London: Walker & Gooden; Being The Bollocks

They’re the dynamic duo of advertising, a creative double act who started out as rookies at Leo Burnett in 1990 and are now executive creative directors at CP+B, orchestrating high-profile campaigns for the likes of Xbox and Paddy Power. One of the longest-lasting creative partnerships in the business, they’re a lot of fun to spend time with, and though they don’t appear to take themselves seriously – you’re guaranteed a jargon-free zone when Gooden and Walker are in the room – their work, ideas and impact have very serious kudos in the advertising world.

Art Director Matt Gooden [above left] and copywriter Ben Walker [above right] first teamed up at art school in Hounslow in the late 1980s. They were on the advertising course – embarking on a basic training that nowadays sounds about as remote as one of the extinct trades of antiquity. “I studied paste up, strips of type coming out of a machine,” remembers Gooden, “and you’d get cowgum and paste it up on a piece of board.”

“Paste-up was still happening in newspapers,” adds Ben Walker, whose dad did a stint as editor of The Daily Star in its halcyon ‘Elvis/Double Decker Bus/Hitler on the moon’ days. “I used to work for Sporting Life. I’d work on the bromides.”

“But it made you really concentrate on layout, balance and line,” adds Gooden. “You couldn’t change it quickly so you really had to think about it. It was a good grounding.” He laughs, shakes his head. “I had to hand-draw [the font] Century Schoolbook, the whole alphabet. It taught me to appreciate balance and design and negative space. A bit like life drawing is to art.”

At Leo Burnett, they made their first TV spots – for Honey Nut Loops and Wash & Go (a woman sleeping by the letterbox to get her free sample ‘because she deserves it’) – both inciting much retrospective laughter. “We even shot one of the last ever Marlboro spots,” says Gooden. “That was pretty amazing. Marlboro cowboy job with the Marlboro man, and Tony Scott directing.” “We smoked like chimneys at the time,” adds Walker.

They wanted to make more cutting edge work, and after being relieved of their positions at Leo Burnett (for not doing much work at all) on a Wednesday, they found themselves at Simons Palmer the following Monday, alongside the likes of Carl Johnson and Chris Palmer, working on their newest account, Nike, before the agency was absorbed into TBWA. “We never compromised on the idea, and that meant that sometimes it wouldn’t happen,” says Gooden. “They used to use our work as cannon fodder in the pitches. Clients would go, that’s really funny, that stuff. Anyway, what we really suggest...’”

“Which is why we moved on and went to Wiedens,” adds Walker. “Wiedens was perfect. Small, totally disorganised, couple of good clients that needed great work. Two good bosses – Tony Davidson and Kim Papworth – and lots of keyed-up people. I’d walk in there and feel really energised. Lots of people dicking around, throwing things about, lots of late nights, drinking, a chaotic atmosphere, but it was all about putting yourself under pressure to do great work. And Honda was the client the agency had just won. Amazing company, but no one had ever told the story of the brand, and Wiedens did that. It just clicked.”

They stayed there eight years, before joining CP+B as ECDs in 2011, opening the US agency’s London office, overseeing 50 or so creatives organised into half a dozen teams, and leading the creative vision for CP+B’s European clients – the likes of Paddy Power (their first signing to the agency after their arrival in 2011, for which they fashioned the We Hear You campaign), Microsoft, Netflix and Captain Morgan. “It is an amazing culture,” says Walker. “All the way through our careers, CP+B was a mystical place in America that did these amazing mad things that we really wanted to do. We were excited even to be considered for the job.”

“I remember the interview,” adds Gooden. “We met in a hotel room and talked about swear words in different cultures and countries.” He laughs. “That was it.” Walker goes on: “It’s because we have London accents and they were fascinated by it. All these expressions – like, ‘it’s bollocks’, or ‘it’s the bollocks’.”

Engineering a beautiful spot

When it comes to creative work, Gooden and Walker are definitely The Bollocks, and that early, pre-computer age training with pen, paper, cowgum and a sharp blade has stood them in good stead – especially when it came to prepping the campaign for which they are still best-known, 11 years after it first aired – all two minutes of it – during a Grand Prix race. All the working parts may have long been put away, but Honda Cog is out there, still moving, a chain reaction with plenty of afterlife in its veins, and one of the most memorable TV ads of the past 20 years.

“It took a long time,” remembers Walker, “six months from start to finish. We wrote it for the Civic – it often happens like that. It was about the beauty of function. That was the whole idea. And the Civic was this most beautifully functional car. But they couldn’t produce it in time so it went on the backburner, then they needed some work for the Accord. That’s how it actually happened. It worked well for the Accord, because the whole platform for Honda was really about functionality and the beauty of engineering, how function and engineering can be a beautiful, human thing.”

“I remember doing lots of little drawings,” adds Gooden. “We had a Haines car manual and went through what we thought might work. The director [Antoine Bardou-Jacquet] was great, he put together a team of special effects guys, a sculptor, engineers, who would take my drawings and go, alright, let’s break up a car and see what’s possible.”

“I remember him doing all that,” says Walker of Gooden, “and it was pretty cool. Rows and rows of drawings – he went in to a lot of detail. It was important just to get your head around what might or might not work. Draw it out.” He laughs. “I just sat there writing the one line for the end. I did write hundreds of them, he adds, “and Tony [Davidson] the boss went with the first one.”

Cog became an enormous hit on account of its sheer ingenuity and sense of ambition. “It was at a different level – it transcended the industry,” says Gooden. “Cabbies would start chatting to you about it. My mum would introduce me to her friends as the guy who made ‘that advert’.”

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 “I remember my mates looking it up on YouTube, before it really started to get going,” says Walker. “It was only aired on TV a couple of times.”

“And I remember it went round as a little file,” adds Gooden. “That’s how it seeded. We sent it round on CDs, and it went out in The Sunday Telegraph.” They both laugh at the memory.  “Unbelievable. How weird is that – distributing an ad in a Sunday supplement?”

As to the question of whether a TV ad can still have that kind of impact in the cellular world of multi-platform digital, Walker is unequivocal. “TV is still really important, because people only watch it en masse when there’s a live event, like the Super Bowl. Live event advertising is really massive. You do something good there and you can really have an impact.”

Being the balls and breaking rules

Walker’s creative formula for creating that kind of impact is pretty simple – no bollocks here, just The Bollocks. “Say something that no one else is going to say, and don’t make it complicated. There’s massive ad language out there, isn’t there... I listen to adverts now, and I listen to the language of it, and if you can break out of that, that’s amazing. You’ve got to do anything to break out of that. The important thing to remember,” he adds, “is that people don’t want to engage with advertising. They want to engage with ideas. I used to think, I’ve got to learn about all that tech stuff, all the latest digital, but I tend to just leave it and keep to the basics – great ideas.”

“‘Break one rule’ is the thing we’re bandying around at the moment,” adds Gooden. “What we do as an industry – and John Hegarty talks about it – is that every day we come in we have to reinvent ourselves. The point of what we do is to stand out, so whatever is happening today, we can’t copy it. There’s no point. What we keep repeating to our creatives, and to clients, is break one rule. It can be media, strategy, execution, anything where people just go, ‘you can’t do that’. It’s a sure way of standing out.”

“The old adages are proving to be the best ones,” agrees Walker. “You’ve still got to make great work, you’ve got to make it very simple, and you’ve got to make it something that people want to watch. It’s all those old rules that are still in place even more than ever, because there’s more and more rubbish out there. You’ve got to cut through it.”