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 ^

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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. When they’d start injecting that sort of stuff back into their advertising then sales would go back up. Pretty basic stuff.

There was the directive to do storyline commercials. I wasn't really strong on what was supposedly storyline, having been someone who wrote the jingle and put pictures to it. But we managed to do it. They still wanted music but through the pictures there had to be a bit of a story going. So I got exposed to my first big budget commercials with Coke. In the one about ? coming to town and breaking the drought. We built the facades of the little town in the Currumbin quarry and shot it there. That was fun, getting a bit of a taste for film production.

This was all working to international accounts with international rules. Maggi had a rule book that they sent all around the world to show you how to shoot food - it had to be lit from the front and all this sort of stuff. But ever so slowly we managed to break all the rules and did a half reasonable job on it I think.

Levis sounds like it would be a terrific account to work on when you were thirty but I think by that stage Levis was confused about who it was. Once upon a time Levis was just blue jeans. This was the first stage of trying to grow the product by introducing a female range of jeans. Suddenly there were pink green and blue jeans or pink green and red jeans. They were becoming very confused about who they were, so it was getting harder to do a good mainstream Levis commercial.

I went to Sydney with George Muskens. He was the driving force behind us going down there. I don't think I would have gone if it hadn't been for him.

There was a lot of American influence there. Levis was so tough to work on. I think it was half the reason I came back to Brisbane. They had two sets of research you had to go through - qualitative and quantitative. You'd sit in on qualitative research group for Levis and everyone would agree that there was this image thing about Levis that was to do with the loner, he was very laid back and very much in control of his life and all that sort of stuff. You'd go away and do a music track and put together a storyboard and come back again with it. And everyone would say, Yes that's exactly what Levis is all about. Then they'd put it in this primitive research thing called quantitative where people would sit and watch the commercial with a dial that they'd turn to They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 4 Interview transcripts

register excitement value. How you could possibly do that I don't know. Everything that succeeded in qualitative failed in quantitative. Until we decided sex was the only way out of it. To preserve the loner image, the plot was that this guy was leaving this girl. Eventually it got through both types of research with really good results - so somehow we'd managed to crack the system. But it did come through as slightly negative with the women who thought he was a bit of a bastard for leaving the girl. So then we went ahead and produced this commercial which in 1981 cost about $110,000. It was shot by the guy who shot The Man from Snowy River. It was set in this American diner and we had rain machines - the production values were fantastic.

When the commercial was finished and researched it got an even bigger negative result from women so they decided not to run it. We said hang on we'll make the sequel - he'll go after her and she'll leave him - anything if you just want to balance the score. We tried re-editing it, we put different music to it but everything we did made it worse. We gave up in the end, and decided you just can't please these two forms of research. It was never shown.

Richard McCarthy, the director actually wrote to advertising magazines at the time, complaining about research systems and the injustice that had been dealt to this commercial. He was really proud of it. It was very well done. It was called The Original stands Alone.

It was very hard in those days to be creative with these international products. There was a certain point in the commercial by which the brand had to be mentioned. There had to be x number of drinking shots and the person had to be seen to be holding the can in a particular way so you could read the brand of it. So there were all those things that these big multinational brands insist upon that don't lend themselves obviously to anything creative. You have a preconception of what they want from the start - it will have to have a certain amount of energy to it, it will have to fit in with the Australian summer, all that sort of stuff - so the room to move creatively wasn't that fantastic. It was very different from what I'd been doing with George in Brisbane. It was like being dumped in a bit of a vertical takeoff, being smacked around the ears with all this international stuff.

S. Did you decide it was time to get out?

Yes I was reduced to a gibbering idiot. When I left, after all these research sessions, I had at least 25 jingles presented to me on a cassette tape which I tried to play a year or so ago. There was virtually nothing left on it - all that for one ad. Some survived the qualitative research quite well but were too laid back or whatever to get through the quantitative stuff, which was making it difficult because qualitative was saying yeah, laid back, cool, he's the loner, that sort of stuff, but when it came to turning the excitement button, the ingredients weren't there. I don't know how that can work. I don't think my brain is connected that consciously to my hand.

S. Was research a new experience at McCanns?

I think you can safely say that everything before that was gut feel, instinct, and probably the clients were pretty much the same way, if they liked the idea they went with it and if they felt it was the right way they'd do it. I think research was in its early days. The system had been brought in from the States. They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 5 Interview transcripts

S. What about when you came back to Brisbane? You worked on big accounts. Were they research driven as well?

Fosters was certainly researched. I don't think it was done on Peters. Fosters head office was in Melbourne and they were advertising around the world. When we did Have a Fosters instead I don't know that it was researched but I know some of the other beer ads were - like Carlton and XXXX. I don't know what it says, but I don't think most of the stuff that I've ever had researched got through. Whether that's good or bad I don't know. It certainly saw a lot of ideas that I thought were reasonable, die in research.

I remember one of the things I did for Levis - there was a horse like Pegasus, with wings etc. so it was fairly fanciful stuff. I can't remember the plot, but there was a bloke in his Levis riding this horse and you'd say to people in the research sessions - what this is about is this man who rides this horse blah blah blah ... and because we don't have any film footage to show you what that looks like, we'll be showing you drawings. So you'd get drawings done as realistically as you could and maybe you'd even put them on videotape and make up a mock commercial. And you'd ask people to imagine what it would be like on the day - it would be a real horse, a real guy, that sort of stuff. You'd show the commercial and usually the first comment would be ‘I don't think you should do it in animation. I don't think drawings would be very good.’ So it just seemed that whatever you said made no impression. It happened time and time again. The clients didn't have the capacity to see it any differently either. They'd almost see the comment that it shouldn't be in animation as 'they've written that one off. The points of contact seemed to be very few. It was like operating at arm's length. These people relied totally on ticks in boxes so there was no real human communication and in the end you felt like you were going mad. You were so totally isolated that you couldn't discuss it, - unless the ticks were in the boxes and the needle went over 120 - then everything was fine. What else was there to talk about? I can't see how it brought about any good commercials in those days.

At the same time I remember Mojo did an ad for Amco Jeans, the theme was Every Amco tells a story. It would have come out of them all sitting around having a chat about it saying I can remember some of the best times I had in my jeans etc. And because of the sort of people they were no one would even think of researching their stuff. They wouldn't come near them or even suggest it because they were advertising gods. But we were victims of the stuff. Later on I got to meet people like Hugh Mackay who said you can't research concepts. You can research attitudes. You need to understand the times you're living in and make sure the product fits in with that. It was just like sanity. Understand the attitudes of who you're talking to, and give the people who are going to write ads that sort of information which they probably already know anyway. That sort of sanity didn't prevail. It probably still doesn't much. He seems to be one of the most unlistened to people which is a real shame because he keeps dropping pearls of wisdom along the way, all the time. Its been quite frustrating that sort of stuff.

[1982 George Patterson Advertising]

George Pattersons employed about 30 people. I think Dick Marks tipped me into something there. I remember telling him I was going mad in Sydney and I think he spoke to John Cornwell who ran George Pattersons. I was up here shooting a Coke commercial They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 6 Interview transcripts

SIDE II

Bank of Queensland. It would have been good to have kept whatever the brief was. But sometimes there wasn't a brief, sometimes it was a conversation. It might have been - the Bank of Queensland wants an anthematic theme or something. The brief probably was to say that the Bank of Queensland understood local people's needs more than any other bank - more than the National or Commonwealth. The brief was probably to be local in some way.

Waddaweneedl was a commercial for Mortein. I'd left McCanns over a year before and I had my own freelance business. The guy who ran McCann Erickson rang me up and said, 'Grev, we want you to do an ad for us, an ad for Mortein - and the brief is to make Mortein Australian again. See you later, I'm not going to tell you any more about it. Lets not complicate this - make Mortein Australian again.’ So it was a very specific brief. This wasn't me just going and sitting in a comer by myself thinking, T reckon this is what Mortein should do'. It was to a brief but it certainly had the benefit of a very clear singular idea. They'd dropped lines like When you're on a good thing, stick to it which was like an Aussie icon, and Louie the Fly. So they'd lost all that. Then they'd gone off into a few years of John Laws wandering around with a can of Mortein. But it was a John Laws ad, it didn't have anything to do with Mortein after a while. So they basically wanted to get back to being an Australian leaning post that they had been. I didn't coin the expression but someone said there are leaning post brands in society, you know, even though its a rotten fly spray its one o f those commodity things that was there since we were kids.

But anyway, it wasn't researched, it had a really tight specific brief - two words - 'Be Australian'. Max [Bannah] did the animation, Dick [Marks] shot the pictures, I had a bit of a sing, and it went off to win awards in Hollywood and New York, whereas Levis went round and round in circles getting nowhere and didn't even get shown - its was crazy stuff.

S. What international awards have you won?

Mortein got a New York award of some sort. There was a thing called Hollywood Film and Television Awards and the one it won was the best combination of live action and animation. I think I've actually got a tape of the show it was on - it was featured in a TV show in America.

There were some commercials I did at Mojo for DB Draught, which was a New Zealand beer - using letters. There is a story behind just about every ad. Don Morris briefed us in Sydney and said we want to do something for DB draught in New Zealand. He said New Zealand's like Australia was about ten years ago - not confident about itself but finally starting to find its feet, so lets fuel the fire and do something that's really parochial - you know the sort of stuff boys. Just write one of those Aussie commercials for New Zealand - lets celebrate being ourselves. So Jo and I hopped into that together and I think we came up with something like 'My kind of country, my kind of beer'. So we went off to New Zealand to present this stuff to the board feeling like we were champions of the world and we were going to kill them. But a couple of nights before we went I did these little posters with a black background, and the line might say 'You must be ready for one by now'. The lettering was white on black on the poster but the 'D' and the B' were yellow and that's all it was. I showed them to Jo and he said 'Yeah that's a cute idea, bring those too and we'll show them'. They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 7 Interview transcripts

So we presented our stuff - we'd done the whole thing - we'd written the music, produced animatics, spent half the agency's money doing it. And as we presented it there was absolute deathly silence. We knew it wasn't going too well. So we presented a couple of commercials. Then the guy who was chairing the meeting said, 'Well I've got my feelings about all this, but anyway, lets go round the table and see what we think. Frank you can go first'. So Frank says Well I think if we run that stuff, that will be the death knell for the brand'. The night before Jo and I had been sitting in the bar together and I said 'You know, we could do something with these posters. We could make them into interesting commercials.’ So Jo started to elbow me and go, 'Tell 'em about the other ones mate, tell 'em about the other ideas'. So I dragged out these posters and said this was an alternative idea. Then they said 'That's a bit more like it. That's a bit more interesting'. Because they were in fact more English in their style and were happy to be a little bit more obscure and less chest-beating about themselves and their country, to be entertained and a bit more subtle. And so they went for that stuff and I think we made about ten of those in similar form to what we'd presented at the meeting.

Generally if an idea is right and they like what you present they're happy to let you go away and do it. An idea like that is pretty simple. One of them had a barbecue line - 1 forget the line now, but there was a 'D' and a 'B' in there somewhere. The letters clunked down and became the timber, then an T came out and struck the side of another piece like it was a match and that lit the other letters up and all the letters became the steaks. They flipped over and started to sizzle and then I had a fly come in which I think was a full stop. But they made us take the fly out - so I suppose there is always room for interference somewhere. And people probably would have quite enjoyed the fly too, would have thought it was a bit of fun. They all hung together pretty much as they were conceived. They were sent off to the London Television Awards where they won in a very modest category - something like under 15,000 pounds and we were well under that. I don't think these things would have cost much - Multivisuals would have done them for about $3000 each.

Provincial Newspapers ads campaign was written in Sydney, jingle written by [Snappy Tom writer]. Provincial Newspapers went to Sydney to get agencies to pitch on their account. An agency in Sydney came up with that idea. They came up with the music and the title 'Checkout cla ssified but Provincial Newspapers didn't like them as an agency so they came to Mojo to get the visuals to go with them - so they'd have a commercial. They didn't have much money, it was a really small budget so I just came up with those little clipart things as a really economical way o f doing it. The economical ways, the simple things are often the nicest. f 1983-86 Greville Patterson Creative]

S. In 1983 you set up on your own. How did that come about?

I was sick of agencies. I'd had enough. I just wanted to have a go at it on my own for a while. There were people who encouraged me. Bill Bristow came up with a fair bit of work at that time. I can only recall one Friday when there was nothing to do on the following Monday. It was amazing in terms of the amount of work. It was a bit of a mixture between getting to do things that were reasonable on a national level and budgets and anything that came through the door. Its funny but the tiny ones that just came through the door were often the most trouble, the least money, expecting the most for their money and you could never make them happy, you could never please them. They came to you because you'd done something that was a big thing. I They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 8 Interview transcripts remember somebody came through the door once and they wanted to do something like Meadowlea (which I hadn't done). They said they had $5000 to do it. A Meadowlea commercial would have been 150 grand in those days. So it was quite naive really.

S. In amongst these jobs were there many different agencies?

Waddaweneed? was for McCann Erickson in Sydney.

Unbeatable Drumstick was directly for Peters. They rang up on the Friday night and said they wanted a concept to put into research for Monday. I said I couldn't do it. They said you have to do it - we want something from you. I said, I'll do a deal with you. I'll do something that is so simple that it's achievable to have it ready by Monday. But anyway it won through on the research. That's about the only thing I've ever done that has come through research. It was a girl talking to camera and they wanted all their flavours in it. It was made specifically for Sydney. It increased their sales by 70%. So I got a letter saying nothing else had changed so it must have been the advertising that did it. Its quite interesting to see how these things work at times.

S. Do you get that sort offeedback from most jobs?

You mostly get feedback when they don't work - like anything I suppose. And I guess some of them are hard to evaluate, like this one I did for Bill Bristow The Famous Aussie Spirit. Commercials like that tend to make the client feel wet and warm about himself and probably not do a lot, just keep the product there in some way. But you never really know if its increased sales. Probably just helps to maintain a presence.

Take it Easy Take a Train was for a little agency called Ken Campbell Advertising. That was funny too because at that time I just made this suggestion to them. I said why don't you just band each of your divisions - Citytrain, Freight train and Traveltrain - and I did the little logos. You never charged terribly much for the job but now Citytrain is on the side of the city trains and there are delivery trucks driving around with Freight train on the side. If someone like Ken Cato had done the job in Melbourne it would have been 250 grand for it and lots of manuals on how to use the typeface and all that sort of stuff.

S. What sort o f brief did you get for that job?

Ken Campbell had to do a corporate thing for rail. I'd done something for GMH in Melbourne - The lion will roar in 84 - and he'd seen that on TV and thought that's what we need for Queensland Rail, we need one of those really pumped up beefy commercials. I got back to him about a week later and said I don't think that's the right mood for trains. Trains are about not having to do very much. You know, you just sit on them so its more about taking it easy. That took a little while to sell him because he came to me because he thought he wanted one of those commercials and a week later you're saying no I think you want something that's the opposite of that really. That was a terribly small budget too.

B ulk Cheap - Errol Stewarts Warehouses was something I did for Shazam.

City Living Riverside Apartments was something I did directly for Dick Marks. They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 9 Interview transcripts

Up on the Downs - Heritage Building Society was for Knowles Bristow. And Stefan.

Ingham Chicken was for Gamseys. The product was these new chicken nuggets. I stuck Ingham Chicken love 'em on the end of it and that's become their corporate campaign, its on all their packs still. You never get paid for that sort of thing but I suppose that's just bad management on my part. Its amazing the way people just take things as being part of it as well. I suppose its fairly human to do that. But they never divide it up and go well that's the jingle and that's the script for the TV commercial and that's a little marketing idea and that's the logo idea or something. I think that is just bad self-management really.

D ream w orld - 1 don't have a copy of the original ad.

No one's far from anyone anymore - OTC - that was for Mojo. I'd started freelancing for them at this stage.

S. Was that a good time when you were working for yourself?

I think it probably was. The thing that frustrated me about it was that I didn't seem to be a very natural kind of empire builder. I suppose you learn a few things about yourself. It just amazes me that people do run advertising agencies who probably haven't got an advertising bone in their bodies. But they spin the bullshit and build up pretty reasonable businesses and make quite sizeable incomes. I suppose that's what they are interested in doing. I think somewhere inside me I harbour this half resentment about myself that I seem to have done a fair bit of advertising over the years but never converted it into a real benefit to myself. Because advertising agencies are machines that do make money with their media commissions and their service fees and all that sort of stuff.

It is probably changing but people have been fairly unwilling to simply pay for ideas. A lot of these things aren't exactly the greatest in the world but they seem to do the job for a lot of people at the time. Writing jingles or coming up with visual things, its almost like its not taken all that seriously. Its not quite part of the business world. Yet the business world takes advantage of it and uses it to inject wit and charm and emotions into what they do to make their product loved and to put them in a favourable light but the idea part is incredibly undervalued. And I can't say I've helped it myself because its half your nature, it seems to be a common thing with supposedly creative people that they not terribly good money managers.

[1987- 1988 Mojo Brisbane. 1988-1989 Mojo London. 1990-1997 Mojo Australial

S. What was it like going to Mojo after working on your own?

What Mojo had was a recognisable culture which was very definitely Australian. I'd worked with them a little bit. Mo actually told me sometime later that when he first saw the Mortein ad Waddaweneedon air he said to Jo ‘Someone's gotten onto us mate. They know what this Aussie thing's all about’. It certainly wasn't conscious, it was the brief - just make it Australian - so it was full of cockies and mozzies and that sort of stuff. So they saw that and thought there's a bloke out there who's a bit like us. They approached me a couple of times but I was quite happy doing my own thing. And then I had one of those bad days when I thought this is not the way to go, so I They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 10 Interview transcripts joined them. It was quite good to be in an agency, the first I'd worked for, where the people running the agency actually make the ads - the name on the door is the man in the store. That really did make a big difference....

27th November, 1998. Tape I

I learnt from my years of freelancing that I wasn't an empire builder although I probably could have decided to expand it into an advertising consultancy. But I didn't seem to be the empire building type so I didn't choose to do that. It was always hard to know which extra person to put on, whether it should be another creative person or an accounts service person. As one person you're doing all the running. With advertising there are lots of different tangents - you have to see printers or TV people or sound people, so you spend a lot of time running around. But I chose not to do that.

I've always had a bit of a love/hate relationship with advertising. I kept doing it without really wanting to do it.

City Living - Dick [Marks] was shooting it for a developer. He asked me to do a jingle. It was one of the first apartments on the river, a new cultural thing for Brisbane, first inner city development to come along and declare itself as a viable option. Hence the New York look about it which was fairly untrue really. Brisbane kidding itself a bit - living in the city was interesting because there were lots of things to do in the city - when I really don't think there was apart from ride a bike through the park and have a cup of coffee downstairs. Visuals reflected overseas ads, all that imagery that we've copped - influenced by Manhattan skylines, someone sitting in a room and outside there were buildings. He tended to capture a bit of that. Framework was that New York apartment style living was now available in Brisbane - we're becoming a more sophisticated urban centre - 1 suppose that was the feeling.

Up on the Downs was for Knowles Bristow. I think they wanted to do a corporate commercial but probably didn't have the money to do an expensive one, so someone, I think it was Harry Scott, came up with the idea to hold a photographic competition that people would take photos of the Downs/Toowoomba area and the best 20 or 30 pictures would be in the commercial. So I wrote a jingle called Up on the Downs and it was a very country sort of thing.

I think I became a bit pigeon-holed with jingles. After you've written about 4 or 5, people think that's what you do and that's what they expect from you. I've found myself in presentations pitching for accounts with everyone agreeing this is not a jingle thing, let's not do a jingle here. But usually at some stage during the presentation the potential client would say, you haven't tried a jingle, why didn't you do a jingle because they felt that's what they were there for. There was a whole stage with Mojo when that's what they thought they were going to Mojo for anyway - Mojo did jingles. Whereas if you put together a Mojo reel from that time it was probably 50/50. That's what they were known for but they did other things as well.

S. Was it a completely different style of working from anything you'd done before? I think it was. As I was saying before, they'd spotted this Mortein commercial and said somebody else can do this Aussie thing. I was doing that Aussie thing to a brief but I suppose as an They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 11 Interview transcripts

Australian I was capable of doing it. But certainly going to Mojo was a chance to be as Australian as you wanted to be, as you could be. Mo & Jo had done the early hard yards declaring this thing as Australian advertising, because up to this point it had been influenced by the English or Americans and we were pretending to be them. If you look back at some of those old Australian commercials like Stuart Wagstaff doing Benson & Hedges commercials. He was virtually being an English gentleman in Australia, and the Marlbro man was American. Australian advertising existed somewhere else before we got hold of it. Everything we saw on early television was mimicking all that stuff because that was how you did it. So it took a while for Australia to discover that it could make Australian commercials.

I was in Mojo for something like ten years, and I would say the first three or four years were pretty confident about this Australian thing but it became unsettled after that. Mojo merged with an American company and became culturally confused themselves which was perfect timing with the whole country becoming confused. Suddenly there were informed people telling us no one really knew what true blue meant any more and it was being acknowledged that there were lots of Greek taxi drivers running round Melbourne, and people from lots of other cultures not as absorbed - they weren't becoming instant Australians. You don't spend a fortnight in the migrant camp, read Women’s Weeklies, eat Vegemite and come out Australian.

Being Australian wasn't as straightforward as it had seemed to be. Maybe Mo and Jo were getting away with murder anyway for the time that they were doing it. Even the thing of Meadowlea, celebrating Mum in the kitchen - you just can't do that anymore. The whole strategy of Meadowlea was giving Mum a pat on the back. If you talk to Mo and Jo about it they'll say congratulated was the only word that rhymed with polyunsaturated - which could have been exactly the way it happened. But happily it was like someone said well this isn't a bad way to go because everyone treats mum like an unmade bed so lets give her a pat on the back, and slipped the tub of lard in there at the same time and Bob's your uncle. And it worked. It was a long-running campaign.

When I joined Mojo Brisbane, they had already merged with another agency and become Mojo/MDA and they had their office on Petrie Terrace. Joan Yardley was running it and as agencies go it was really successful - it was good fun and had a spirit about it. The whole Mojo thing was totally embraced by everyone there.

It's interesting looking at some of the commercials. I used to do some reasonably Aussie things but Mirage Resorts, you couldn't call that Aussie in any way at all. It never was for Joe Bloggs anyway. I actually found it embarrassing and I said to Christopher Skase at one stage, you'd be lucky if one percent of Australia can actually go to your resort but we're blasting the airwaves with it. You're spending all this money putting your resort on television, and that's going out through the western suburbs of Sydney where there might be two or three people who can afford to go there. Of course he reminded me that it was nothing to do with bums on seats so much as establishing an image for him and Quintex, to impress banks and investors he was seeking money from. I'm sure it attracted lots of people to go there as well. It actually did attract a lot of people who couldn't really afford it. One of the big things was they'd pay for the room but there'd be McDonalds packets in the wastepaper bin in the room. Because they wouldn't have an orange juice because it would cost ten bucks so they'd duck out for a McDonald's. They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 12 Interview transcripts

S. How d id the ad come about?

At that early stage, Mojo would have been the highest profile agency in Australia. They had a couple of vans driving around Sydney, white delivery vans with Mojo on the side and school kids would yell out to them Come on Aussie and all that sort of stuff. So Mojo was very well known as an agency, which was most unusual. Thirty or forty years ago someone wrote a book about The Hidden Persuaders showing advertising as a cloak and dagger manipulation. But Mojo was out there with the people in a funny kind of way. And they did all these really extrovert ads like Ife e l like a Tooheys and Good on you Mum.

S. Why were they so well known?

Jo's voice was so identifiable and quite unique in an advertising sense, and so Australian. They were very accessible, there was nothing pretentious about them. Their style was earthy. They attracted a lot of interviews as well, these two bearded blokes. I don't think they sought the publicity so much as their ads attracted it. They were very popular ads. If you've got the whole country singing Come on Aussie, the media is going to want to know who wrote that. So they were quite high profile.

So I went down to a meeting in Sydney where he [Skase] was meeting Mo and Jo for the first time. I'd tagged along as the person who would probably do some of the work on it. I was like the Brisbane connection for him. Virtually as soon as I started my job at Mojo, we were starting on Mirage. It was about the first meeting I went to. At that stage there had been some publicity that Christopher Skase was about to start building a resort. The mythology had it that he drove a Ford Falcon around Australia when he was 18, spotted the Port Douglas site and promised himself he'd build a resort there one day. As far as I was concerned I would be the one who'd knock out the odd magazine or press ad but Mo and Jo would do the main campaign.

So I went back to Brisbane and a couple of weeks later I was expecting Mo to come up and work on it. After about three weeks I started to panic a bit and thought we should be starting to do something on this thing. At that stage of the game Mojo would never do anything under six weeks. It was always - we won't come back to you before six weeks because that's how much time we need to think about this thing and do it properly. So after three weeks I thought, half the time's gone, so I ring Mo up - to which he said 'Oh shit, haven't you done that thing yet?' And I said 'No, I'm not going to do it. Christopher Skase doesn't want me to do it, he wants you to do it. He wants you and Jo to do it. You're the heroes.' Mo said *No, no. Go on, think about it. You can do bloody something.' I said TSTo* because I was actually terrified. I'd stood in awe of these two characters and thought I can't do what they do. So six weeks passed and the deadline was virtually up. I rang Mo again and said 'You'd better get up here. We've got to do something.' So he came up and straight away fired someone who'd been around the world looking at all these resorts and spent all this money. They went quite berserk. A couple of them [people in account services] visited California and the Mediterranean, visiting other resorts. They spent a fortune and didn't come up with anything. [Their role was to manage the day to day business of an account as distinct from the creative people who do the ads.] They went a bit too far.

From a product description of this thing and a few photos you knew what it was about. It was probably the first time in Australia that these really upmarket things called resorts were being built They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 13 Interview transcripts

- where they'd have a combination of things like a golf course, a gymnasium, a swimming pool and a hotel. Skase invited Mo up to see the building in progress at Port Douglas and Mo said I can go and visit a hole in the ground in Sydney. That's what it was. You knew it was going to be this fabulous thing on the water. So Mo came up after about six weeks, walked through the door and said 'Where's that bloke who went around the world. I think I'll fire him for a start.' The door slammed behind him and he came out about five minutes later saying 'Right I've fired him, got rid of him', because Mo quite a tyrant, you know. And he said 'Righto, where are we going for lunch' and I said 'Mo, come on, we've got to sort this thing out'. He said 'It can't be too bloody hard. Imagine, it's the best bloody location in the world, there are palm trees and the sun's shining. There's all this luxury, it's a terrific place, and you go back home. How do you describe a holiday like that?' I said, 'I don't know. Too good to be true?' And he said 'Yeah, that'll do. Work that up. Now where are we going for lunch?'

I think Mo was a pretty terrific creative director. He saw the simple solution to things and could clear all the bullshit away. He was a terrific ad writer but he was also good at sorting out the wood from the trees. I think even Jo admitted to that. Mo would come up with these silly little thoughts - they did a commercial for Pea Beau which went 'Hit 'em high, hit ’em low, hit 'em with the old P ea B ea u ’. Another day he said 'If everyone in Australia killed a fly today, that’d he like 16 million less flies' and that became the lead into the jingle, the shoehorn into the whole idea.

So I wrote up this 'Too good to he true' thing which in a way was probably one of the most romantic things to come out of Mojo. It was very unlike their style. But when you've got a name like Mirage, it's not exactly a brand like Four and Twenty Pies or something. It's got its own atmosphere that comes with it. And the line 'Too good to be true' and the idea of illusions and the fact that the hotel wasn't built and you had to make the ad without a hotel. All this added fuel to the idea of doing imagery that was illusory, because you couldn't wave the camera around inside the hotel because there was none. So in some ways this was good creatively.

It was quite funny. When I wrote the first version of Too good to be true, I actually thought it was a bit too wussy. Then I wrote one that was a little bit more up tempo and had a little bit more stick to it. That was the one I recorded and sent down to Mo. He hit the roof a bit and said 'This is really wrong. The first one you came up with was what it was all about. It was the best. Go back and do that.' They were certainly never short on spending money which was a good thing about them compared to agencies that don't make ads. As admakers running an advertising agency they realised the product was everything and they would do whatever they could to make that product as good as it could be. There wasn't an accountant running it who would say 'We can only be this good because that's all we can afford to be.' They'd actually put money in.

In terms of an advertising style, Mojo produced lots of jingles but I don't think anyone could beat Jo at doing that Australian thing. I think he was fair dinkum and it came from the heart and I think that's terrific. There's a guy called Terry Hennessy in the Sydney office who'd come pretty close to Jo and give him a good run for his money for that style of thing. But I don't think I was ever that sort of style, I think I was a lot softer. From a singing point of view my voice was a lot softer - but I think my brain's a lot softer too. I had a softer, more romantic style. So with something like Mirage in terms of making an impact or being remembered for anything in the Mojo days I think it was probably Mirage. I was pleased with it because it was a slightly different style, probably more me than it was Jo, because he was what he was and you couldn't beat that. They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 14 Interview transcripts

S. It sounds like they were very generous in their support, able to pick what was going to work, to embrace new people and let them contribute what they could?

I remember once feeling like a real dill, probably around this time, when I asked Mo about their briefing system. He said 'If any bastard ever produces a brief we'll take a look at it and if we don't like it we'll throw the bloody thing away.' They were very much their own people. I think they were - whatever artists are - if they're people who seem to be able to absorb things around them and process them in a particular way, and put it on the wall where it means something to someone - that's what they were and still are. I suppose advertising is the same sort of thing. You just absorb as much as you can about something and paint it in the best or most appropriate light that you can. They were very instinctive and seemed to attract people around them who were as instinctive. As far as advertising agencies go it was the best one I ever worked for because it was run by people who made ads and that really makes a difference. It's not run by accountants. When it became Chiat Day Mojo that was the beginning of the end.

S. How do most agencies operate ?

There's this dreaded thing called the briefing form that every advertising agency seems to rewrite every twelve months. It's usually broken into about 12 sections - product, target audience, and then after that everyone finds the briefing form pretty difficult because there are subjects like what do we want the advertising to communicate. And everyone in the world finds that really hard. They shouldn't, that's part of the job. Account service people seem to be very product based and probably tend to search for something in the product, like XXXX is more refreshing or something which to the average beer drinker would be total bullshit. Mo and Jo's big lesson was to stand in people's shoes and ask what this product means to them. And usually it wasn't so much to do with the product but how it fitted into people's lives.

It doesn't seem to change anywhere around the world really. I'm not saying that at Mojo anyone could do it any faster than anywhere else but at least the communication lines were open . And they were so good at clearing away the bullshit so very quickly you could have a chat to your mates there and all agree whether something was in the right direction or not or that was a pile of shit - now lets maybe think its over here somewhere or lets face it we don't know where it is so lets all go to the pub and have a chat about it. It was a lot more open, human system where people could talk about things rather than be dictated to.

S. How do you get started on an ad? What happened with Skase for example?

We were pretty much left to our own resources. The brief was that we had to air certain components. If there was a brief it was probably the first five star resort, in Australia, on the beach. Money was no problem. And make sure you get all the components in. That's not really a brief that's a description of the product. Probably was something saying it was the highest quality product available in Australia at the time. But it wouldn't have been much more than that. It wouldn't have said let's create an atmosphere for this brand called Mirage, and exploit that brand and push what it means. I thinks that's the instinctive stuff, well it's not even instinctive. In a way its just common sense. If someone gives you a brand like that its the assumption that you'll make something of it. I think that sort of stuff is left for the poets. Its almost like the poets have got the They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 15 Interview transcripts most common sense in advertising because they see what the essence of something is. That's actually reality, that's not dreaming something up. Whereas you'd think the people who are actually the pragmatists and the practical people would see those things, but they don't seem to.

S. Once you got going with that idea did you meet with the client again?

We were six weeks overdue, so it was twelve weeks from the brief. He was spitting chips and we were still putting it together the night before presenting it. Noel Harris and I worked out what it would look like visually and we had about 20 frames of the commercial. They were pretty well photographic. You'd steal bits - like you might just find a hotel on a beach overseas and say that'll be the aerial shot of hotel; we probably drew things or I might have found a picture of a glass and one of a marlin and stuck those sort of things together. The intention was to put it on videotape with the soundtrack that we had recorded. And we did that. I looked at it and thought if you've been waiting for twelve weeks this doesn't look very impressive. And it just wasn't. As soon as you put something on tape it's got to almost be the commercial. So we decided not to put it on tape and left it as the pictures to show him and imagine the rest of it.

We went up to present it at the big blue building in Eagle Street. Skase had a thing about blue. In that office there was this big blue marble boardroom table that had been craned in I think - it was the only way to get it in when the building was being built. It was the most ominous thing. I've never been particularly fond of presentations, never seen it as quite my arena. And I took a look at this table and imagined the sort of power game that could be played there with him up one end and us presenting our work and I just about vomited. I said to his secretary, 'Look I don't want to present here. I'm not going to present here. See that little coffee table over there with the chairs around it, I'd really like to present there'. And she said 'oh no you can't do that. Mr Skase says everyone presents from here. And I said, 'Well I'm not. I'm going to I present it from the coffee table'. She came back about five minutes later and said that was okay. So he sat down and said 'Right go for it, you've got five minutes'. So I said 'Apart from us being late, we've actually got quite a bit of work to show you and it's going to take more than five minutes'. He said go for it. I think he left about an hour later. He looked at it all and said, 'That's terrific, go and do it. There are two points which I'll detail in a memo to you tomorrow.' I think we left out a visit to the Mossman Gorge, so he wanted that shot, and he wanted his boat in it - Mirage II or III. And he left us alone then - that's very little interference.

It took us a lot of work to do all those effects, because the game wasn't like it is now with computers and all that sort of stuff, even though it was only 11 or 12 years ago. We did it at Jumbuck, and I think they might have even done it on a machine called a Mirage, which is a bit uncanny. We finished it - at least to the point where we thought it was finished. We went and showed it to him. After he'd looked at it once he said 'All the sky in the Mossman Gorge shot we want blue. I think its fabulous. Just fix that up.' We explained there was a camera move here, a crane moved across the water, then lifted up, then these two people in yuppie whites stepped up onto the rock and embraced each other as the camera moved to view up the gorge. So there were all these trees and all these tiny little leaves with grey sky in between. For us to paint that blue we're going to have to paint every frame. It will cost a bit of money. He said 'I don't care, people won't come to Mirage for grey skies. I want blue skies.' So everything had to be blue. It probably cost another ten grand to do fix all that up. We all know who Christopher Skase is and what it all means, but he was probably one of the best people you could work for in terms of having an They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 16 Interview transcripts incredibly clear vision of what his product was and letting you go and do it. So it was all a bit unfortunate really. It was intended to develop into quite an extensive global campaign, so I had a line in the jingle 'Could this be the Tropic of Paradise?' After I'd written it, it occurred to me when he came up with the idea that he was going to start a resort in Hawaii, that we could have this line going around the planet joining all the resorts Gold Coast to Port Douglas to Kuwai to Los Angeles till eventually he could have had this chain around the world on its own little Tropic of Paradise - which was a bit of an appetising thing I suppose. But none of that happened.

Toyota you're Queensland all over. I don't think I realised it at the time but that campaign got Toyota into Mojo which was all part of a grand plan. Toyota's agency through most of the world was Saatchi and Saatchi. Bob Miller wanted Mojo to handle part of his advertising because they were good at this Aussie stuff. Saatchi were very good at clever conceptual advertising while Mojo was the heartland agency. I think they were having a lot of trouble from the Japanese getting permission to have another agency, so they kind of back-doored it through Brisbane and I did this campaign called Toyota you're Queensland all over which then got him his footing into Mojo. Then once we were in the guys started doing other campaigns for Corolla.

Currumbin Sanctuary - Face to face with your Aussie mates. I didn't write that line, I think it might have been Terry McCarthy. I don't know that he did it as a jingle, just a poster line, and I turned it into a jingle. It was a very cheap little commercial with existing footage. It ran for a while. It wasn't particularly great in any way. It was a real cheapie. We just had a bit of fim with live footage from Currumbin, forwarding and reversing it. It was a bit like an animal reggae ballet.

R aby Bay. That was fairly early on when I started at Mojo. I hadn't done any work on it. Hugh Edwards and somebody else were working on doing press stuff and there was an account guy called Bob Hill and he was about to take these ads out to be approved - maybe they were the first concept ads for Raby Bay as newspaper ads, and he said we still don't have a slogan for this place. I was leaning against the door post listening to this and I suggested the line How can you stay away? to sit under the logo at the bottom, which I remember thinking at the time was pretty good. As he went out the door he said you better start writing that jingle which I did. That was quite a long running thing. I think I went there once.

Can do -Credit Union Australia - small budget, nothing special. It didn't last long, I don't think they had the money to keep going.

S. So you fitted all those into the year before you went to London ? - a very productive year. f 1988-1989 Mojo - London]

London - it was a foggy day. Setting up Mojo in London was one of the great mistakes of all time. Because they had Qantas and the Australian Tourist Commission, they felt they could set up a little office in London to represent those two clients. And Qantas was toying with the idea of doing some advertising on television over there which they really couldn't afford - 1 don't know that they ever did it. They had Reckitt and Coleman in Australia, some shampoo products or something. They promised they'd give them a shampoo product. So they had two live accounts and the promise of one so they set up the office there. Wayne Kingston had come from their office in San Francisco to manage London. He'd been there for a year with a writer whose name I've forgotten, They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 17 Interview transcripts but he was a very famous advertising writer who'd been in Australia, had an agency in Australia and gone back to England to retire. They dragged him back in to do consultancy stuff and I think he came up two or three days a week from Cornwall.

I was in Mo's office one morning with Mo and a guy called Doug Watson. He said do you want to go to London to be creative director? What! Are you serious?' 'Have a think about it mate. Go over there, make lots of money, have lots of fun' - that was the usual sort of bullshit line- 'Have a think about it. I've got to go to a meeting.' So I was left there with Mo and I asked him ' What was that all about?' He's looking out the window and he says 'Geez, that girl's got big tits. Does she work here?' He wouldn't be drawn to talk about it, then later on in the day I got back to Watson and said 'Are you serious about this?' And of course Jan being the traveller that she was, she'd go anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat. So I thought it would be a pretty good thing to do, as an experience.

But looking back on it all I couldn't have been more naive. For someone who was my age then, which would have been forty, my awareness of international advertising was still fairly low. And because Mojo was such a force in Australia, you didn't feel any real need to be up with the pace of anything that was coming out of London or New York or whatever, whereas the Saatchi and Saatchis of this world were. That's where their focus was and they were bringing that international advertising to Australia as far as they were concerned. So I really couldn't have been more naive in going there and thinking - 1 think Max [Bannah] summed it up with the cartoon he did of me and Jan and the girls standing at Piccadilly Circus going, I'm the bloke who wrote Raby Bay. It was really like that.

It was managed by John Thompson from Australia. There were only about six people in the agency - myself, John Thompson., an Aussie girl on the switch, another Australian girl who was the accountant and two account managers who were both English. The two English guys absolutely and totally embraced the Australian Mojo ethic - I think their only real reason for embracing it was that they thought it might be a way of getting a holiday to Australia. It might not have been quite that, but everyone was hellbent on bringing this Mojo thing to London. But in fact the Mojo thing had probably been through London about ten or fifteen years earlier. There was a particular agency there which was very jingle based. I think agencies only become jingle based when they've got writers who just write like that. It's not really to do with trends. It can be. But if someone else was to come along who was particularly good at writing jingle type ads for the nineties in Australia, it would probably be in a musical style or have a contemporary feel that would be okay now. So with this bloody minded attitude to be Mojo in London, it was destined for failure, because as far as the Poms were concerned, they produced the most sophisticated advertising in the world, and they probably do and it was an absolute culture clash, with the English being obscure, making advertising almost a puzzle and a game. I guess all that has sprung from their heritage, living with the English language. They like playing word games. Advertising was like an indoor game, it was like a parlour game as much as anything else.

After about two months there I was saying, this place really needs to be English. I think Wayne Kingston had upset everyone by appearing in all the trade journals saying we're here to show the Poms how to make advertising. He couldn't have said a worse thing. So for better or worse I kept trying to convince the guys we should be English or at least get someone in. I should go home and they should get someone in who could make English advertising. But they insisted that I should They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 18 Interview transcripts

stay on and keep trying to do the Mojo thing, and it was an absolute disaster. It was a failure. It was like pitching every couple of weeks and never getting anything. The self esteem took a huge battering. I ended up in an infectious diseases hospital. I'm sure it was the body saying ' I'll get you out of here. I'll just pack our bags for us. I'll get sick enough that we'll have to leave'. In some ways it was a bit of a shame.

I don't know that I ever would have been capable of producing the kind of advertising that's right for there. The first attempt to do a campaign for Tooheys was very much based on H ow do yo u feel? '. It was supposed to be for a test market in Newcastle in northern England. I tried to tone it down a little bit. The hook line in Tooheys was How do you feel? Ifeel like a Tooheys. I turned it into How do you feel? How do you think we feel? which tried to breed a bit of English cynicism into it. I came up with this other campaign that was trying to play a bit of a word game. Toohey's logo - say it was Draught, Toohey's was in black and Draught was in red. Somebody was putting posters up in the commercial, very Chaplainesque. Research said Toohey's was a reasonably strong beer over there - most of their beers were reasonably light on - 3 compared with Tooheys 4.7. So I came up with this campaign where you take a phrase like - ‘not to be taken lightly’. All the poster was going to be was a picture of a can and the words. N ot to he was going to be in black and lightly in red. So the guy comes along with the poster, the winds blowing and he gets it all mixed up. The poster goes up and it says 'lot to be taken nightly'. The English voice would go 'Tooheys light - from Australia - not to be taken lightly'. You could build a little puzzle into it and play this little word game.

But noone would present it to them, saying this is not the sort of stuff we want to do. We want to do real advertising, we want to do real Australian advertising. So I found myself having these fights, saying its not going to work here. It’s got to be more obscure, it’s got to be more entertaining. It’s got to have a lighter touch. After a while you begin to feel trapped by your own heritage. You've lived in an outdoor culture, where the sun's shining. A lot of Australian advertising, particularly Mojo advertising is a celebration of Australia. The English don't go around celebrating England because its grey and its miserable and they are happy in their own grey miserable sort of way. And hence all their art and literature tends to be quieter, with more sleight of hand and with more content in terms of ideas. I certainly tried but it met resistance within the agency because they wanted to create this real advertising. I don't think the Australian office cared so much about it all. They had their own problems. I'd get on the phone every now and then and whinge and Jo would say why don't you throw it in and come home. But you'd persist. I think the ego was on the line. I'd like to have made it work but I didn't produce one commercial while I was there.

I'm sure if someone had said - what this Mojo thing is its a common man thing, its got a humanity and a warmth about it, its emotional advertising, so whatever those equivalent things are in another culture, that's transportable as a philosophy. Take the principles....

It was a very un-Mojo thing to do but all advertising agencies have principles or philosophies and they're very similar. Mojo's were very nice and simple and they did express what they were about. It was like - try to build a slogan that gets taken into the vernacular, fence in the existing loyalists rather than trying to recruit new ones it was like if there's a bushfire burning, don't try to start another one, keep this one going. It was like support the people who support you. They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 19 Interview transcripts

S . Were these things written down?

Yes. They were called the nine principles or the ten principles or something, and that was to be visible on a wall somewhere. It was nice simple stuff, fairly bullshit free. Whatever this warm music based thing that Mojo was doing was, it had all been done in England 10 or 15 years earlier. So in a way it seemed to be from the past. Also, you'd have clients telling you this was the most sophisticated television audience in the world but at the same time, the most popular programs on TV were Coronation Street and Neighbours. So somebody was overlooking somebody. I don't think it was just the East End of London that governed all the TV ratings.

S. Why wouldn't things be presented?

Some things just ran out of puff, like the Tooheys things. It wasn't actually Tooheys there. Tooheys were distributing from Australia to an importer over there. So you were dealing with an importer. Then I think the deal fell down. I must have done six or seven different Tooheys ideas - different angles, different tonalities. Research showed people thought it was a smooth beer, so I did one where it was called The Smooth Australian, which was almost in a way redoing the Paul Hogan thing over there. It was pretty crass in some ways but it was like two Australian blokes at the bar. The other thing with Tooheys, when you poured it had a very big head. So there's this dreadful looking barmaid who pours the beers and they say 'God Almighty, look at the head on that', so the big thing became the head on the beer. To which this guy, the Australian pulled a boomerang out from his boot, threw it ou the window of the pub, the boomerang flew around the pub, came back in the other window and chopped the heads off the beers. They said cheers, and the title came up - The Smooth Australian. The poster was a guy in a tuxedo in a pair of thongs, drinking a Tooheys - The Smooth Australian. That almost went somewhere but the whole distributorship fell down. So it was yet another case of why something didn't work. It just kept going.

We got so close to getting Dulux. When we first went there, it was John Thompson's idea to get a list of who the big spending television clients were. Also he decided anything under $1 million wasn't worth going for because British TV was so expensive that a million dollars wouldn't get you very far anyway. So that was about the entry price to be on television I suppose. We sent out about 50 reels to people and Dulux responded. This guy, who was a lovely character, who'd been briefing advertising agencies on paint for the last 30 years ( he was only a couple of years away from retirement himself) - he said 'You guys seem to have a very instinctive approach to things. Go away and come back and tell me about paint.' So I did a bit of my own thinking then I thought there's a fellow in Australia who could probably shed a bit of light on this. I rang Hugh Mackay from London and asked him, What's paint all about, Hugh?' He said, 'I'll tell you all about paint. Paint is about seven stages in your life'. And he gave me this whole thing about how, by painting rooms, we clear ourselves for the next stage of life. The teenager paints his room red or black or something, declaring his own space. That's the beginning of that stage of life. Then we get married and we move into a flat or something and we ask the landlord if we can paint it - 'If you supply the paint we'll paint it'. So that declares the next little stage of life. Then we get our own house and the first baby comes along and we paint their room - that's the pink or blue room - so that's another stage of life. And then when the kids have stopped bouncing off the walls with their bikes and it’s safe to paint - that's the next stage. So I developed this campaign called New Life Dulux which this guy was pretty taken with. We did all sorts of presentations. We had tapes, animatics, tracks They’re just ads: Greville Patterson’s life in advertising 20 Interview transcripts and print working. He trotted off to Canada, the East and Australia. We got as close as we were going to get when eventually he said ' I just can't convince anyone that we should give our account to six Australians'.

Tape 2 Side 2

He did his best to sell this campaign in various parts of the world but his biggest job was to convince the board at Dulux. Dulux is ICI. Eventually he said to me 'What you've got to get your heads around is - 1 think you've got something here that would be very effective as a piece of work and its go an insight that we've never had before, but this is Dulux and Dulux is ICI and ICI is almost like the Royal Family. It's an institution in England and I cannot convince anyone in this company that we could possibly give our account to six Australians. ' We said, 'If you did give us you account we wouldn't be six Australians. There would probably be twenty five people in the agency to manage the account and most of them would be English. Its interesting too that there has never been an advertising agency establish itself in the UK under its own steam, as an independent entity. Lots of people have come in from outside, but they've actually merged with existing English companies. So if we think Australia is a culture unto itself I don't think its anything compared to the UK. It really is a small island community that fences out other cultures really quite efficiently, or that was the impression at the time. It was just one thing after another.

Then there was Sky TV - which was Rupert Murdoch's satellite TV - only through a Mojo connection with Channel 9 in Australia. Somehow we found ourselves in that which was an absolute joke. I did all the work myself. Prepared a presentation and went off to News Ltd. - the walled world of bloody News Ltd. in London to make this pitch to ten or twelve people. We'd been going about 3 seconds when Rupert came in. You've never seen a room go to water like this one did. Once he was in the room it was like the very next breath they took depended on paying attention to him, and he was only talking to one or two people. So I was presenting down this table with all these people leaning over listening to whatever God was saying to whoever and I think at one stage someone looked up and said 'Go on, go ahead with the presentation' and they all went back to it. I turned to John Thompson and said 'This is all over. This is lost. This is stupid. Let's pack up and go.' So we packed up and said 'Goodbye gentlemen'. They all looked up as one and said 'Thank you very much, thank you'. No one heard a word of anything. It was just a joke.

So all that stuff was quite debilitating after a while. You're a long way from home and you don't have any real mates and you're being asked to push a kind of advertising that nobody wants. Absolutely crazy.

S. So what happened to the agency after you left?

The merger with Chiat Day happened while I was there. I had the honour of meeting Jay Chiat one night. He came over to London to see his new agency. He of course was some sort of god in the States. In my naivety I didn't realise that so I didn't understand how deeply I should be bowing and scraping to this guy. So John Thompson and I went out and had dinner with him one night. We picked him up at the hotel and took him to the restaurant. I was trying to make polite chat to him in the taxi. But he was leaning over against the window, looking out at the rain or something and I'm in the back seat with him trying to make polite chat. He turned to me and he said 'I don't know why you're bothering to talk to me because I don't even know why I'm here. I don't particularly Greville Patterson - transcripts 21 They're just ads want to know you.' So I'm thinking to myself, 'How the hell did I get myself into this situation. This is just crackers stuff.'

He'd come to check out his new agency and have a look at the people in it. So I had to put my work out in front of him and show him what I'd been doing since I'd been there which was pretty embarrassing because it was all jingle based. I'd been briefed to make it that way. So he had a look at my reel and said What are you doing in goddam advertising boy? Why don't you write songs?' And he probably had a point in a way. I think Chiat Day's Christmas card from the year before said on the front 'Bells bells bells' and inside when you opened it up it said H o jingles'. So Mojo couldn't have got itself into a more diametrically opposed culture. It was just absolutely culturally the wrong fit. And I think it was the beginning of Mojo becoming unhinged in Australia too. People are so political. Half of them were trying to make themselves look better in Jay Chiaf s eyes or Lee Klau's eyes. He was the creative director in America. He was in fact a brilliant guy. He did fantastic stuff. The work they did was so American and so California, and so smart. It was the sort of stuff that would have worked pretty well anywhere in the world. But it was an embarrassing fit and I think Mojo found it embarrassing and Chiat Day found it embarrassing. How it ever happened I'm damned if I know.

I know in London a lot of money must have been lost because no money was made. I felt right in the middle of making a huge loss - which doesn't make you feel good. It was a bit of a fizzer. I think I lasted 20 months and came home with my tail between my legs. They didn't seem particularly concerned - they just didn't worry about that sort of thing too much.

After 18 months of trying to produce an ad and failing at every twist and turn the body said stop. I started to come out in lumps. If I sat on a chair like this (with arm over the back), that night there'd be a thing there like an egg where my arm had been touching the chair. If I put my arm over a guitar or something, I'd come up in a thing like an emu's egg under my arm. They couldn't diagnose what the problem was. I think my body was trying to come up with anything to get me out of there.

[Mojo Sydney and Brisbane 1990-97]

The plot seemed to be to write - to spend a bit of time in Sydney and a bit of time in Brisbane... I came back to a less happy Mojo. By this time it was deeply entrenched in its own cultural crisis because the full merger was on with Chiat Day. Ninety percent of the people politically were trying to grease the American arm of it and I think Mo and Jo were starting to be made to feel pretty uncomfortable as though their particular brand of advertising wasn't as relevant as it used to be. At lower levels people were seeing it as a better career move to try to come up with advertising that might look good in Los Angeles when Jay Chiat asked to see the reels so that they'd maybe keep their jobs a bit longer. It had become a political game then unfortunately.

Birch Carroll and Coyle. You want it, you got it! Some things are born out of necessity. I'm probably as happy with that as anything I've done in terms of an idea. But the fact of life was they needed to produce commercials pretty regularly to say what was on at the movies and they didn't have very big budgets. Mostly it's the smaller budget things that are more interesting because you do have to find a nifty idea. So often times with the big budget things like Queensland Tourism ads where they do want to show lots of stuff around the state where it will be expensive to shoot Greville Patterson - transcripts 22 They're just ads it but - it doesn't mean those ads will be terribly interesting or creative. Most of the money goes into running expensive postcards past.

We produced each of the [BC&C] ads for about two and a half thousand dollars. It was really just a format of looking at all the footage and seeing what you could do with it. It was a bit of fun.

Golden Circle. It must be summertime was for their soft drinks, just for Queensland. The previous year we'd done this thing they called The drink we drink. A lot of research had been done and it said that kids were very cynical about soft drink commercials and all that lifestyle stuff that had been around. Then it was almost a case of making something that was almost anti-commercial. We ended up doing this thing called The drink we drink. They were reasonably silly commercials but I don't think they were really anti-soft drink in the end. Probably about as anti- as Golden Circle would ever be.

It Must be Summertime was deciding to be a bit more grown up about it. I don't think Golden Circle ever knew this but at one stage I was asked to come up with another cricket theme. C’mon Aussie had fallen on fallow ground and they were looking for the next summer's cricket theme. I had this idea about hearing the ball hitting the willow, and the theme was 'Hear that sound - it must be summertime'. So it started off as an idea for cricket. I think they thought it was a bit too soft. But I had it in the bottom drawer and I used it for Golden Circle. So the sound of a cricket ball hitting the willow became the sound of a can being ripped open. So it was Hear that sound - it must be summertime. It wasn't exactly tailor made, but that's what happened.

Mother Nature. There was this guy who ran the Golden Circle Cannery and he had competition building from pineapple and other fruits being imported into Australia and selling a little bit cheaper. He simply wanted to make a commercial that painted our own environment in the best light possible, saying it was clean air, clean water, and clean earth - without really drawing attention to the fact that he was damning anywhere else. So I don't know if anyone ever got the point because it never did damn anywhere else and never did draw the parallel but it won a New York Art Director's Award so that was something. And apart from Ron Johanson shooting it beautifully, and Ron and Max sitting on the mountain tops doing that one with the stop frame animation of the clouds....

Duelling Banjos. There was no real brief except come up with another XXXX commercial with I can Feel a XXXX Coming on. We did this little thing based on duelling banjos. It seemed like a good idea at the time that this guy who'd been playing the banjo through the whole commercial would open his mouth and smile at the end and he had a tooth missing. I think they only had about 3 or 4 complaints saying it made Queenslanders look like hicks, so it was taken off air.

We Love it up here was very much to a brief to return XXXX to being a Queensland parochial beer. In the preceding couple of years I can feel a XXXX coming on had been a campaign to take XXXX nationally. S. What about the panoramic ads on the show reel?

They were shot by Dick [Marks]. They were about the last outpost o ïl can feel a XXXX coming on. Mo and Jo had done the first three or four years of that stuff. Then they got onto this idea that Greville Patterson - transcripts 23 They're just ads was like sound effects producing the melody line of things e.g. commercial out west with banging triangle, then helicopter blades would spin, the cows would moo and it was all in time to the melody o f I can feel a XXXX coming on. They'd developed a series of commercials and there were about three or four done as animatics but the brewery wouldn't quite buy them because they didn't have the basic thing about them that they liked about I can feel a XXXX coming on. So the Our land ads were like us trying to get out of that comer. Mo and Jo had created this comer with sound effects and it just became a softer version of that. It was instrumental and a homage to Queensland. They were very simple but bloody expensive.

S. Did they work well?

I don't know. I think what happened was it had all the blood taken out or it. They became almost like tourism commercials. We put up about ten ideas and there were things like 'Our boys' - that was the RAAF commercial and there was another one with a couple of truckies having an arm wrestle. They were the commercials that had a bit of humanity and all the macho stuff, and work. There is a really old beer strategy - work/refreshment or work/reward - which is what most commercials were. When they chose these commercials they picked all the ones that were the softer scenic ones. It lost its humanity - the barbed wire beer feel. That was virtually the death of I can feel a XXXX coming on. Not that they were failures really, its just they were the last outpost of I can fe e l.... Sure they were big commercials and they were expensive, but it was dying days.

S. Had Mo and Jo come up with I can feel a XXXX coming on?

Yes that was originally I can feel a Coke coming on. They started out freelancing in Sydney. Jo had worked for Coke and they asked if they'd throw in a couple of ideas for them to take to Atlanta. Mo's legendary line came out of it. They were presenting I can feel a Coke coming on. The top of the totem pole said: 'That's an interesting concept gentlemen. Exactly who are you aiming your advertising at?', and Mo said, 'Any cunt with a mouth!' So he got himself into the hall of fame by saying that. And they didn't get the job of course. That got put in the bottom drawer, then when XXXX came along, out it came again. I think it was a pretty good beer line.

There was the Toig Australian' thing driving beer - blokes being blokes, particularly in the bush, the rural landscape. If there were six cameos, five of them would be in the bush and one would be a bloke cleaning his shoes at the kitchen table. So there was this myth. It would come up in research. They'd say, this is all wrong, this bush stuff, because most of the people who are drinking this beer are in the city offices working.

Side 2.

But I probably was caught up in it at the time too. I guess I approached it in a pretty general way. It wasn't through an intimate knowledge of it, that you'd lived in the bush and you were sitting near the water tank one day and this funny thing happened and you could have made a commercial around it etc. It was more to do with energy, like working up heat. It was about that simple. That was about the depth of it. If the whole strategy was about work/reward which means a licence to drink piss ... Is it a lack of self confidence, or a lack of self knowledge, or is it the wrong people in the advertising agencies trying to write the ads? It probably is that. Greville Patterson - transcripts 24 They're just ads

Ballymore was like the second boardroom. It always seemed to be so pumped up that these guys had to have the next macho commercial coming on. I think you were running scared half the time. I never felt very blokey anyway and I used to think What the shit am I doing working on this beer thing anyway. I don't know anything about footy, I don't know anything about this. If the commercial's not going to be about footy, what's it going to be about? If it's not all these blokes riding around on horses and a pseudo Marlbro track and blokes pulling beers out of ice and throwing them down their gullets, what is it?' And I started to feel as if I just couldn't get a handle on what it could be if it wasn't that. I started to feel inadequate that there wasn't this capacity in me that I could have some other vision of it.

You don't know yourself. As an Australian you're a product of all these other influences. You've actually missed out on what it is that's you, that makes you Australian. So you start to feel as if you're a bit pseudo and then you look at the English commercials and you feel these people really know themselves, they're familiar, comfortable with themselves, they're quite happy to take the piss out of themselves. They are secure in themselves.

This would probably make a pretty good commercial - two blokes sitting there saying how piss- weak the TV commercials are and what would they be and how would you do it? I dunno. Have another one. Who are we? Well we don't bloody know who we are do we, but we keep pouring this shit down our gullets, drink enough of this shit, it won't matter who we are. Then it would be okay to be no one. I look back on the stuff I did for beer and think - how disappointing.

You could do research of blokes working in a factory and it would be all red yellow, hot and steamy and some macho jingle - 'Rip the top off it, hoover it' and in the research session they'd say 'We don't want to watch a whole lot of blokes working, can't you put some sheilas in these ads?' So that would be the fruit of a research session. No one would say - there's not much wit or charm about that. Can't we have...?' I suppose you're a victim of a lot of this stuff because that's what you're measured against. The people at the brewery would say 'The big takeout of this research mate, is they want to see women. So what sort of situation are you going to put the women in? Come up with the ad.' So you don't know where to tum. I could never write an ad as witty as the English stuff but I think if someone said 'this is the zone...' - it's really hard to do it as the person who is making the ad. Its got to be like all the blokes at the bar at Ballymore from the brewery and the ad agency have all got to get their heads in the space that says ' Ah well, this is the new place we're supposed to be. Everyone's understanding that. We're not on the footy field now. We can be anywhere.' You go in and it's 'Anyway mate, you going to the footy on Saturday?' and I'd go, 'Shit, I wouldn't know anything about it! You sure you got the right bloke to write these ads?' They probably didn't. The atmosphere wasn't there to give you a clue or guide you out of that part o f the wilderness or you weren't quite the person. If you were 10'6" and really respected and could say this is all bullshit blokes, what you've bloody got to do is this and move on, they might have snapped to, bit it didn't happen for me. It didn't happen for anyone.

We love it up here. I can feel a XXXX coming on went for a long time, a heck of a long time, about 4 or 5 years. Lion Nathan bought all Bonds breweries in Australia. So the new regime was in and it was headed up by Kevin Roberts, a real gung-ho lad. The account was put up for pitch. He came in from New Zealand where I think he'd had dealings with Saatchi. So it was put up for pitch between Saatchi, Gamsey Clemenger and Mojo. We thought we'd lost it but be retained it Greville Patterson - transcripts 25 They're just ads with We love it up here. The brief was, it's been this Bond beer and he stuffed it up with Perth on the can so bring it back to being a Queensland beer again.

S. So it was just made for Queensland.

Yes I think by this time they'd given up the whole idea of a national beer. It didn't actually run for very long - all the trouble that everyone went to find a replacement for I can feel a XXXX coming on - it wouldn't have run for more than 12 months. I think Kevin Roberts really wanted Saatchis to be his agency in Australian and I think the guys saw the writing on the wall for XXXX with Mojo and actually resigned the account. They were having enormous trouble with Tooheys in Sydney. They had this campaign 7feel like a Tooheys' which was regarded around the world as one of the best beer campaigns of its type but the young marketing boys felt it was old hat and it was time to move on and Mojo went through an endless embarrassment of trying to do things. They should have just stayed with Ife e l like a X X X X because ever since their beer share has gone way way way way down. So the writing was on the wall with Tooheys and XXXX was looking bad so they resigned the whole thing - didn't wait to be fired.

S. Was We love it up here successful?

It was funny with We love it up here because supposedly at the time it did the job it was supposed to. When someone got a goal at Lang Park it would go up on the screen. I don't know if it wasn't successful. It had an incredibly light media schedule because at this stage Bond ...I don't think the whole brewing group was terribly healthy at this stage and I think XXXX was propping it up a bit with sales. They were saving money by not advertising XXXX very much so it had a very light run. It might have got two seasons at the footy, being flashed up on the scoreboard whenever Queensland scored. Then they'd sing it at the Caxton after the game at Lang Park. It got into the culture a little bit. I thought it was reasonably successful at the time but I learnt recently that XXXX had come to look at it not very happily because their research showed them that at that stage a lot of their potential new drinkers were coming from Victoria and New South Wales because they were migrating here and they liked moving to Queensland but they didn't like what it represented. They thought We love it up here was a good example of the things they didn't like about Queensland because it was so parochial.

They've lost their way and aren't doing a lot of advertising at the moment and continually debate whether they should go back to I can fe e l a XXXX. But the emotional connection isn't there. The main marketing and creative people are in Sydney and they probably do a XXXX commercial when they've got nothing else to do.

The things we do for a Tooheys or two was yet another attempt to try to hold the water in the dam while these people worked out where Tooheys was going.

I Love Saturday Morning. I think that was just put up to them as an idea. They must have wanted some sort of corporate commercial and I think that was me going - lets make one about Saturday morning. Saturday morning seems to be the time when a lot of people regard hardware stores as a grown up toy shop - rather be doing things with hammers and nails than working during the week. Its a shame it didn't develop. Someone from Mojo actually took it with them and all they were good at was putting catalogues together so all that stuff to do with image and getting a bit Greville Patterson - transcripts 26 They're just ads of feeling into it was dismissed.

[More on We love it up here!]l think they were trying to bring it back to Queensland. That was part of the brief too. Bond had taken the beer and put Perth on the can. He tried to make it a national beer and it didn't work. They were coming back to this philosophy that all beers belonged in their own regions - Tooheys belonged in NSW, XXXX in Queensland, and Swan in Western Australia. And that culminated in my period with We Love it up Here because the brief at that stage was and absolutely parochial one, a celebration. Bring this thing back to Queensland. I was in a comer. They hadn't bought these extensions of the commercials, the sound effects stuff, which I think was much more creative. I think what Mo and Jo had tried to do was come up with this idea that yes, we could embrace all this Queensland stuff but not in a jingoistic way. At least with sound effects it had some sort of entertainment value in taking the bits and pieces of our environment and using them to construct a sound track.

Tape recorded 13/2/99

Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation. Yo! Way to go!

You had to fight for every dollar to get new footage shot - it was a far from perfect operation. They always had their internal film department at QTTC and all the stuff was shot for audiovisuals -1 0 minute films of things - two people on a cliff-face getting out of a BMW pointing then walking through the rainforest and all that sort of stuff - not shots designed for commercials. If its a kaleidoscope montage commercial where you have to show everything in Queensland, you're after one and a half seconds of action - it's not necessarily going to be a very creative commercial because they just want to show all this stuff. Often the footage they've got is just not ideal. You might want something fairly lively happening in Mossman Gorge or whatever. So you just had to struggle. I saw the new commercial on TV the other night and it looked like it had been shot holus bolus as one big shoot. Even though 'Yd and 'Live it Up' probably weren't the most sophisticated advertising campaigns compared with the Victorian stuff, I think that's the differences in the nature of the places. Victoria is all restaurants and shopping and a more cultural experience. Oftentimes you'd hear people at QTTC saying they wanted to aspire to that sort of thing and you'd think: 'Cut it out. That's not us, we are sun, surf and palm trees, muddies, all that sort of stuff. I always felt with 'Yo' and 'Live it up', a lot of the trouble we got into was there was a bit of irreverence in it. I always felt the south expected it of us that Queensland wasn't really part of Australia - it was this place you could go to let some steam off - escape from the real world. You can go to Queensland where the guard was down a bit, it was a bit more innocent, a bit more irreverent I think.

S. What was the brief for Yo?

There wasn't one. Don Morris knew Peter Laurance who was the chairman of Gold Coast Tourism. He was a bit flash - had the yellow Rolls Royce and the yellow sports coat and that sort of stuff. A bit of a socialite, a bit of a personality I suppose, an entrepreneur. I think he ran Sea World for a while too. He knew Don who was CEO of Mojo in Sydney. Everytime he'd see Don he'd say: 'When are you going to get your blokes to do a Gold Coast campaign?' So Don would periodically mention it when I was there in the company of Mo and Jo.

We used to have these weeks on the Gold Coast where we'd try to write a few campaigns. One Greviüe Patterson - transcripts 27 They're just ads particular week we knocked up I think it was the G ood Better B est campaign for Telecom, a new Tooheys campaign, ... there was quite a bit of stuff done in one week. Don rang up and said, listen while you blokes are up there on the Gold Coast, have a look around you and do a Gold Coast campaign. So we were just sitting on the balcony of the hotel looking at Surfers and going: this is just like Venice Beach in California - there are kids getting around on skateboards and its bikinis and it's all a bit flash and in your face. There are body builders walking up and down the beach and that's very California you know. At that stage Mojo was connected to an agency in California called Chiat Day and they had a drink called California Cool and they'd done some interesting campaigns for it. One of them used a line from a Beach Boys song ... S ol said Why don't we just do some sort of silly expression - like 'Yo, way to go' or something. And Jo said ' That sounds like fun. Let's write that up and see what happens to it'. So we wrote it up and he got on the blower and convinced Don that we should record it. So we recorded it and we did animatics. We put quite a bit of work into it as a Gold Coast campaign. Don Morris didn't like it at all. He didn't want to show it to Peter Laurence. Peter Laurance kept ringing him up and he kept denying that we'd done anything because he didn't want to show it to him. And then Peter Laurance moved from being CEO of Gold Coast Tourism to Chairman of QTTC and once again he was prodding Don asking 'Have you blokes done anything?'. And he said 'They've done a thing for the Gold Coast that you can have a look at. He really liked it and being a bit flash said 'I think we should do this for Queensland'. We said No, no, don't do it for Queensland - it was a sort of Gold Coasty joke'. But he insisted. He said, and he was probably right: No. Queensland's sun, surf and sex, that's what Victorians see it as and that's what people from NSW see it as. When the commercial was finished he said: 1 don't think it's sexy enough. I don't think its raunchy enough. I think you should shoot some more'. We said: We think you're in enough trouble already'. And then there was the launch to the media - the women's department had just been formed within the state government - and because there was the bottom pinching and all that sort of stuff... there was trouble. But as far as Peter Laurance was concerned it wasn't nearly as sexy or raunchy as he wanted it to be but all that was taken out anyway. I think it was the first commercial that I'd ever done that went to air before it went to air - on the news. It didn't do much for my reputation amongst my relatives!

But that's how silly it was. There was no brief - it just stumbled into existence by accident really. So that lasted a while. It was very popular down south. We used to get stories of people having Yo, way to go parties. But I think I felt very embarrassed at the time, thinking, this thing that started out almost as a joke about the Gold Coast being a bit like California suddenly became Queensland. I'm doing this in the agency that made Australian advertising. There was the media launch and there was this huge blow up and people complaining. Then Borbidge hopped into it - it was good political fodder of course ...

S. What were the main complaints?

Sexist ... there was a woman getting her bottom pinched. We'd done an animatic - putting it together to give an impression. There was a bottom pinching shot in that. So we reshot that and had the woman turn to the camera going No, no, no. don't do that'. It was a pretty stupid thing to do.

And it was a bit of a cultural crime to use 'Yo', which was interesting. It's a really good example of people not being manipulated. You show people an ad like that and it gets up a lot of people's noses, so you have a furore. It gets shown on the news, it gets criticised left, right and centre and Greville Patterson - transcripts 28 They're just ads you have people making a real scene about it. Well that's not people being manipulated. Its a great example of people interacting with an ad.

It lasted a while, for all its controversy. It was immediately watered down to make it more acceptable to everybody. I think there was one particularly skimpy bikini taken out. Do you remember the mutton bird man at Surfers paradise, the man who sprays the suntan oil. He would go around right in the middle of Surfers Paradise, the girls would stick their backsides out and get themselves sprayed with this stuff. So in a way we were shooting what existed.

S. How did people in the agency react to the controversy?

There was a fair bit of going to water. Really that sort of publicity is not too bad in some ways. It did go all around Australia and it did create a bit of a stir. A lot of people in the agency became quite frightened and couldn't wait for the thing to be corrected as quickly as possible. There wasn't any fight or resistance. Borbidge was jumping up and down. I suppose it is a government body - Queensland Tourism - it's not free enterprise - it is highly political. So we did buckle under pretty quickly.

I had to find replacement shots to correct it. But people were certainly terrified that that copy was going to be on the loose somewhere. I think the master was put in the safe at some stage. Mostly you're dealing with free enterprise and they tend to carve out their own fate. So I suppose it was something we weren't quite used to - that it was a government thing and we had to buckle under fairly quickly.

I was probably being a bit naive I suppose but I think I was shocked at the time. I took it very seriously ... I thought: 'Wow, I've really underestimated people's reactions to this thing and gee, it probably is wrong. I don't think I'd do it again, given the time over, but it was a comedy of errors. It did start off as a Gold Coast idea, then Peter Lawrence became head of QTTC and the comedy of errors just rolled on. It's not something to be terribly proud of in retrospect. It was just a big mistake. Mo and Jo weren't terribly concerned about it. They were in Sydney anyway. And there was always that hierarchy too that whatever problem Queensland had wasn't a real problem compared to what a real problem would have been in Sydney. I think they would have thought it was all a bit of a joke.

S. How conscious were you of being from Queensland?

I think fairly conscious. You thought Sydney was the capital of Australia. They thought that very much too. And with the brands that they'd been working on, they were all big brands - you couldn't do an Ampol ad out of Brisbane. You'd never do C'mon Aussie, C'mon. Australian Tourism ads with Paul Hogan would never have been done out of Queensland. S. Did you have to suffer Queenslandjokes?

Not really. They quite liked coming up here. No there wasn't that sort of problem, it's just that that's where all the big stuff happened. There was no putting down. I think they thought it was pretty funny that we lit the cliffs at Kangaroo Point. They probably thought there were better things to light in a city. I can remember a couple of occasions ... one of the reasons why they'd come up to Brisbane was to have some muddies. We used to go to one of those seafood Greville Patterson - transcripts 29 They're just ads restaurants down by the river, looking across at the cliff faces. That was one of the standard jokes - 'Gee the cliffs are lit nicely tonight'. They did I can feel a XXXX coming on before I was with them. When it went up for pitch again I think they'd pretty much lost interest in it. I think they were in the throes of losing Tooheys in Sydney. Swan had gone in Perth. I think XXXX was getting to be the only one in the stable and for what it was worth they'd rather go : 'Let's forget that stable of beers and have a go at Fosters'. So I was left to my own resources for We love it up here.

16/3/99

Toyota - Its agency in most of the world was Saatchi and Saatchi. It certainly was in Australia and the UK. The Japanese have a philosophy of loyalty, they like to stay with their agency. Bob Miller who was a renegade - 1 think the history of Mojo is a history of rebels and renegades, blokes who've rattled the cage a bit - so Miller had this agency Saatchi & Saatchi which was a very clever, conceptual, ideas driven agency with a big reputation for creativity (hence it closed down). Bob Miller was happy to have that kind of agency, but Mojo was the heartland agency, more emotional than conceptual. He wanted a bit of that. He thought he had a couple of products that needed more of an emotional approach. I think Landcruiser was one of them and Corolla as well. Anyway, I'm led to believe his hands were a bit tied trying to get Mojo as the agency in Sydney so the backdoor approach was taken I believe when he came in through Brisbane.

Toyota you're Queensland all over - the brief was let's do a parochial campaign for Toyota dealers in Queensland. It could easily have been done through Saatchi & Saatchi, so there probably was some truth in it. It was done in Brisbane and was well received by them, so much so that they did Australia You're Toyota All Over. Mo wrote the first Corolla campaign - Corollaing along.

S. What about 'Oh What a Feeling?'

I think it came out of America. Australia is the only country still using it. I think about 20 years ago it might have been the whole ad, but in my memory it's only ever been the end line tag. In the UK I think their line is 'The car in front is a Toyota'. The US have a strange line - something like 'Toyota Today'. Every few years the 'Oh what a feeling' thing would be challenged and Toyota would decide it was probably time to move on. In my dying days at Mojo, in my dying last couple of years I did a campaign called 'It's not just a car, it's a Toyota'. We put an enormous amount of work into it. We did music tracks and animatics and it looked like it was going to be the new thing for a while there. I was rung up while I was on holidays up the Coast and told you've got to come back to Sydney straight after your holidays because Bob Miller wants to go with it. So I went down to this presentation and he really pulled the rug out from under it.

There was a guy called Bernbach - like the Bauhaus of advertising - he left a heritage and example of what can come out when one of the principals of an agency is creative. Tons of agencies around are just money-making machines run by accountants. Most interesting advertising in the world comes when one of the principals is a creative person. David Ogilvy is another one. He was a real method man who stuck to strict guidelines. He did extensive research to prove things would work but he had ideas and humanity, not just glossy bullshit.

In this country ... Mojo's personality was so strong because clients wanted to see the principals Greville Patterson - transcripts 30 They're just ads of the agency who were the blokes who also wrote the ads. Jim Walpole was similar - still is - he's in his 60s now and still producing very distinctive stuff and having an input into the agency.

S. What about the Arnotts ad?

That was an emergency call from Sydney. Jo rang me up and said: 'We've got to do a chocolate biscuit commercial for Arnotts' - that was about two nights before Christmas. I virtually got off the phone, wrote it, phoned him back and said, 'What do you think about this - it was one of those quick instant things. It stuck around for a while. It seemed like a pretty good line at the time but once again it was a victim of who's the brand manager. They'd go, then someone else would come along and want to make their mark.