DK: Well I started out at J Walter
Thompson (JWT) because my girlfriend
Margaret’s father knew some people
in advertising. He got me two or three
interviews and one was with JWT in
Mayfair. I had just come out of the Air
Force and managed to get a job as a
junior copywriter at the best ad agency
in the world! It was renowned as the
university of advertising so I knew that
I would get really good training there. I
ended up working in the TV department
which was, in those days, very new,
because commercial television had only
started a few years earlier. So I was
writing commercials in the very early days
and after getting frustrated about writing
ads for pack shots and media, television
media was where the real buzz was for
me, because huge sums of money were
being spent on commercial television.
That was good training for me and I
was one of the pioneers of working on
computer programmes for looking at the
value of air time, i.e. different audience
segments at different times of day, late
night, early afternoon etc. I actually
worked in three top agencies before I
started my own company, Knight Keeley
ten years later.
LE: You worked with a number of clients
like Pan Am, Grolsch, Nissan and DynoRod, but I want to know which one you
rate as your most successful advertising
campaign, plus tell me about some of the
ones that didn’t work?
DK: I think the worst has got to be when I
hired a writer who’d been a railway porter
since he was 16.He’d written this fantastic
letter to me and he was desperate to
become an advertising copywriter. He
was a bit headstrong and he needed a
bit of guidance on what was feasible and
what wasn’t. We had a client who was a
medical insurance company and he wrote
this advert which had been approved (by
the client) who themselves were pretty
naïve as well. Well this advert turned out
to be the Grim Reaper walking down a
hospital ward and the headline said, “you
can avoid this with….”! When I saw it I
couldn’t believe it, and of course we got
a huge amount of complaints. My God,
did that teach me a lesson, because it
damaged that company. Obviously we
had to fall on our sword so we resigned
the account. Normally I’m an absolute
stickler for quality control and dotting Is
and crossing Ts. We used to have this
phrase at my agency about loving an ad
to the last second before it went off to the
paper or to the television company.
LE: What about the best one, then?
DK: Well it’s obviously the one that’s the
most famous, the Wonderbra advert. But I
would actually choose the best campaign
we did was for the Macallan malt whisky.
They didn’t have an advertising budget
and we started out with a very small
budget, so we organised blind tasting…
ask anyone today and they’ll tell you
it’s is just about the best – it used to win
blind tastings hands down against all the
big brands. So we started out by taking
spaces alongside the Times crossword,
as we were after a particular type of
audience - literary men and women of
quality and refinement, shall we say.
Each ad was at the bottom and said
‘The Macallan. The Malt’. The malt – the
definitive article, the malt. So we started
with little ads the same shape as the
crossword. So we went from the Times,
then we went to the Daily Telegraph, then
we went to the Guardian, always in this
position. And this brand grew and grew
and, they had all these anecdotes, and no
lifestyle pictures. We never showed the
bottle and glass – everyone else did bottle
and glass advertising; we didn’t. We just
engaged people’s minds. And this took
off. It went from literally 146th at that time,
(there were 146 different malt whiskies
produced by distilleries in Scotland).
And Macallan was one of those, but
they decided they wanted to take it out
and launch it in America and the UK,
right? So we started this campaign and
it went crazy and they had to open parts
of the distillery that had been closed for
80 years! It was an amazing story and
we designed all these signs like, ‘Shhh,
whisky sleeping in the casks’, stuff like
that.
After about eight years we were
approached by Glenmorangie, which is
the number two worldwide brand and
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