Ad Icon: Andy McLeod

Creative-turned-director Andy McLeod feels like he’s hitting his stride in his second career. Considering he’s already helmed such award-winners as Mulberry’s #WinChristmas and Wall’s ‘dog-in-a-ringbox’ spots, who knows what humorous heights he’ll hit next. David Knight dissects the fun-loving director’s knack for bringing an idea to life, making a good script better and getting the best out of people… and pigeons

Andy McLeod has made a career out of making people happy while also selling stuff. Two careers, in fact. For nearly 20 years he was half of a creative team behind iconic campaigns for Marmite, Doritos, Volkswagen and more – and co-founded a very successful agency.

Then nine years ago he jumped the fence, and became a full-time director. He has gone on to helm some of the funniest and most memorable British commercials of the past decade. Whether it’s with deadpan humour for Mulberry, Kwik Fit or Ginsters, cartoonish satire for Paddy Power, surrealism for Wall’s, or wall-to-wall Hank Marvins for Mattessons, McLeod’s work has the knack of evoking emotion while firmly embedding brand identity into viewers’ minds. It’s an approach he fervently believes in.

“You want good creatively-led advertising that, yes, sells products, but does it in a rewarding way for the viewer and for the people who work on it,” says McLeod. He’s forthright and passionate about his craft and his principles. 

McLeod’s work may be highly successful at embedding brands in viewers’ minds, but it’s also embedded a certain view of his own talents in clients’ minds. In his surreal Wall’s ads Kitchen and Garage, a couple of emotionally-stunted males are only able to express their gratitude to women for providing them with their favourite sausages by producing a ringbox containing a tiny dog serenading the ladies on an electric piano. In Robinsons’ Birdhouse, a finch returns to its bird box, which turns out to be a decorated in human style, picks up laundry, watches TV, reads a magazine and drinks Robinsons; in Journey, for dogfood brand Cesar, an elderly Mediterranean man takes his adorable dog for a walk in their picturesque village – ending at the cemetery to put flowers on his wife’s grave. McLeod’s latest campaign for Virgin Money is an adrenaline bolt of visual comedy, with a pigeon bopping to The Selector in one spot, and a skateboarding tortoise, in another.

In other words, McLeod has developed a bit of a pigeonholing problem – and it involves actual pigeons. He seems to have gained a reputation as a director whose particular forte is working with animals. “Which is bizarre,” he says. Yes, there are very entertaining and well-crafted animal-featuring ads on his reel, but he claims to be no more expert with furry and feathered creatures than any one else.

Sitting in the office of his production company, Rattling Stick, McLeod ponders that it might have all started shortly after his highly entertaining commercial for Thinkbox a few years ago – an ad intended to sell the idea of making TV ads. It introduced Harvey, the resourceful four-legged resident of a dogs home, who creates his own ad, to sell himself to prospective owners. Not long after Dogs Home came out, McLeod received the Wall’s ringbox scripts.

“I thought, ‘I probably shouldn’t do it, I’m going to get pigeonholed,’” he recalls. “It’s quite a weird idea, but the weirdness appealed to me, I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to do it.’ And thank god, because everybody loved it, and it won loads of awards.” 

Ultimately he stuck to his principle of following his instincts when it comes to how he treats any script that arrives in his inbox. “If it’s a good idea I’ll do it, and I’ll do it if it’s got animals in or not. I’m a sucker for an idea.”

Now in his late 40s, McLeod grew up in South London and gained his first brief exposure to the workings of advertising at college in Bristol, on a business studies course. That was enough, he says, for him to realise that “if there was anything I might be okay at doing, it would be the creative side of advertising”.

He went on to the highly-regarded advertising course at Hounslow where he met Richard Flintham, and began a partnership that lasted the best part of two decades. At BMP DDB in the 90s, the pair hit a hot streak of big award-winners including Self Defence for VW Polo and TV bumper idents for Doritos that won a D&AD Black Pencil. They also developed Marmite’s Love It. Hate It. campaign, which runs to this day.

Taking the scary way out

Then in 1998 McLeod, Flintham and three other partners (Robert Senior, Laurence Green and Michael Wall) founded their own agency – Fallon London, with McLeod as joint creative director. It became one of the most successful agency start-ups of recent times, growing from five to 150 people in just eight years, with a host of prestigious clients.

McLeod directed his first commercial while still at Fallon – for Skoda, one of his accounts. But at that point, in 2006, he knew he was leaving the agency. The original founders had sold their holdings to ad conglomerate Publicis. McLeod had done well financially as a result, but the game had changed.  

“It had been a brilliant journey, but if I’m honest, I was getting a bit bored,” he says, “I wasn’t writing much any more. I’d enjoyed running a department at Fallon, but once we were employees of someone else, it didn’t feel it was going to have the same pizzazz that it had. Maybe that was a bit of an excuse. I just felt like I needed to reinvent myself a bit, to rejuvenate myself and get that learning curve back – and get scared again.”

He says that becoming a director offered enough of a difference, and enough similarity, to be a realistic option. He admits he wasn’t certain that making the transition to filmmaker would work without any formal training. But he had the encouragement of Danny Kleinman and Ringan Ledwidge, founders of Rattling Stick, who had noted his astute contributions when working together, sitting behind monitors on shoots.

“Danny and Ringan both said to me at different times, ‘You might be quite good at this if you decided to give it a go’. That gave me the confidence to think about making the change. Because it is scary. The first time you turn up at six in the morning, and there are 80 people waiting for you to tell them what to do, is quite an unnerving thing. But I was cocky enough to think I could do it.”

He adds that in his early days as a director he would worry about the technical aspects of filmmaking, until he learned to delegate those responsibilities to others, and just focus on the important stuff: telling the story, bringing the idea to life – and making a good script better.

“If people think their script is absolutely perfect, they might not need me – they can send it to a proper filmmaker,” he laughs. “But invariably these things are a collaboration and it’s very rare that when you get a second or third person in the room, if they have something about them, that you can’t make an idea better, as you move it off the page onto a screen.”

He says that making the ad for Thinkbox was a benchmark moment when he felt he had successfully made the transition to being a proper director “even though that’s a weird thing to advertise on telly.”

In terms of a wonderful agency script, he says the greatest gift was probably the one provided by Saatchi creative directors Andy Jex and Rob Potts – who used to work for him at Fallon – for Mattessons, which involved a small army of schoolkids leaving school all dressed as (and doing the moves of) Hank Marvin, lead guitarist of 50s/60s Britbeat combo The Shadows.

“The Hank Marvin script was one of those that turns up and you just go ‘That’s fucking great – please let me do it,’” he says. “It’s very rare to get something that high concept that you can describe in a sentence. Obviously you change things along the way but it is what it is, a great idea, a Cockney rhyming slang gag about kids being starving after school.”

Casting people and pigeons

McLeod thinks that more light-hearted scripts have gravitated towards him because of what he sees as his core attributes as a director – good casting and getting good performances. “I think I’m a good observer of people – that’s something I’ve always had,” he says, adding that he finds the casting process both rewarding and excruciating. “If you’re not getting the person, it’s horrible. Cold sweat. When you’ve got to get the guy and you’re not seeing him, it’s hideous.”

His methods for casting and directing are the same for talent of the furry or feathered variety – and he completely shies away from using CGI to create his animal characters. He says that marvels like Robinsons’ Birdhouse and the new Virgin Money Pigeon ad were all basically achieved in-camera, by shooting a lot of footage, then finding the anthropomorphic moments in the edit that make them more human. And it’s a difficult, drawn-out process. “It’s really all about working with an editor and creatives and clients who can see the value of your experience and nous.”

For Cesar’s Journey, despite the furry co-star, McLeod says the lump-in-the-throat nature of the story meant the ad was something of a departure for him. “My work is usually blunter in its humour. You’re always striving not to do exactly the same thing again, try to make your reel a melting point of great ideas approached in many different ways. I’m very proud of it.”

Adding a more serious flavour to his reel is the chillingly understated Road Safety spot Kill Your Speed about a man racked with guilt over the young boy he’s knocked over and killed, who sees the child’s body wherever he goes. And McLeod’s more recent Road Safety ad, which has a motorcyclist talking to camera as he lies dying in the road after an accident.

McLeod reveals that his aim as a director is to have made three things in a year that make people sit up and take notice “and make those three things different from each other”. In that respect, 2014 was a good year, and ended very well indeed, with his hilarious ad for Mulberry. In #WinChristmas a young lady of the English upper classes is lavished with increasingly outlandish gifts on Christmas morning from members of her family (including a unicorn from her boyfriend). But she only gets seriously excited when she opens her grandmother’s present of a Mulberry bag, with the immortal line in modern toffspeak: ‘Shut. Up. Grandma.’

McLeod says this ensemble piece with six actors was a tricky but thoroughly enjoyable experience. He made important script changes during the one-day shoot at a country house near Rickmansworth. “I did that for very little money that job, because I loved it, and I thought it would be important to me. It was a great script but I added a lot to it that I was pleased with.”

This year has, up to this point, been all about shooting and editing his two Virgin Money ads. “Now I’m waiting for the next great script,” he says. Nine years into his directing career he feels like he’s still learning his trade – “I’m not the fully-formed article yet,” – but adds that it was at about this point in his career as a creative that things really started to come together for him.

Some things he’s still trying to get used to. “It’s much more difficult than I thought it would be – because there’s no routine. You can go weeks without doing anything. At an ad agency your day is all mapped out.” 

Research is the death of nuance

With the benefit of his considerable experience, he’s not afraid to issue some words of warning about the general state of creativity in commercials. And he offers a spirited defence of the principles that have defined and guided his career.

“There’s less trust from clients, from the industry in general, than 10, 15, 20 years ago – less belief in the economic value of creativity,” he declares. “Then, there was a strong belief that memorable, humorous advertising would punch above its weight. I think it’s less so now. You only have to watch telly a bit, to see that the sliver of the industry that people like me operate in is getting thinner and thinner.”

The reason, he says, is the reluctance to put faith in ideas that haven’t been heavily researched. “I think research is the death of nuance, and a lot of good ads become great ads through nuance. Most of my work is the proof that you can do creatively interesting advertising that punches above its weight in terms of cost per pound.” As a case in point, the Hank Marvin ad for Mattessons was part of a 29 per cent uptake in sales for the product.

Has he ever been tempted back to the agency side, to perhaps try to do something to improve the flow of decent scripts? He says not, but then veers towards the outspoken in his criticism of the age-old commercial production system, where the agency acts as a buffer between the client and the director.

“I am looking forward to the day when it’s a bit more direct, and clients will say ‘You were a good creative and are a good director, can you write me a script on this property – write a script and direct it?’” Brand-owners, he adds, are not obliged to use agencies, and thus incur all the layers of cost that go with agencies, to produce commercials.

“You can save a lot of money, and put a lot more money into production. Whether it’s 30-second commercials or internet content, whatever, there’s got to be a place for that. Relationships between advertisers and agencies are not suddenly going to crumble overnight. But I do think, as things become more project-based, there will be bits around the edges where you can see that a new model might be worth exploring.”

Andy McLeod may have worked on both sides of the fence. Just don’t expect him to sit on it.