Robert Campbell: The Way I See It

From cattle farmer to trainee vet and tea-boy extraordinaire, Robert Campbell followed a meandering path into the advertising world, but soon hit his stride as a producer, launching the careers of leading directors Tarsem, Paul Gay and Rupert Sanders, to name just a handful.

Now leading the field with his multi-award-winning production company Outsider, he tells Selena Schleh how having an eye for the beautiful things in life – antique kilim rugs, 1960s cutlery and a motorbike he’s only ridden twice – has helped him build and nurture a stable of great talent

I was born on 30 December 1962 on a farm in Essex. It was the coldest winter on record and the midwife couldn’t make it through the snow. But as my father was a farm manager at the time and used to cattle and pigs, delivering a baby wasn’t really a problem. Legend has it that he poured himself a glass of whisky and set to work.

Because I was allergic to my mother’s colostrum, she was advised to put me on powdered milk, which was very expensive. My father worked out that calf milk powder was pretty much identical and it was a lot cheaper, so they gave me that instead. That’s why I’m a big lad.

I had a fantastic, adventurous childhood, but it was transient. My father was headhunted by a big agricultural company, a job which took him and us all over the world. When I was 12 we moved to Florence, Italy, where I spent my formative years. It was an incredible time; I had the most idyllic lifestyle. At 13 years old you’re already legally riding a white Vespa without a helmet. The weather is beautiful, the food is out of this world and the girls are just gorgeous.

I was so happy to get out of the British prep school system, which in the 70s was brutal and abusive and inspired learning only through hatred. My enduring memory of my school – which I won’t name for fear of retribution – was a bath full of cold water. Why? Because when you got beaten, you said ‘Thank you very much,’ and ran like hell out of the headmaster’s office, getting undressed as you ran, and got into that bath to stop the welts and the swelling. The peculiar thing was that I never told my parents about it. No one ever did.

By the time I got to Italy, I was intellectually numb, but at the American School in Florence I learned to love education. Once I realised that I wasn’t stupid just because I couldn’t ‘do’ Latin and I wasn’t going to get hit by anybody, I ended up doing really well and surprising myself. Not quite as much as I surprised my parents, though.

The week after finishing high school, my father gave me a one-way ticket to America and a hundred dollars, and I went to work on a 3,000-cow farm in Chino, California – the dairy capital of Los Angeles – for a man called Charlie Perotti. It was the most incredible time of my life, because I will never work as physically hard again. It is no exaggeration to say your hands bled, you were completely sleep deprived, you got one day off a month, you worked every hour God gave you and it was fantastic. At one point I carried out a Caesarean on a cow with a penknife while the vet was delayed. He said, ‘Get her on her side, cut her open and get that calf out.’ Luckily it was quite a sharp penknife, and they both survived.

The past can be a funny place to go back to. I flew back to California recently
because I hadn’t seen Charlie for thirty-odd years and wanted to say thank you. Within five minutes, it was like I’d never left. He took a brash, cosmopolitan kid and beat the shit out of him, but taught him how to work hard and respect others. I hope that everyone in the world has the good fortune to meet someone like that. Everyone needs a candle to follow. Parents are forgiving, and the most important thing is someone who is not forgiving and who learns to love you, rather than loving you unconditionally.

After working on the dairy farm for three years the natural progression was wanting to become a vet. Until I went to veterinary college and realised I’d have to sit there for nine months with my hand up a cow’s arse.

Coming back to our house in Florence in 1985 I was confronted by a little Irish fella in a bathrobe – the film editor William Anderson, who’d rented our house for the summer. We ended up hanging out reading scripts – I remember reading The Mosquito Coast before it was made – and I thought being in the film business would probably beat having your hand up a cow’s arse and smelling of shit.

By pressuring various friends of friends, I got a job as a runner at Pinewood Studios just outside London. I was 23 but the one thing I couldn’t do – probably the only prerequisite for a runner – was make a cup of tea. I ended up putting the teabags in the kettle.

Pinewood in the days of Cubby Broccoli and Roger Moore was a really exciting, inspiring place, even though I wasn’t paid and worked in a bar at night. Through luck I got a job as a director’s assistant on American Roulette, starring Andy Garcia. It was a disastrous film but Andy and I got on well and I ended up driving him around. I invited him to my sister’s birthday party. Bless his cotton socks, he came, grabbed her, did the tango and kissed her. She practically wet her knickers.

Around 1989 I left the film business and became an assistant director in
commercials. After dealing with grumpy farmers in Minnesota, this wasn’t a big deal, and I quickly worked my way up to first assistant director. Then I bumped into Steve Lowe, who I’d first met in the bar I was working at, and ended up producing music videos with the Molotov Brothers. Working with the likes of Martin and Stephen Brierley… it was as much fun as you could get.

It was a life-changing moment when I came across Tarsem [Singh]. I’d done the video for Katrina and the Waves’ Walking On Sunshine with Michael Haussman, through the Molotovs, and they called up a month later saying they had a kid who was fresh out of Pasadena film school who wanted to do a music video in Czechoslovakia. It sounded quite interesting – this was 1989 and the Velvet Revolution was just kicking off – so I asked them to send me his reel.  

Five days later, it arrived – thunk! – on my desk.  It was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever seen. I knew that I could do something with him. So we went to Czechoslovakia and shot the video for Suzanne Vega’s Tired Of Sleeping. I didn’t really understand what he was shooting until we got back to the studio and I realised it was all match cuts. We fought like hell, because he was a student and used to getting everything, but the end result was stunning.

When Tarsem told me he was thinking about getting into commercials, I said: go and see RSA and Paul Weiland. A week later he called me back and said your enthusiasm is worth more to me than all that, do you want to do it?

We were cocky as hell in those early days. At first I thought I could do it all on my own, but quickly realised I wouldn’t be able to back any of the jobs if we got them. So we went round to Spots, Barry Myers’ production company, who immediately saw that Tarsem was good and said, ‘You boys go out there and be the snipers, knowing there’s a big tank regiment behind you. Now fuck off!’ And we did it.

Levi’s Swimmer is one of my favourite ads to have been involved in, because of everything it did for me and Tarsem, and it still looks beautiful. The job came off the back of REM’s Losing My Religion, which had won loads of MTV awards. We were up against Steve Lowe, Tony Scott and Paul Weiland, and then there was Tarsem with his curly-toe slippers and a farmer boy! I remember the client saying in the pre-production meeting that they’d watched the MTV Awards the night before, and then, ‘I don’t think we need to have this meeting, do you?’ [BBH’s] Nigel Bogle still says it’s the best pre-production meeting that he’s ever been in.

Things just took off from there. It was supermodels [Vauxhall Corsa’s Supermodel], and Smirnoff [Message In A Bottle] and more Levi’s [Washroom]. It was an adventure, a great learning curve, and someone was even good enough to pay us for it. You look back on it now and think, I can’t believe they let us do it, because we were just so young.

That five-year rollercoaster culminated in Nike’s Good vs Evil. There were internal wranglings at Spots; everyone was falling out with each other. Tarsem wanted to go off to the States, but I didn’t want to go with him. I thought we’d run our course. I suppose underneath it all I wanted to do it again. I liked spotting talent early and bringing it to fruition.

I got a load of really flattering and bizarre offers, and took on the maddest one of them all – agreeing to run Tony Kaye’s company for a year. Although it was never going to be anything other than chaos, no matter how hard I tried, it was a good experience. But I was determined to avoid a repeat of what had happened at Spots. I flew to LA on the 364th day and said, ‘Tone, I’m out, I’m setting up on my own.’ He said, ‘Call it [the company] Outsider.’ So I did.

That was nearly 20 years ago. In the first year, we won every award going. I don’t know if someone watches over us, I don’t know if it’s pure luck, but I had the office open for about 10 minutes and Howard Spivey, head of TV at DDB London called. They had no money, but wanted Outsider and Paul [Gay] to do a series of VW ads [Lamp Post, Hiccups and Chair]. I rang Paul and said: ‘I don’t care what the answer is because we’re doing them.’ So from our first job, we were off.

John Hegarty told me that your first three months [as a company] will dictate your next three years. It’s the soundest piece of advice I’ve ever been given. Tarsem and I were lucky because we got Swimmer early on and Outsider was lucky because we got VW. Then all we had to do was hold onto the horse as it took off.

I put my success as a producer down to the fact I have an eye. My mother and great-uncle were both brilliant artists; I can’t even paint a house. The artistic gene missed me completely. But I have had the good fortune to be able to spot talent in others. That applies to everything from my art collection – in 2000, I bought 15 Banksys for £50 a pop because I thought they were interesting – to my career.

There are plenty of young directors who come to Outsider having been viewed by other production companies who didn’t see what I saw. It’s great when that happens. It reminds me of a story about [jockey] Lester Piggott, who was called by a trainer to try out a horse for 50 guineas. He gets off the horse and the trainer says, ‘So what do you think?’ And Lester says, ‘No, I charge 50 guineas to ride the horse – if you want me to tell you what it’s like, it’ll cost you another 50 guineas!’

You can’t sell what you don’t believe in. Ultimately, we’re in a service industry – we service clients and advertising agencies, and we cannot ever get above ourselves and think we are artists. As long as we remain within that framework and understand the mutual benefits to both parties and service our clients to the maximum of our ability with talent that we thoroughly believe in, then we will do well.

In-house production will happen. Hey ho. But will it ever be as good? It’s no coincidence that Frank Budgen, Chris Palmer, Andy McLeod and others left agencies to pursue creativity on their own terms. And if it gets bigger, there will come a point where an agency will do a job and it’ll go horribly wrong. Every time I do a job, I have to rely on the brilliance of my team to make sure we get it right. If it does go wrong, I personally wear it [financially]. But agencies don’t.

The UK has an innate ability as a nation to be creative. Production is merely a part of that, and we are good at it because we are subconsciously influenced by this country’s outstanding creativity in art, design, literature, music and film. We have Jaguar E-Types, the Beatles and iconic artists such as Banksy and Hirst in our blood and in our genes. But we don’t pat ourselves on the back often enough.

The worst thing in the world is a league table: whether it’s schools or advertising, it does no one any favours. Outsider enters Cannes and the [British] Arrows and keeps away from the rest of it. You can get caught up with the whole awards thing and end up entering everything. Take everyone out for a bloody good meal instead!

The Arrows is incredibly fair in the way it works. It can’t be influenced by anyone else; it’s a non-profit organisation and the shareholders are all of us, not some nondescript company that’s coining it in. Cannes is a huge advertising conference now and very little to do with awards. Let’s face it, there’s an award for best T-shirt now. When Harvey Nichols won all those Lions [for Sorry, I Spent It On Myself] I had to call up Ben Priest [CCO, adam&eveDDB] and ask him what they were for. I’m not sure he really knew himself.

I’d love to work with [tonic water brand] Fevertree. I’d do it for nothing. Ten years ago, you’d hear ‘tonic water’ and think of one brand alone. Fevertree has come along and completely changed that.

There’s a lot to be said for working with people you really like. There are some directors I’d love to make an ad with, but the chances are slim. Personally it’s more important working with the people I like today.

Check, check and double-check is the advice I’d give to anyone aspiring to work as a producer. Remember that assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. I once worked for a big farmer named Doug Maddox in California, who told me: ‘Son, the only thing you need to know after you’ve milked 3,000 cows is how much goddamned milk is in the goddamned tank!’ From a business point of view, that’s absolutely right. Economically, know where you stand at all times.

If I could change one thing about myself, I’d have hair and weigh 12 stone.

My greatest regret? I would have loved to have directed. I tried it once and it was a fucking disaster. Which is why I have so much respect for directors now.

If I could time travel, I’d go back to the day Gaudí sold the idea of La Sagrada Familia and listen in. How he must have sold that in is phenomenal. I marvel not just at its beauty, but its very existence in the world. Surely today someone would have said, ‘Don’t be fucking stupid – it’s failed in research, it’s not happening.’

Like everyone, losing my family is my biggest fear. But day-to-day I have a fear of failure – of letting those who look up to you down, of getting things wrong. Oh, and I’m frightened of aubergines.

The closest I’ve been to death was a car crash in the San Joaquin Valley, California. I aquaplaned on my way to milking and the 63 Chevy truck I was driving hit a levy and started rolling across the field. I ended up hanging upside-down by my seat belt. By pure luck I was wearing the belt and the field wasn’t flooded. I was pretty shaken up, but there’s a funny ending: when I got back to the farm and told one of the boys what happened, he said: ‘So you drove your Chevy to the levy and the levy was dry?’

Beautiful things are my hobbies: I’m an eclectic collector. Motorbikes, classic cars, art, jewellery, cutlery by [1960s British silver- and goldsmith] Gerald Benney. I’ve just bought an 18th-century kilim in very bright, unusual colours, as if whoever made it was on acid. My wife’s livid. She said, ‘What are we going to do with it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but it’s really nice.’

My most prized possession? A signet ring in white gold with my initial, C, which was cast from [1960s celebrity jewellery designer] Andrew Grima’s own ring. Every mark, every indentation is the same: it’s a little piece of history. But you wouldn’t want to be hit by it.

I’m an extreme introvert; I like very much to be on my own. But I am by necessity forced to be an extrovert.

My heroes are Gaudí, Lucian Freud, Abraham Lincoln, Ferrari designer Scaglietti. A man called Henry Holt, who’s one of God’s good people. And my parents, for the hardships they went through taking two young children out of the safety net of Britain and bringing them up overseas.

Ignorance – whether that’s bad manners or not doing as you would be done by – is what makes me angry.

I’ve Googled myself for two reasons. Firstly, because my daughter did and she wasn’t at all complimentary. And secondly, because there is another person in the business called Robert Campbell [founder and creative director of creative agency BETA].

Professionally, I don’t care what people think about me. That’s for me and my maker to figure out. What would upset me is if people thought I was nasty. But generally I find the older you get, the less you give a shit.

The single greatest and worst human invention is the automobile. Cars are extraordinarily beautiful and have given us huge entertainment, but on the other hand they’ve killed quite a few people and really fucked up the world we live in.

If I was UK prime minister for the day, I would mandate that we stay in Europe. I would have a stern word with Boris [Johnson, former mayor of London, leading campaigner for ‘Brexit’]. I would scrap the schools league table system. I would take the first step towards making the National Health Service something that actually works. It saved my daughter’s life, so I’m a huge fan, but it needs sorting out. And I’d have a very good lunch.

[Advertising] has a shelf life of weeks and then it disappears, so my burning ambition is to make something which lasts. That’s why, through UNIT9 [Outsider’s innovation partner company], I’ve invested in the Hummingbird. It’s a fold-up bike made of carbon fibre which weighs just 6.5kg. That’s lighter than a Tour de France bike – you could pick it up with one finger. It’s being made by the same people who build the racing Aston Martins for Les Mans and is due on the market this year.

I would hope that my family would remember me as a fair and good father and husband. I’m not that fussed about the rest of it. I would feel – well, I wouldn’t actually feel anything, because I’d be dead – immensely proud if one or two of the people that came out of this business felt about me the way I did about Charlie Perotti.

Money is an irrelevancy. You can make a lot of it, and spend a lot of it on beautiful things, which I’ve been very privileged to do – but when my daughter was ill, I realised it was all completely irrelevant.

At the end of the day your family and your friends are what really matters.