They're Just Ads
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Edited transcripts of interviews with Greville Patterson (20/11/98, 27/11/98, 16/3/99) used in preparation of thesis They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising by Sylvia Bannah Submitted as partial requirement for the Postgraduate Diploma in Arts (History) The University of Queensland 1999 Applied History Centre Department of History The University of Queensland St Lucia 4072 14 ^ g S iO , p ^ /T p r - ' TU * a * .âirfíiiÍ>..:áií 3^&° They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 1 Interview transcripts Fri 20/11/98 - Side 1. [1973-76 Jones Knowles McCann Erickson] I was put on there as an art director, mostly doing layouts for various accounts like Rover Mowers, Trittons, J. B. Conlan menswear store, Queensland Permanent Building Society - they're gone, Wallace Bishop, Mathers. I guess they were all pretty well Brisbane based accounts. There was a mixture of press and television advertising. I got to make my first TV commercial there for Wallace Bishop You need Timing\ I did that to a 50's pop song, by Sam Cooke. It was the first TV commercial where I actually sat down to write storyboards, camera movements and all that sort of stuff. Ronny [Johanson] shot it and Max [Bannah] did the end animation. It would have been done around 1975. I've got an Art Director's Annual, the Art Director's Club had only just been formed then, and we got an award for it - Best TV Commercial - which was a bit of a surprise. I wrote my first jingle there, the Adsett Treatment. Bob Knowles was the writer. I almost cautiously showed him this jingle I'd written and said, What do you think? What do you reckon? He said that's terrific, I'll take that into Bill Bristow - because I was like the new boy. Bob said to Bill, I think you should have a listen to it. I'll drag Grev in and get him to sing it for you. So they went for it, we recorded it at 4BC and it ran for years. Bob Reece was quite a musician, he played bass guitar. He organised the music for that ad. I was employed as an art director. I suppose I started to cross the line then between being a writer and an art director. But I think advertising is like that, it's an ideas business. Pictures generally come with words and vice versa so you tend to do a bit of both, its not uncommon. I was there for four years. Bill Bristow was the creative director and he said, 'You'll have to leave to get past me, to be your own person a bit more', so I took this job at Peter Donnelly which was really a very low profile agency. I think I took the job because I didn't know where else to go. I'd reached the ceiling at Jones Knowles - it was a situation where someone else was the creative director and he got to make all the TV commercials - and so he would and so he should - so you just have to leave to get to do a bit more of that stuff yourself. At least twenty people worked there. It was a reasonable size for a Brisbane agency. [1976-77 Peter Donnelly Advertising] Peter Donnelly had this little tiny agency underneath the Story Bridge at Kangaroo Point. It was virtually a house that had been converted into an agency - a very low profile agency. He was a bit of a frustrated commercial artist, so every time you wanted to do an ad he'd come up beside you and do these little sketches and drawings and if you did anything different you'd be in trouble. It was a locally owned agency. Garnsey's was as well. But the rot had started to set in by that stage, with all these multinationals that were coming in. Jones Knowles was McCann Erickson. McCann Erickson came out of New York. Leo Burnetts was American. [1978-79 Ogilw & Mather - Brisbane] I was there for about a year when suddenly George Muskens arrived in town. He was a bit of a They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 2 Interview transcripts madman. But he was looking for an art director. Somebody recommended me. So at this very conservative, held-under-the-thumb Peter Donnelly Advertising, George broadsided into the parking lot one afternoon in his hotted up Torana and I started becoming a bit of a partner to George. He was starting Ogilvy and Mather with Steven Trebble. How're you gonna treat your dinky di doggy tonight was the first Australian thing I'd done. At Jones Knowles I used an American pop song for Wallace Bishop. You can count on a Queenslander was the first really parochial thing I ever wrote. I actually wrote 'You can bank on a Queenslander' and when I presented it a fellow called Graham Hart who was the marketing manager of the Bank of Queensland said no, you can bank on the Commonwealth, how about 'You can count on a Queenslander'. It was almost like - 'Why didn't I think of that?' So while I say I wrote You can count on a Queenslander twenty years ago, he actually put a word in there that was pretty central to it. Doug Parkinson sang it, which was a bit of fun. I don't know why we didn't get a Queenslander to sing it - I don't think anyone presented themselves at that stage who had the kind of voice that Doug had, with the strength that was in it and earthiness. Allan Border was in it - you can count on a Queenslander when it comes to staying in. It had all these Queenslanders in it that you could count on for different things. O ur land. Hooker Centenary was a collection of suburbs - there was Jindalee and Mt Ommaney. It was selling some houses but a lot of land as well. It was an anthem, framing this thing up as our land and giving it a stature beyond what it probably had. [1979-81 McCann Erickson - Sydney] I would have been about thirty by the end of my time at Ogilvy & Mather. I still didn't have much awareness of world advertising. I think I was still very Australia bound in my vision of what advertising could be. It probably wasn't until going to Sydney and getting exposed to a lot of the Coke stuff that I started becoming more aware. At head office of an international agency you'd be exposed to monthly reels that they'd send out. They had a heavy American bias, so for better or for worse a lot of the influences that were coming were American. Before this most of your influences from outside would have been whatever you saw on television. While O & M was an International agency, I don't remember seeing many reels of their stuff. There would have been a little bit at Jones Knowles from McCann Erickson, but usually there was some visiting fireman would come out, stand in the boardroom for half an hour, show a few commercials, put up some graphs and tell everyone how everything was going to be fabulous, and a fortnight later of course it wasn't, so half the staff would be fired. It was probably at that point that I became most exposed to international stuff and having to cop an international line that you were writing to. Like Have a Coke and a Smile. At the time I can remember thinking, and I still think, that was the worst and most trite line you could ever walk into because when you were a kid there were lines like The Real Thing, and Things go better with Coke and all that sort of stuff that seemed to be so much a part of the culture and got through to you as pieces of advertising. I don't think a line like Have a Coke and a Smile was ever going to do that to you. It was so un-Australian. They did that every two or three years - a new international line would come out and everywhere would have to adapt to it. So this was like the global They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 3 Interview transcripts campaign. They'd have what they called pattern material that would be like a library of dozen commercials that they would have preferred that you ran because they didn't trust Buenos Aires or wherever to make a commercial to the standard that they wanted. The only thing was that they probably wouldn't have been a good cultural fit if they'd done that. So we struggled with this line Have a Coke and a Smile. Prior to this they'd done more gimmicky commercials. Remember that big ball commercial, and there had been a super surfing commercial. Doug Parkinson had sung the music for that and it was all very hip and young and teenagery. But having done these device commercials they wanted to get it back to storyline commercials. They felt the device commercials ignored basic product things like Coca Cola and ice - they had no refreshing values about them. So we all got dragged back to the basics which everyone thought was pretty boring. But it was quite interesting how it showed on the graph that when sales had diminished, oftentimes after really groovy images were presented, then they'd get back to the core values of their products - like Coca cola is refreshing.