My First Meeting - Drambuie meets Christo

When I was a young media planner I moved to Young & Rubicam to experience full service advertising. This was in the old days when creatives & media people actually sat in the same meeting.

My first "full service" meeting was with a Scottish client Drambuie, which is a sickly blend of whisky, honey & herbs. There was also a sickly blend of client, distributor & advertising agency at the meeting. Apparently we had agreed with the distributor IDV that we would be doing a print campaign. But no-one had told the conservative Scottish client this fact.

Print was enjoying a renaissance in the UK with brands such as Haagen Daz & Boddingtons buying the outside back covers of magazines & calling it the "poster in the living room". Y&R proposed copying the famous artist Christo in covering the world's famous sites with the golden liqueur of Drambuie. I thought this was a brilliant idea. The client didn't.

The meeting started badly when I introduced myself to one of the grey haired men in the room. I didn't know if he was from Drambuie or the distributor. It turned out he was the Chairman of Y&R. The meeting then got worse.

Drambuie didn't want Christo, they didn't want posters in the living room & they didn't want Y&R any more. They wanted what they had got for the last 40 years; TV at Christmas.

I thought the meeting was wonderful. Very creative. A sparky honest conflict of ideas. A dramatic discussion of different media. The suits thought it was nightmare.

Drambuie got their dull Christmas campaign and Y&R was fired in the New Year.