London: Dawson Pickering; Long-Term Relationship

Back in 1949, three admen left the established agency scene to go it alone and launch their own shop. The name of that small start-up? DDB, now one of the most well known names in the business. So perhaps it’s no surprise that 65 years later Neil Dawson and Clive Pickering – two DDB alumni who spent some of their formative years at the agency – are following suit.

Leaving behind the security of the networks for the brave new start-up world, this April the pair unveiled their own agency, the no-nonsense named Dawson Pickering. But while their company might be just a few months old, these two bring with them a legacy of work that comprises multiple award winners, including a couple of Cannes Grands Prix, for high-calibre brands such as VW, Philips and Bacardi.

South African life-changer

Dawson and Pickering first met in the late 80s at Leo Burnett London, joining forces to become an art director and copywriter team. But in 1994, after the early 90s recession in Britain dampened the creative opportunities on their home turf, the pair decided to swap the grey London streets for a more vibrant location – South Africa, then on the cusp of holding its first ever free elections.

“It changed our lives and careers,” recalls Dawson. “We arrived in January and Mandela was elected in April. It was the most exciting place in the world to be at the time. The atmosphere had an impact on the whole country. The sense of optimism infected everything. People felt like they could do anything and that affected the clients and agencies too.”

Their experience in post-apartheid South Africa – which culminated with a stint at Hunt Lascaris, now part of TBWA and one of the country’s most successful agencies – changed their creative approach too, says Pickering: “In those days, British advertising tended to be about clever pun-based headlines and wordplays, but with 11 official languages you couldn’t do that in South Africa. You had to be much more visual and simplify the idea, but still have that cleverness. It changed the style of advertising that we did, and stood us in very good stead for when we came back to London, where a lot of accounts were becoming more international.”

On returning to the UK in 1997, they joined BMP DDB and helped create the Surprisingly Ordinary Prices campaign for VW, whose infamous posters [below] became one of the agency’s most recognised pieces of work. Next they moved to BBH London to lead Johnnie Walker, then headed to TBWA before deciding the time was right to explore their own directions.

While Pickering became head of copy at TBWA and later joined Albion London, Dawson took on creative director duties at Ogilvy before rejoining DDB to lead the global Philips account. There, he helped to turn the brand’s creative around with quality campaigns such as the Grand Prix-winning Carousel and its follow-up, Parallel Lines. But Dawson was ready for a new challenge by 2011, when he was asked to launch French agency BETC’s UK office. Pickering was the first person he called.

“We’d always dreamed of doing something,” says Dawson, “whether it was our own thing or with a network. So being approached by a network that was saying, ‘We want to do a start-up, you do it how you want it and we’ll finance it,’ was extremely alluring.”

Entrepreneurial next step

BETC gave them the freedom to develop the agency’s ethos – something they say they modelled on their experience of BMP DDB’s competitive but collaborative culture – and they helped grow the office from scratch to win clients including Bacardi, Diet Coke and Cow & Gate. So when their relationship ended with BETC earlier this year, it seemed a natural step to take that entrepreneurial spirit one inch further and open up a place of their own.

“It’s a bit like going to work abroad,” considers Dawson. “If you’ve never done it, it sounds terrifying and when we went to South Africa it did feel like that. But once you’ve done it you realise it’s not so frightening. Then, when we started something in London (with BETC), we didn’t have to put our houses on the line but we did start with nothing and it was great fun. Once you’ve done it, you want to keep going. It’s scary but the upsides are much bigger. But it’s also about teamwork. We have each other’s backs and we know we can do it. We have ultimate trust for each other.”

Small agency, big ideas

Having worked together for the best part of 25 years, each partner plays to his own particular creative strengths: while Dawson focuses on the client relationships, Pickering is happiest mentoring the younger talent. Since they only opened their shutters for business recently, they’re still in talks with potential investors to explore exactly what financing model the agency will take. They have, however, already been busy working on their launch campaign, the first ever TV commercial for new client CollectPlus, whose marketing director, Catherine Woolfe, spent several years at VW. And despite their own current small size, their emphasis is on big ideas that give brands meaning.

“It’s about making people feel something about a brand,” says Pickering. “Not just informing them about it, but making them feel something and getting to that right-side of the brain.”

It’s this ability to connect consumers and brands in an emotional context where Dawson says the agency’s greatest strength lies. “We have a long history of creating work that can make people feel something. With the internet and digital, over the past 10 years clients have been bombarded with lots of different companies throwing lots of different components at them and they’ve been slightly bewildered by that. Now clients need it all to tie together with a simple insight that works as the basis of a campaign, and this is something we are good at articulating.”

Recent examples include their work on the Bacardi and Cow & Gate accounts at BETC. Tasked with creating a global marketing campaign for Bacardi, the pair came up with an idea that focused on the brand’s family-owned heritage by celebrating its survival through natural disasters, prohibition and Cuban exile with the tagline ‘Untameable since 1862’. The campaign was spearheaded by a climactic ad directed by MJZ’s Dante Ariola that marked out the brand’s independence and passion, with print and digital elements giving further room to tell elements of the Bacardi story.

“The TV ad tells a background story, and there’s a lot of heavy lifting going on in there but that’s because it had to,” Dawson states. “People were thinking of Bacardi as a brightly coloured beverage that teenagers vomit into the street on a Friday night. So many people thought Bacardi was owned by Diageo, but it’s not – it’s owned by the Bacardi family, and people didn’t even know there was a family. You have to tell that history in a way that moves people, and setting that up allowed them to say ‘We have an untameable history.’”

At the other end of the spectrum, but powerful in its own right, was their work for Cow & Gate based on the line ‘Feed their Personalities’. Injecting some much-needed soul into a traditionally staid category, the central TV spot saw a troupe of toddlers let loose in a recording studio and culminated with them banging out the Dexys Midnight Runners track Come On Eileen. To celebrate Diet Coke’s 30th anniversary, they also brought back perhaps the sexiest of any brand symbol – the Diet Coke Hunk.

A city with optimism

Now Dawson and Pickering are hoping to recreate those successes at their own agency. When it comes to timing, even compared with the launch of BETC just three years ago, they say there’s a greater feeling of optimism and buoyancy in the London ad industry now, and that they’ve received a great deal of support for their new venture.

“There’s goodwill in the industry,” believes Dawson. “People generally want to see the whole industry moving forward and so companies starting to do well is what people like to see. They want to see places opening up rather than closing down, whether it’s ad agencies or cafes.”

Only time can tell if Dawson Pickering will achieve the same success as their kindred start-up DDB did in its early days, but if their track record so far is anything to go by, they’re certainly heading in the right direction.