management about me because they couldn’t lock up until I’d gone home.

One of my favourite pieces of advertising is the old PG Tips Mr Shifter that was made back when it was quite acceptable to use real chimps in a commercial. It still makes me laugh when I see it after 40 years. It seems a shame that humour has given way to ‘style’ and a genuinely funny commercial is relatively rare nowadays. I’m still clinging on, waiting for the pendulum to swing back towards comedy again.

The most famous advertising that I’ve worked on is probably the UK Nike campaign Kick It that we did at Simons Palmer Denton back in the 90s. It’s definitely the most-awarded work that I have ever been associated with. It was a massive campaign of billboards with a bit of TV and supporting press ads. Of course, I didn’t do it alone, I had some of the finest brains in advertising to help me look good.

When I was younger I used to chase awards. I look back and think that I probably did it to compensate for a lack of confidence. I had this fantasy that if I won enough of them people would listen to me in meetings. It never quite worked out like that in reality. Over the years I’ve won golds at Cannes for print and TV, Pencils at D&AD and Grand Awards at NYF for graphic design and TV, plus hundreds more – even a Bafta [for Nike, Kick It]. I seldom enter any these days. They’re so expensive and I prefer to spend the money on new creative projects. But even though awards are not as important to me, I’m still quite competitive in everything I do. I sometimes find myself racing my wife Anna to the next lamp post even when we’re out for a stroll down the high street. I definitely married the right woman.

Even when I was fixated on awards I never forgot that my job was about selling. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything with awards juries in mind – I’ve always wanted to make a difference in the marketplace.

I’ll happily sell anything – if it’s legal I’ll work on it, even if I don’t agree with the product.

I’ve been given a lot of advice throughout my career, most of which I’ve chosen to ignore. I still hear ‘you can’t do that’ on a regular basis, and generally the devil makes me do the polar opposite. Probably the best bit of advice that I remember was delivered in a talk by the self-help guru Tony Robbins, who appeared in the film Shallow Hal: “If you keep doing something and you don’t get the result you want, stop doing it.”

A lot of youngsters ask me how they can get into advertising. I generally ask them, ‘Why do you want to get into advertising?’ If they are truly creative, maybe advertising isn’t the best place for them now, given that creativity isn’t as valued as it used to be.

The advertising industry has changed so much since I started in it nearly 40 years ago. It’s not as creative as it used to be. That’s a fact, not some nostalgic, rose-tinted view of things. Creatives used to be the geese that laid the golden eggs. Now – by and large – they’re treated like battery hens. That’s nothing to do with the quality of the creatives; they’re just as talented as they used to be. It’s the system that’s changed.

These days it seems like agencies make money from filling out timesheets and keeping the process going as long as possible rather than coming up with ‘the big idea’. Just because clients now get months of research, a big spread of creative options and plenty of charts presented by an army of nodding, smiling faces, they probably think that they are getting a better deal; in reality, they’re being short-changed.

Getting fired from my own agency (Simons Palmer Denton Clemmow and Johnson) in the mid-90s felt like the worst day of my career at the time. It turned out that it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. In many ways my old partner Chris Palmer was the creative face of the agency. I’d been content to hide in the background and let the work do the talking for me. Suddenly, I was booted out on my arse and I found myself alone on the street pondering my future. It was not only an education; it was a wake-up call. If it hadn’t happened, maybe I would never have found my own voice.

Creatively, the Simons Palmer Denton Clemmow and Johnson experiment had been a huge success. We collectively won an inordinately large amount of awards. I discovered that it wasn’t enough to do good work – you had to let the world know about it – so PR was always a very important part of the process. It was my reputation as a creative director that secured me plenty of scripts from day one as a commercials director. At my peak, I was shooting 40 to 50 commercials a year, as well as consulting work and creative pitches for various agencies.

I worked at quite a few production companies over the years… Redwing, Godman, Blink… before joining my old mate Malcolm Venville as the joint owner of Therapy Films. When Malcolm went off to become a feature film director, I opened my own production company COY! Communications. And then the recession hit. It was like having the phone lines cut. Suddenly everything went deathly quiet. Our rep couldn’t get into agencies – they’d nailed up the windows.

I came up with the idea of doing my talks to promote COY. I couldn’t get in the front, so I went round the [agencies’] back door and kicked it in. Instead of seeing one creative team I found myself in front of hundreds. It wasn’t long before we saw a direct correlation between putting on a talk and getting scripts. They worked pretty well as a promotional tool for me and my company, but I never intended them to be any more than that. It really took me by surprise when I started getting requests to do the talks for clients, design groups and companies such as IPC Magazines that aren’t directly related to commercials production. I even did some outside of the UK at agencies like DDB New York and 180 Amsterdam. The climax came when I did a President’s Lecture for D&AD earlier this year. The tickets sold out two weeks in advance and there was a waiting list. Almost 600 people attended, and D&AD said they had more tweets about it afterwards than any talk they’d ever put on.

The talks are a great selling tool, even though I don’t show any of my commercials (that’s probably the reason they are so successful). I change the name of the talk every time I do it and promote it by enrolling the agency that I’m visiting to create a new poster. Even so, it’s essentially about the same subject every time, which is ‘The benefits of making creative stuff’.

It seems quite fundamental, but you’d be surprised at how many people in the industry have forgotten that good creative ideas can make things happen in the world, sometimes unexpectedly. So there are lots of stories: like how I decided to dress up and be photographed as my fictional ancestors and, before I knew it, I was an exhibit in the National Football Museum; or the time I turned my small flat into a cartoon stately home, which resulted in my own half-hour programme on Japanese TV. Then there’s the more everyday stuff like when I put on the UK’s first-ever World Championship Mexican Wrestling event in the Café de Paris on Leicester Square.

The talk is constantly changing because I’m always involved in new projects that I want to show off. I’m currently in the process of launching a new magazine and writing a musical with my lovely wife and daughter. It’ll be my second foray into theatreland after I helped produce my missus’ first play, Sex Cells (written by Anna Longaretti and staged at London’s Riverside Studios in October 2013). I loved the Sex Cells project – there were no clients to clip our wings, so if it was good or bad we had no one to blame but ourselves. But it was good… and because I believe in advertising, I didn’t just promote it with some small-space press ads, I ran a digital super-site poster campaign. I got my old mate Dave Dye (now head of art at Mother) to write and design the posters, because I knew there was a fair chance that they’d be better than any I did myself. I love working with talented people.

Most of my personal work has some kind of retro element about it, but I always like to add a twist that makes it contemporary. I’m not wedded to one style though, because obviously when it comes to advertising it’s essential to design a look that supports the idea.

I get twitchy when I’m not engaged in some kind of creative pursuit. I wish I could switch off but I can’t. Even when I did some craft classes with the wife where the aim was to learn how to transform an empty milk bottle into a charming ornamental wizard, it turned into a ruthless, ugly competition. I had to make the best wizard. It’s exhausting being me.

My biggest fear is that I’m going to get to the end of my life with an enormous amount of creative projects that I never got round to.

I’ve got no time for hobbies because my job has completely leaked into my real life. There’s now no separation. I feel the need to design everything that I own from my socks to my furniture. I’ve even been known to redesign the labels on the baked bean tins in my kitchen cupboards.

Probably the biggest inspiration in my life has been Winston Churchill. He not only won the Second World War, he found time to paint pictures, knock out a few books and build brick walls in his spare time.

As I’m getting older and my time is getting more precious, I find I’m getting less tolerant with time-wasters. Time-wasters, bullshitters and lazy people make me angry. Everyone makes mistakes, so I try not to let a genuine mistake rattle me and use all of my energy in putting things right, rather than waste time shouting and hollering.

I don’t feel the need to have the approval of everyone. I’m quite happy to accept that me and my work are not everyone’s cup of tea. Funnily enough, I sometimes get as big a buzz from naysayers as I do from supporters. The worst thing I can imagine is to be completely ignored. As long as I’m loved by my family and I’m creating stuff that I like, I’m happy.

I think it’s a really exciting time to be living with all the technological progress out there, but if I had to choose one invention that I couldn’t live without it would have to be the shoehorn. It’s the one item on my rider. At the same time, there’s a bit of tech that I can’t stand, and that’s Ambi Pur/Glade plug-ins. They’re a complete waste of space.

I feel that I’ve landed on my feet and been really lucky to find myself in advertising. I can’t imagine where I’d be now if I’d plumped for my first and second options – hairdressing and panel beating – when I left school. I suppose if I could have been successful in any field, and I’d have liked to try my hand in the fashion industry. I haven’t completely given up in that area. I still design and sell T-shirts and I’m hoping to stage a fashion show featuring some of my leisurewear in the near future.

I’m still ambitious, but I rarely look far beyond the project that I’m currently doing. I’ve still got no long-term plans. I’ll leave that to when I’m grown up.

Once I’m dead I don’t give a monkey’s how I’m remembered work-wise. I would like my missus to remember me as one of the best husbands she’s ever had.

At the end of the day, what really matters is squeezing as much blood out of every available stone. We are only here for a nanosecond and there is plenty of time for a nice lie down when you’re dead.