FOCUS: CREATIVE SPECIAL - Falling, with style. "It's worth it (not being mediocre)"

Trevor Beattie, creative director of TBWA GGT Simons Palmer in the UK and creator of the controversial FCUK campaign, put on a show-stopping presentation at the recent MEDIA-organised Creative Workshop. No stranger to controversy, he has broken rules, flouted norms and riled his peers. But this is one rebel with a heart and guts; he is a volunteer worker at a Rape Crisis Centre and has flown in a Russian MiG. The art of prosthetics has come a long way since the blissfully legless days of chaps who walled up offices in the dead of night, threw typewriters out of Soho windows, and drove their sackloads of money home in gloriously obvious phallic symbols, heading out to renovated barns in the home counties, a little after lunch. But for TBWA London creative director Trevor Beattie, being legless is still a basic requirement for those in the business of creating communication messages that work. "There's always going to be someone who runs across the minefield and gets his legs blown off, to enable the gormless to traipse after him years later when he's cleared a path," he said. At a show-stopping presentation at MEDIA's recent Creative Workshop in Hong Kong, Mr Beattie's speech was a one-and-a-half hour journey through the photo album of his life, covering censorship, politics, philosophy, sport, hope and aspiration, in a series of slides and video cuts reflecting his understanding of 360 degree marketing. Opening footage featured the live television interview with Monica Lewinsky discussing her unfortunately stained dress, then moved to the commercial break and a spot which ran immediately afterwards - for Vanish washing tablets ("Powerful Stain Removers"), with the end line "Everything has vanished". Mr Beattie's comment: "A quality piece of media buying and a quality piece of creative thinking" which took a "pretty pony ad" from a three to an eight. It was an inspired opening for a presentation to creatives in Asia-Pacific, and the perfect twist - to open with an example of high creativity that was about media buying. "It's about what you do, and how you react to the world around you," he said. "To be mediocre is very easy. It takes a bit more effort not to be mediocre, and you might get told off for it, you might get unpopular for it. Tough. But it's worth it." Unashamedly banging the drum for his clients (and contrary to industry rumour, he does not have a PR agent for himself, he assured MEDIA), Mr Beattie's ability to rile people is paying off in dollars, by the sackload for clients who get it. The FCUK campaign for French Connection UK did not attract any attention at all he said, until a columnist at the London Daily Mail published an article of pure invective, targeted personally at Mr Beattie. Referring to journalist Linda Lee Potter of the Daily Mail as a "hateful old hag who writes for a newspaper which thinks Margaret Thatcher is still in charge", the article was the catalyst to what has since become one of the industry's most renowned public relations coups to surround an advertising campaign since Benetton's bloodied army clothes at the time of the Gulf War. Mr Beattie's response? He put the article on French Connection T-shirts - more sales, more news - an FCUK advertising formula. Being able to make and be news is, said Mr Beattie, the required skill for those involved in the creation of communications messages that work. "It's getting very crowded out there," he said. "There are over 300 TV channels, everything's got 'dotcom' stuck on the end, no one really cares, no one really wants to see your ads - why should they? They've got better things to do. It's our job increasingly to try and stop them." For French Connection UK, controversy and ad-spin contributed to an overwhelmingly successful campaign, which has resulted in record sales and exponential growth for the previously unremarkable UK fashion brand. Held responsible by the press for "every sin on Earth" from teenage pregnancy and youth drug addiction to the Bosnian war when the FCUK campaign launched in Britain in 1998, Mr Beattie is currently working his last job in advertising he said, as creative director at TBWA London. "You must be totally aware of the environment in which your ads are running. And having been aware of it, to then try and do it differently," he said. "FCUK is an account which reacts to its environment. We will try to make news, react to news and be news - we're a fashion company." Taxi boards running FCUK were removed overnight by the mayor of New York, schools around the world banned the wearing of FCUK T-shirts, and a worldwide debate on issues of censorship continues to hit the news whenever the FCUK banner is raised. A concept in itself, FCUK advertising resonates throughout Mr Beattie's reasoning, product and public persona. Hard-edged shock tactic communications, with a reliance on gratuitously 'sure-win' tits and bums, create immediate and lasting bottomline results. With the need for communications messages to do and be more than the traditional advertising of above and below-the-line increasingly understood, attendant controversial ad-spin is a pure FCUK advertising component. A resplendent 'up-yours' to anyone who disagrees - the pure opportunism of FCUK advertising resulted in increased sales and further press coverage with each objection raised. As a business philosophy, it can't be faulted. Controversial ad-spin is not a new concept, but it's an art which Mr Beattie has down to a tee. Originator of the infamous "Hello Boys" campaign for Wonderbra, which resulted in huge controversy in the press, and some delightfully coy concept-adaptation work for the Asian markets, Mr Beattie, who also works as a journalist, maintains a simmering relationship with the news media, a critical component of his marketing mix. When the 40ft Pretty Polly billboards campaign broke in the UK last year, Mr Beattie went to enormous lengths to gain the attention of a neglectful press. In response to a brief to get Pretty Polly legs noticed, he turned the billboards depicting towering legs which stop tantalisingly just short of anticipation, pushing a massive 40ft of expectation into the London skyline. When a promised front page story covering the legs failed to materialise, a relentless Mr Beattie hired a helicopter which circled the Dockland headquarters of the unperfoming organ, trailing a 90ft canvass of the said neglected legs. Needless to say, they got the front page the next day. Influences and mentors in Mr Beattie's life run from Graham Fink ("probably the single best man in advertising") to Buzz Lightyear ("because he thought he could fly") to Muhammad Ali ("the greatest adman who ever lived"). In a world where some criticism is more equal than others, Mr Beattie does not choose to answer - or indeed, put on T-shirts - widely published criticism of the Wonderbra and Pretty Polly campaigns for their reliance on outmoded representations of women's sexuality. When asked his opinion of claims that the ads promote sexual stereotypes that may arguably be dangerous to women, Mr Beattie simply chooses not to respond. The Playtex Christmas greeting which appeared on a 50ft poster projection on Battersea Tower in London was a case in point, also serving as a fantastic business development tool for TBWA. With the headline "A Christmas Greeting for all our Viewers", the poster showed the eponymous Playtex breasts with the endline, "Remember when you were happy with just a pair of oranges". It was a howling, perfect ad-spin success story that also helped TBWA win the French Connection business. What Mr Beattie will tell you, however, is what he does when he's not making ads - for the past eight years, he has been working without pay for the Rape Crisis Centre in the UK. A laudable act in an otherwise Machiavellian world? Perhaps. A function of spin? Maybe. And when he's not working for Rape Crisis, he's flying Russian MiG fighter jets. With a passion for airplanes and an empathy with Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear, he set off last year with the mission to make Buzz fly. "If you get a great big bag full of dollars and give it to the Russian airforce, they will strap you in the front seat of two-seater MiG 25 Foxbat D, which is the world's fastest airplane," he said. "When you reach 90,000 feet you go to weightlessness. I figured if I smuggled Buzz Lightyear on board when I get to zero gravity, I can let him go and he'll fly, just like he always said he could. So I did, for the hell of it." And he did it flying in the face of safety regulations which state that all objects in the cockpit must be tethered - otherwise, upon re-entering gravity, the loose objects could cause fatal crashes. "So I smuggled Buzz on board, unthethered," said an unperturbed Mr Beattie. "I wanted Buzz to fly because he deserves to." What's the bottom line here? A fantastic experience for Mr Beattie, no doubt, though you may need to think twice about whether or not it is PC to be putting money into Russian army coffers. A great story. Pure hedonism of the new age, that keys in perfectly with current social wish fulfillment. There's a world of people out there travelling to infinity and beyond every weekend, though in the far less glamorous surroundings of the world's seedier clubs and for far less capital investment. It's a perfect example of Mr Beattie's opening stance: "It pays to dictate your environment". The path is worth following - Buzz did not fly, Mr Beattie changed the environment. Presumably it's a good job too, that Buzz didn't ricochet untethered around the cockpit, making them crash and die. What this comes down to, is a question of style. Mr Beattie's style is opportunistic, hard-nosed, gratuitous, and fundamentally Machiavellian. He causes friction - and spin - wherever he goes, whatever he does. But who ever suggested that genius or art, let alone good ads, could be born out of compliance? We, like Buzz, are still falling. Trevor Beattie just does it with style.

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