Shark's Tale

Y&R used to have a little client called Andersen Consulting. Not a lot of money but brilliant creative work.

I worked on the business in London for a while. The problem in London was that the target audience was unknown. Who made the decision to hire expensive IT consultants? Was it the managing director? Or was it the lowly head of IT? Perhaps it was the Finance Director or even the media director (no need to capitalise that one) Being a reasonably clever but essentially lazy chap I could not be bothered coding all eleven targets into the computer. So I devised an elegant solution. We would target Economist readers.

At this time I did not read the Economist but I understood from their poster campaign that they targeted "decision makers". This meant that I only had to use one code on the computer. It also meant that I was guaranteed a fabulous lunch with the Economist at a restaurant of my choosing.

A couple of years later I was working in Warsaw & who should appear with a small budget but Andersen again. The client, William Anal Englishman as I recall, told me that the target was Economist readers. It took supreme will power not to shout "I know, it was my idea". His budget was about £10,000 including production. Not a lot.

The question was which one of the many brilliant images to use from our New York office. Again being an efficient chap I conducted some quick research amongst finance professionals to understand their opinion. I went to our CFO George Szyman (or Jerzy Simon depending on his mood) & asked him which one he liked best. The shark he replied. New York did not feel that my survey was statistically robust. They insisted that we waste £2000 conducting a proper survey. So we spent 20% of the media budget finding out that several decision makers preferred "shark". See the TV ad here.

My small budget was now tiny. But being a sunny sort of fellow I saw necessity as the mother of invention. Big beautiful airport posters were £100,000 for a year but cheap crappy posters on the road to the airport were only around £300 a month. I asked the wonderful Malgosia Wegierek of penguins/Zywiec fame to book as many sites as possible on Zwirki i Wigury. After production costs we could afford about 17. Several people thought that we had bought badly as there were so many sites in close proximity. I would ask them how many posters we had nationally? Probably 2000 they would say. "Just 17... & you noticed the campaign" I would happily reply.