Creative Profile: Darren Bailes

What Darren Bailes, VCCP’s ECD, loves most about advertising is when someone at a meeting says something bonkers. Looking at his work, populated by knitted sock monkeys and aristocratic meerkats, his affinity for and deft handling of bonkersness shines through. He tells Emily Ansell about  moving Munkeh moments and more

The UK has fallen irrevocably in love with three furry little creatures, people are always eager to hear more about their lives, their relationships and their adventures. Who am I talking about? Aleksandr, Sergei and Baby Oleg, the three hilarious meerkats that have become the face of comparethemarket.com, of course.

The man behind these popular characters is Darren Bailes, executive creative director at agency VCCP, and the meerkat trio belong to just one of the many standout campaigns of his that the public has grown to know and love.

Bailes started his career at WCRS creating award-winning work for Speedo and amusing work for Butterkist. He then moved to DDB London (but was given the boot). Next, he spent seven years at Mother, making hits for Pimm’s, PG tips and Yellow Pages. Face of the Future for Siemens’ trendy Xelibri mobile phones followed – pirate DVD copies of the TV spot were even available on street corners in Japan. Bailes actually got people wanting to pay to watch an ad.

Bailes moved to VCCP in 2008 and launched the hugely successful comparethemarket.com series of ads a year later. Another hit was the Be More Dog campaign for O2, despite his team nearly getting kicked out of the O2 headquarters when they first presented it. His work for Coors Light featuring Jean Claude Van Damme went down well, as did the humorous More Than insurance comparison website ads, which have resulted in Morgan Freeman now being referred to as More Than Freeman.

With so many notable ads under his belt, one could be forgiven for assuming that Bailes has always dreamt of being a creative. However, as he explains to shots, it was feature film that first caught his eye when he was growing up in Durham, North East England. “I think it all started when I used to watch Hitchcock films with my granddad,” he says. “He would make me watch them from when I was about six years old. That’s the first time I realised that people make stuff and it got me interested in making things too.”

Stamping his mark on design

When Bailes left school, several commercials directors were starting to make names for themselves in feature film. This led him to consider advertising as a route into directing. “As I loved making film, I thought ‘I’ll do the advertising thing and that will give me a way in.’ So I went off to Berkshire College of Art and Design, which had a great reputation for advertising, but I was unfortunately told upon my arrival that they weren’t really doing ‘advertising stuff’ anymore. I used to fight with them on a daily basis because they wanted me to design stamps. How boring! Eventually though, I did design some stamps and they loved them so much they told me I should be a designer. This was frustrating as it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

Feeling unfulfilled by his course, Bailes looked up the names of creative teams in various magazines and would turn up to see them on a weekly basis. Bit by bit, he started to work out what was going on in the industry and build up some contacts.

Talking about magazines causes Bailes to reflect on his childhood in Durham where there was only one shop in the whole area that stocked ad industry publications. “I would travel to that one shop and grab the one dusty copy on the shelf,” he says. “I suppose I was always quite creative. At school, I used to draw horses and study their musculature. My friends thought I was a freak but my parents would just let me do what I wanted to do and encourage it. It worked out all right; my old school friends probably wish they’d drawn horses too now!”

WCRS was the foot in the door that Bailes needed. He was there for seven years before moving to DDB with his writing partner Al MacCuish. He says that no one really liked the duo and their way of working, so it wasn’t long before they were asked to leave. “Working at DDB was pretty hard for us and we eventually got kicked out, so we played tennis for a few weeks and had a brilliant time doing that. Then Mark Waites from Mother called us and asked us to start there the following day. We had to cancel our tennis court booking and head to work.”

The duo were delighted when their first job at Mother was a pitch against DDB, which they won. It was for ITV Sport’s Streaker campaign, which went down well. Some amazing work followed, including PG tips’ Al and Monkey campaign as well as ads for Pimm’s, including Bury The Money, which gave birth to the phrase ‘Pimm’s o’clock’. “Pimm’s was brilliant. The first time I went to the pub after that some guy recited the whole script to me, and then asked whether I’d seen the ad. I told him ‘Yes, I did that one.’ When we started the campaign, Pimm’s was a dying brand. It was a drink for middle-aged people in Surrey on a Sunday afternoon. Our brief was to popularise it and democratise the whole thing. We were giving the drink to bank robbers and crooks and it just kind of spread. It was a massive success.”

Selling through stories

Mother was a fruitful spell for Bailes and another favourite ad from that time was PG tips’ The Return. He says he looks back with fond memories on its creation because it changed the way he thought about adverts. “We set out to make it like the most dramatic Coronation Street episode. There was so much hurt between [Al and Monkey] across the table. It was so believable; it was silent on the set,” he recalls. “That’s when I fell in love with characters and story. People love stories and people don’t love advertising. It’s a natural thing – people have stories read out to them from the moment they’re born. They don’t have adverts recited to them! So if you make advertising more of a story, people enjoy it. So that’s what I like to do, as you can see with work such as comparethemarket.com.”

With a heavy heart, Bailes said goodbye to his writing partner after their stint at Mother and decided to go it alone at VCCP. “I love Al dearly but I wanted to do something for me and take on a new challenge. VCCP wasn’t great at the time but it worked and there were some really good people there,” he comments.

Being David Fincher

Bailes’ plan to direct features didn’t quite come to fruition – he was bitten by the advertising bug and realised that directing might not be everything he’d thought it would be. “My plan was always to start in advertising, then do the directing thing and then end up being David Fincher. Then I shot a commercial with him and he was a grumpy sod,” he reveals. However, while at Mother, Bailes was still keen to direct. He shot an Elbow promo and a couple of spots for Al and Monkey, as well as a five-minute cinema film for PG tips called A Tale of Two Continents, which related the history of tea and was part of a tie-up with the environmental organisation Rainforest Alliance. “We wanted to make a short film for PG tips and give the DVD away with every box of tea. We had very little money and a big story to tell, so me shooting it was the only option. [Production company] Rattling Stick was a great support and I had a great time. The disc went to about a million people in a week.”

Not a fan of waiting for good scripts to arrive, Bailes knew running the creative team at VCCP instead of directing was a good choice. “What we try to do at VCCP is make things we’ll enjoy making. There’s nothing more soul destroying than a team ploughing through something they don’t really like and haven’t engaged in. It’s agony. We make sure we’ve got an idea on the table that makes us go ‘Fuck! That’s gonna be fun to make, fun to shoot, fun to present to the client, and when it gets on telly people are gonna have fun watching it!’ That’s why we do loads of silly stuff.”

Bailes says he feels honoured and privileged to be able to make work that’s aired during massive TV shows such as The X Factor. “Too much advertising wants to be nothing more than advertising. I think we try a bit harder than that.”

Character and story are clearly two elements that have led to his work’s success. But he says a pinch of randomness also goes a long way too. “Randomness is intriguing. Like, when you watch a film you choose to watch it because you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s how it needs to be with adverts – don’t make them predictable.”

Randomness is certainly evident in the More Than Freeman ads. Viewers hear what sounds like the voice of Morgan Freeman narrating the ad, and then the camera zooms in to show a white man speaking. What’s that about? The same can be said about O2’s Be More Dog campaign – why does a cat want to act like a dog? These ads grab people’s attention and make them ask questions.

Bailes says the industry has changed massively from when he first entered it and the emergence of digital has allowed creatives to make work with so many dimensions that they never previously dreamed were possible. He adds: “It used to be: here’s a brief, fill that space with a press ad. As hard and as complex as it is now, it’s exciting and there are opportunities everywhere. It’s hard to get your head round because things change every minute, but you look back and think yes it was easy, but God it was boring, too!

“A campaign like the meerkats could only exist in today’s digital world – because we built the website where you can compare meerkats. Yes it’s very TV-centric but the storyline is about that website. We used Twitter and Facebook in a way that nobody really had before and it went through the roof, giving us many followers and friends. We’re now also selling meerkat toys, and I always knew we would. I said in the original pitch that eventually we’d be making toys and they’d be going like hotcakes, but no one believed me!”

So what made Bailes love advertising so much that he chose to abandon his dream of becoming a feature film director? “The silly stuff and the randomness” is, he claims, what he likes most about the industry. “I love being in a room where someone says something completely bonkers and you think you can make sense of it and make it all come together. I love extracting that nonsense and making it breathe. That’s the best bit. Even the bad stuff that never gets bought and never sees the light of day interests me – I like knowing that the idea existed. We’ve created an environment here at VCCP where weird and random ideas can appear.”

Not everyone’s cup of PG tips

Bailes says he in no way thinks that a career in advertising is for everyone. In fact, he firmly believes that 99 per cent of the people who give it a go end up completely hating it. “People think ‘this is bonkers’ because of the amount of work you do and the amount of stuff that doesn’t go anywhere. But hopefully one per cent of people want to get back on the horse and try again. You just have to be relentless and love the fact that sometimes you win and that win makes up for all the times you don’t get it right. You’re always looking for that one great idea, and you only need a few of them to keep thriving.”