Ball has witnessed more change than most. He joined the fledgling Ogilvy & Mather New York in 1960, when there were fewer than 100 on the staff.
Twenty-five years later in Asia, he founded one of the world's most creative agency brands, The Ball Partnership. Today, he breeds cattle, serves on Australia's National Trust and the board that runs the Australian capital, Canberra. David Ogilvy is still his advertising hero. "David was, to my mind, the most important advertising person in the 20th century. Like most people in advertising, he was egocentric, but he had something that no other agency had, or has now - a culture, which was written down and taught by gentlemen with brains. I was grateful to have spent 25 years of my life with a guy who was the true genius of the advertising industry."
Since Ball left the business, media departments have unbundled and conglomerates have grown bigger. Advertising heroes are thin on the ground. "Everybody has their heroes. Martin Sorrell isn't one of mine, because he did it through finance. I don't think Martin's place in advertising will ever be what Bill Bernbach's or David Ogilvy's is."
Significantly, it took two Australians - Michael Ball and Ian Batey - to change the face of Asian advertising. "Australians are like American or English people, but with two differences - brains and entrepreneurship, which is part of the Australian psyche. We are taught to be individualists, whereas Americans are taught to do things in teams. Australians can exploit opportunities. Even people like Ken McKenzie could earn a feed in Asia.
Ian Batey was a guy who was smart enough and passionate enough to jump off the corporate train and start a company determined to build a brand.
"It's easy to say today that Singapore Airlines is a great airline but, at that time, it was probably nothing more than a wing and a prayer. Ian had the guts to stake his whole future on it, and he did a bloody good job, and in the history of Asian advertising, nobody has staked his balls on a brand the way Ian did on SIA. Singapore owes him a great debt of gratitude."
The Ball Partnership was arguably one of the world's most creative agency brands. Has that era gone forever? "Not entirely," Ball muses, "but custodians of major brands are not interested in great creativity. Not for their main brands, but possibly for the peripheral brands."
Mention creativity and Ball takes pains to communicate his objection to current creative practice. "David Ogilvy had the intelligence and integrity to say creativity means that which will draw attention to the product.
Today's creativity is that which will draw attention to me, the creative person." Ogilvy was first and foremost a researcher, argues Ball. "The Rolls Royce ad wasn't a feat of creativity, but a feat of blending creativity and research. It is absolutely absurd to suggest that a client should gamble not just his advertising budget but the future of his brand on the presumptuous inexperience of some yahoo who thinks that his idea should be superior to the product proposition." Ball references Bill Bernbach's Volkswagen work. "He built one brand in the US, Volkswagen, because he delivered the story well, and it was a totally different story to anything else. Advertising is about capturing a niche and Bill Bernbach did that well. The problem was that it was emulated by people of lesser talent, and they thought, well, if you simply say something relatively outrageous about a brand you will succeed. But it will never succeed if you don't have the right product for the right people at the right time at the right price."
