The Creative Detectorists of adam&eveDDB

Former group CCO Ben Priest, ECD Ben Tollett and CCO Rick Brim tell shots about the many heroes – including brave clients such as John Lewis and Harvey Nichols – who’ve helped them seek out advertising gold

“We’ve been going for 10 years, and in those 10 years we haven’t done a bad job,” says outgoing group CCO, Ben Priest, of the agency he co-founded in 2008 with James Murphy, David Golding and Jon Forsyth. “We’ve gone from 10 people to 700, done some nice work, hired some good people, made some waves.” It’s a neat but entirely too modest summary of one of adland’s biggest success stories, a creative juggernaut groaning under the weight of countless awards and accolades: seven Grands Prix; Cannes Lions and shots’ Agency of the Year in 2014; top of the Gunn Report in 2017 – to list but a few.

Among the good people Priest has hired in his time – and who have helped him raise adam&eveDDB to these dizzying heights – are ECD Ben Tollett and recently anointed CCO Rick Brim, but the real hero, they insist, is the company itself. “It’s been very much a company-wide, group effort. It’s not everyone working for one terrifying egomaniac. No big egos, no prima donnas. It’s about the agency being famous for our clients’ work,” states Priest.

"[Big campaigns are] the most difficult type of work to do when [there is] still some sort of creative dignity to [them]. But we weren’t going to sit in the corner and noodle about with obscure and niche businesses."

Forget creative overlords – brilliant stars around which the rest of the agency orbit – the trio see themselves rather more prosaically like the detectorists of the eponymous TV series, in which middle-aged men doggedly roam the British countryside, waving metal detectors like modern-day divining rods in search of treasure among the old ring pulls and shotgun cartridges. Except in this case, it’s golden ideas, not Roman coins, they’re looking to uncover. And just as detectoring depends on good fortune, adam&eve’s success, says Brim, is simply down to a “run of bloody good luck”. 

Above: John Lewis' The Long Wait

Of all the treasure troves this motley crew have unearthed, their brilliant John Lewis work must top the list. It all kicked off in 2009 with The Feeling, but it was 2011’s The Long Wait that propelled the brand into the collective consciousness and which, with follow-up spots including Monty the Penguin, Buster the Boxer and last year’s Moz the Monster, have made the retailer’s Christmas advert as much of a great British tradition as bone-dry turkey and dozing off in front of the Queen’s speech. 

Above: Rick Brim

But there are plenty of other gems: Harvey Nichols’ Sorry, I Spent It On Myself, which turned a range of crap gifts – toothpicks, paperclips, sink plugs – into must-have items (they were changing hands for 10 times the retail price on eBay, apparently); Marmite Gene Project, a scientific research programme investigating whether the “love it or hate it” reaction is genetically pre-determined (it is); and Come Together, a short for H&M that, says Brim, is “the purest form of Wes Anderson, in a commercial sense, that he’s given to any brand, including Prada.” Not only did those campaigns garner every creative award going, they achieved the holy grail of advertising: becoming pop-culture moments. These were ads to look forward to, watch, re-watch, laugh at, tear up over and talk about.

Above: H&M's Come Together

That, says Priest, was all down to a “very important cultural decision” – perhaps the most heroic statement of intent the agency ever made – that from the outset they would try to do big campaigns, for big brands, that would have a “mass-market, sledgehammer” effect: “That’s the most difficult type of work to do when it still has some sort of creative dignity to it. But we weren’t going to sit in the corner and noodle about with obscure and niche businesses. That’s not what we were about.”

Of course, that bravery has been matched by clients willing to take a leap of faith. It’s a ballsy brand, says Brim, that agrees to take its defining feature, a rainbow, out of its product in honour of London’s LGBT Pride celebrations, as Skittles has done for the last two years. Ditto the decision to use CCTV footage of shoplifters, identities obscured by cartoon faces, as Harvey Nichols did. “If we are to say there are heroes, then it’s the clients,” Brim concludes, “we just try our luck. There’s a whole body of work I can’t believe we got anyone to say ‘yes’ to.”

Above: Ben Tollett

Clients aside, this entire article could probably be dedicated to the trio’s many other heroes, though, as Priest points out, “It’s really important to have them because there are so many fucking villains in advertising.” His list includes David Abbott, Chris Palmer and Mark Denton, and his godfather Marc Antonio (“who had to sit through a year of the world’s worst student book after lunch on Sundays and never once asked ‘What the fuck are you doing?’”).

Brim credits his old art teacher “who made me feel it was all right not to be hugely academic and follow what I wanted to do”, and Sir John Hegarty for making advertising “cool” through BBH’s ads for Levi’s, while Tollett pays tribute to “all the people who’ve helped me through the business”: Erik Kessels and Johan Kramer, Robert Saville and Mark Waites, Tim Delaney, Jeremy Craigen, and his ex-creative partner, Emer Stamp. “I would never have made the journey without her.” 

“If we are to say there are heroes, then it’s the clients. We just try our luck."

One name they all agree is a hero, though, is director Dougal Wilson, whom they’ve worked with on numerous John Lewis spots, because “He’s as nice as he is good. When I started, there were some directors who’d [make you] a great film, but you’d feel like you needed to be jet-hosed down in the garden afterwards,” says Priest, “then Dougal came along and has shown the world that you can be brilliant and don’t have to be bothered about trying to appear a certain way. He’s all about the work.”

Above: Harvey Nichols' Sorry, I Spent It On Myself

With Priest cashing his chips in and leaving adland for good, who does he tip as a future creative hero? He’s loathe to name names for fear of poaching (“We’ll nominate them and then wave goodbye to them!”), but thinks the key is being an all-rounder and self-starter. “You need to have the concept for an idea, know how to take it to market: not just hand over a script and wait for feedback,” agrees Brim. “You’ve got to hustle. It’s not about being gobby and in-your-face, though, it’s about using the channels and tools available to you.”

And being a great collaborator, too, adds Tollett. “[Creatives] can’t have a vision from up on high that everyone has to follow; everyone helps mould that vision and make that idea: account people, planners, technologists.” While the modern creative might boast different interpersonal skills to the admen of yore, one quality that makes a true creative hero won’t change: the ability to come up with “blindingly simple insights that unlock a challenge in the agency”. 

Above: Ben Priest

It’s the doers – the detectorists braving the drizzle and mud – who count in the world of adam&eve, which is why the villains of the piece, for Priest, are the mere “talkers”. “The industry’s in a weird place,” he sighs. “There’s a lot of fucking chat. There’s a lot of people broadcasting their views from the sidelines, telling what the right and wrong thing to do is, but when you look at what they do in their day job, you think: hmm. We like the people whose point of view is visible in their work instead.” 

“There are positive villains and negative villains,” clarifies Brim, “and the people just wanging on relentlessly about a point of view, who don’t actually do anything, they’re negative villains, and they just get on your nerves. But the positive villains are what keep it interesting: they drive you to want to beat their work.” 

Tollett agrees. “Anti-heroes keep you struggling. Obstacles, challenges, different points of view… that’s fundamental to making great work.”