5 Minutes With... Mark Denton

Feeling creatively deadened and drained of motivation? You could do worse than to spend an hour or so in the company of the moustachioed Mark Denton. The director and owner of Coy! Communications has spent 37 years in the advertising industry, as a creative and as a partner in the agency Simons Palmer Denton Clemmow and Johnson during the 90s, and has an ever-proliferating collection of personal projects. He might be known as an unstoppable creative force with an outlandish personal brand, but, as it turns out, he spent the first five years of his career too afraid to speak. And, you come away thinking, if someone who speaks so openly about their self-doubts can become the spokesperson for moustache wax, perhaps there’s hope for the rest of the world. 

LBB’s Laura Swinton joined him to enjoy a ‘Mark Denton Ramble’ that covers everything from figuring out the science of winning awards, ad agencies that don’t care about advertising and why, if he was starting out today, he’d go into computer games.

 

LBB> Usually we open with the question ‘what’s so unique about your company’. For those who are familiar with your work and with Coy! might think this something of a redundant question – but what’s so unique about Coy!?

MD> We’re a bit like the A-Team in that we’ll go anywhere, do anything. We do stuff that we’re totally unqualified to do: TV commercials first, and anything else from a creative point of view that anyone’s likely to ask us. I think that makes us a bit unconventional. I come from an agency background and I know there are a lot of ex-agency people in production but generally – and this is a massive generalisation – they get on with producing other peoples’ ideas. That never suited me. I like doing the ideas bit as well, so we still generate a lot of self-initiated projects too.

LBB> Looking at these ‘self-initiated’ projects, there’s such an abundance and variety of them. Even today you’re wearing your Denton-branded tracksuit. Are you quite a fearless person?

MD> I’m wracked with fear on a daily basis. I wake up anxious. I have the same negative voices that everyone else does; I just choose to ignore them. Everyone’s got it, but these thoughts are of no use whatsoever. The thoughts generally talk about things like risk aversion, taking things cautiously. Doesn’t suit me. I do stupid things on a daily basis, like keep a production company going when the world is saying that production companies are not the best way to make money at the moment.

 

 

LBB> And you’ve got quite a creative way of promoting Coy. Recently you advertised a talk at 180 Amsterdam by posing in a pink nightie in the style of a red light district window, for example.

MD> I believe in advertising in a way that a lot of people in the industry don’t believe in it. In Campaign, for instance, you won’t find many advertisements for advertising agencies in there. These are people who are trying to persuade the client to do advertising and yet they don’t advertise themselves. I talk to a lot of creative teams, and I say to them ‘you’ve got to look after your PR and your profile’. The thing I keep hearing is ‘let the work do the talking’. I’ve found that’s not enough. If you’ve got something good, you’ve got to fluff it up in some way. You’ve got to put a spotlight on it. That’s advertising.

 

You can see the agencies that do invest in their own brand, people like Mother, for instance. They’re just an advertising agency, but they’re not just an advertising agency. They think beyond just doing ideas for clients. They’re as careful with their own brand as they are with anyone else’s, or so it looks from the outside. I’ve got a lot of admiration for them.

LBB> Do you think of yourself as a brand?

MD> I suppose so, in one respect - within our little world I know what I do. In the great scheme of things it’s not that important, but if you believe in the capitalist society, advertising is important. Things do get sold. If you don’t agree with the whole system that’s fair enough – I can see the pros for an alternative society but I couldn’t make that work. If you look at the likes of Russia it seems that few people can make it work. Given that we live in the society we live in, advertising is an essential tool.

Do I think of myself as a brand? Take the tracksuits, for instance. Since I was a teenager I’ve always liked designing my own clothes and getting them made. If I go into an agency in a tracksuit that’s got my name on the back, there might be someone sitting in a closed office with a script in their hand who happens to look through the window and think ‘oh Mark, he could be good for this’. I’m over there and I haven’t even spoken to him. I suppose my tracksuits are like walking around with a sandwich board. It’s a sandwich board that might put people off – but I don’t need everyone to like me. I only need a tiny percentage of creatives to like what I do and that’s enough to keep me in Marmite.

 

LBB> What led you into advertising in the first place?

MD> As a kid my mum used to laugh at the funny adverts. I like making my mum laugh and I like funny adverts. If I was sitting in therapy I’d say ‘yeah I got into advertising because I wanted to make my mum laugh’.

Believe me, I don’t come from an advertising background, I come from a scrap metal background. Apart from my mum laughing at the funny ads, it wasn’t on the agenda. I left school with four O-Levels, which wasn’t enough to get into Art College. I managed to wangle myself into the School of Vocational Studies at Ravensbourne and studied typesetting, photography, technical drawing, that sort of thing. 

By the time I got into advertising I was a bit self-conscious. I started in 1976 at the age of 20 and I was too scared, especially when I got to Leo Burnett when I was 23. They only took on Oxford and Cambridge graduates for their account team, so all their graduates were quite posh and obviously quite intelligent. For my first five years I had perfected this act where I would just nod and smile and I wouldn’t say anything at all in meetings. Until one day there was a big account group meeting and in the middle of the meeting the phone rang. It just so happened that the phone was next to me. It kept ringing. I was too scared to pick it up in the middle of the meeting. They obviously thought ‘what have we got here’.

I was thinking about my agency talks this morning and back then I’d never have guessed that I could stand up in front of over a hundred people and do that. I’ve got the hang of it over the course of the past 35 years.

 

LBB> And can you tell me about your talks? How did they come about?

MD> The talks came about as an advertising campaign, because I looked at my business like an advertising problem. I’m a director, I’ve got a production company that I’ve got to sell and we started up about five minutes before the worst recession anyone’s ever seen. I started doing the talks as a way of getting into agencies. Despite the fact that I’ve been in advertising a very long time and I know a lot of people it’s still very difficult to get into an agency. I thought, well, if we can’t get in the front door, let’s go round the back door. 

It’s turned into something else as I’ve really started enjoying them. I’ve been asked to do them for clients, for accounts directors, for media companies – people other than the original target audience which was creatives. 

I’ve survived in advertising this long against all odds. I’m 57 this year – most of my mates who I grew up with in Leo Burnett in the late 70s, early 80s are not doing it any more. Not out of choice but because the industry has rejected them. It feels like a young person’s game and fills up from the bottom all the time. That requires a bit of new thinking. You have to reinvent yourself every now and then, and reintroduce yourself to a new set of creative. They didn’t know that I was a successful creative director with my own agency back in the 90s, they were still at primary school then. It’s a constant advertising campaign for me and the people around me. We’ve got a new photographer, Paul Burch, and there’s Oli Carver who I collaborate with sometimes. We invite people to the fold all the time and I like that because they know about stuff that I don’t. Ellie Botwood, our rep has really taken the talks and run with them. We’ve been doing something like six a month, although it’s calmed down a little bit now.

 

LBB> So what do you talk about? Is it a talk you take on tour or does it change?

MD> It’s the same talk every time but, because I’m absolutely completely undisciplined on one level – I’m very disciplined on another level – I find myself veering off-piste. They all come out slightly different. 

I like it when things go wrong. Good stuff comes out of that. I’ve done talks before where the slide show hasn’t worked. Or we’ve shown commercials with no soundtrack, so I had to act out all the sound effects. I enjoy doing that. I don’t think there’s anything that could spoil them because they’re so undisciplined and not slick.

LBB> How do you feed your creativity?

MD> Sometimes I don’t see things through to their final conclusion before I get to the end because I get distracted. I can get into anything that’s got a creative process involved in it. If someone asks me to do a bit of flower arranging I’ll think ‘I can do that’. If my missus asked me along on a cake decorating course I’d go ‘ok’. And it becomes a competition. I’m married to the right person because we’ll both try to make the best cake and the two of us become locked in this mortal combat. 

It’s good to do creative stuff without any specific purpose because it leads to other things. I was having a beer with a photographer, just having a chat and I asked if he fancied shooting me dressed up as my fictional ancestors. If you follow the chain along, that led to me shooting a commercial in which I played an Edwardian footballer eating Muller Fruit Corner. It led to me being featured in a Danish Magazine and a documentary on Japanese TV, I’m now the face of Penhaligon’s moustache wax - the pinnacle of my modelling career. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t dressed up as my ancestors all those years before.

Leo Burnett invited me to do an exhibition and I’d never seen all my stuff together before. Generally I do stuff, it goes into the lock-up and we don’t see it again. My wife opened my eyes because she came along to the exhibition and she said “you do know that nothing here has been commissioned, you’ve done it all with no brief”. It wasn’t until that point that I really got it. I mean I knew I did things outside with no brief from an agency but I didn’t realise I did it to that extent. 

LBB> One of the things I wanted to touch on is your work that has a slightly skewed take on Britishness...

 

MD> A lot of people say that. Creative Circle was like the Beano – and that wasn’t my idea. I can’t take the credit for turning the Creative Circle into a Beano-like annual, that was Dave Dye. I was president of the Creative Circle and I asked Dave because he’s a great designer and he’s done a few D&AD annuals. He said that he was too busy so he asked me to work on it with him as part of a collaboration, which was a gift back to me. So I was very much involved in that but I didn’t come up with the initial idea.

I can see why it appealed to my sensibilities. You’re too young but you wouldn’t know the sort of thing I did when I had my own advertising agency, Simons Palmer Denton Clemmow and Johnson in the 90s. We set it up in  ’88 and I was there for six years until I fell out with my partners, that’s why I became a director. A few years later this German couple came to interview me for a book they were writing. They told me that Simon Palmer Denton Clemmow and Johnson were, ad-for-ad, the biggest award-winning agency across Europe for a five year period. We were the hottest creative agency in town. I thought we were anyway, but the Germans came over with the statistics to tell me that. So we were bloody good. 

When I had that agency, everything that came out wasn’t Beano style. Why do people say Britishness? I don’t know. Is there any reason that my work couldn’t be German? Or French?

LBB> The branding for Blink, with the Ginger Nut biscuit really sticks in my mind…

MD> James Studholme is the boss of Blink and he’s got ginger hair. I created this little character called Ginger Jim, so that was that. I don’t know what people have got against ginger hair – I think it looks great. I cast people with red hair in my commercials all the time. But it’s a Ginger Nut because James Studholme’s got Ginger Hair. Is that British? Biscuits? They eat biscuits in America.

But at the same time you’re not the first person to say it, so I’m fascinated to know why. I don’t really get it. I don’t walk about with a bowler hat on all the time. I came into work today with a 1970s style tracksuit – it’s almost a very American look. Or this could be 1970s adidas and that’s German. There’s not British stuff there. I’m not offended it’s just that you’re one of many people who have said it.

LBB> Maybe it’s the humour?

MD> I don’t know. When people say ‘you’re a comedy director’, I think ‘what do you mean?’. I don’t actually get sent that many funny scripts. I don’t mind. I started this whole career to make my mum laugh, so if I can do something mildly amusing then I’m happy with that. With personal stuff, the person it has to amuse is me. 

LBB> Are awards important to you?

LBB> When I was young and self-conscious I thought that if I won some awards I’d be able to talk to people. That people would take me seriously. It’s one of the reasons we were the most award-winning agency in Europe. We chased them. We made a science of it. I looked at categories that not very many people were entering, weak categories, in order to win awards. I wanted to win lots of awards because I didn’t have the self-confidence to stand by the work and not care. 

I was young and stupid, and thought that mattered – and of course it doesn’t bloody matter at all. If I do win an award, then that’s great, if I don’t I don’t feel like crying like I used to. In the past I’ve been to award shows where I’ve won five D&AD pencils in one night – pretty good, but I wouldn’t have punched the air. And then we’d go to an award show where we didn’t win anything and it would be like someone had stabbed me. Very unhealthy. And it was all out of insecurity. Now I feel a lot healthier in that if we win a bronze somewhere at some direct marketing awards we’ll go there, get pissed, punch the air and have a good time. That’s what you’re supposed to do. People don’t care about awards as much anymore anyway.

LBB> It sounds like there’s a good self-help book for creatives in there somewhere...

MD> At the talks I don’t show any of my commercials, I talk about the process of making creative stuff even if there’s no requirement for it to exist. In agencies now it’s worse than ever before. The process is a lot longer, it feels like agencies make their money by keeping the process going on for as long as possible, filling out time sheets, and not by actually producing anything. There seems to be a bit of a dark cloud of fear hanging over the London industry.

LBB> And how do you think that culture of fear is affecting young creative?

MD> I wonder why they go into it now. If I was at college I’d see if I could get into a firm that made computer games. There are a lot of exciting creative opportunities out there now. When I started back in the 70s, there weren’t a lot of career outlets for people who had my sort of creativity. I didn’t have it in me to write a book. Opportunities to get into filmmaking and TV were a bit rarer, so advertising seemed like something I could do. No one had computers then.

 
Now people can produce their own content, they don’t need an outlet like advertising to allow them to do something creative. They can do it at home. Publishing has never been cheaper. There’s great stuff out there, all over the internet. I’m constantly torn. Advertising, for me, has never been duller and the opportunities and tools we’ve got have never been better. 

Clients keep shouting about virals – you know that word that was everywhere about ten years ago. But they don’t understand that these videos that go viral and get a million hits are created by a person in their bedroom and are funny, unrestrained, joyful and haven’t got a client breathing all over it. They want all of that but they want to apply the same shackles as they do to TV commercials. You can’t have both. 

Clients trying to sell stuff are competing with more people than ever before. We’re being bombarded by more messages. So shouldn’t every advert you see be better than the ones you saw back in the 70s and 80s? And they’re not. It’s not nostalgic.

LBB> And looking forward, what exciting projects have you got in the pipeline?

MD> I’m starting a magazine! ‘Coy! Communications the Magazine’ is going to trundle out before the end of the year. I’ve got the first half-dozen covers designed. I’ve just got to get round to filling it up. 

I did a magazine before; when I was trying to up my profile several years ago, I kept sending things into Creative Review. Sometimes they’d take it and sometimes they wouldn’t. I thought, if I had my own magazine, my stuff’s going to get in all the time, so I made Styling Lard Magazine. The idea was that every issue would be about something different – different format, different everything.

 

For the first issue I thought about the young creatives who had never heard of me and what they might like. When I was a young creative I really cared about awards. And when I was even younger I used to like these nudie books you used to find in the woods as a kid. So I decided to combine the two.

I got all the costumes made. I spent £15,000 on the costumes alone. I found out what everyone’s favourite awards were by sending out a postcard to 500 creatives and did research on ten years’ worth of awards.

You’ll probably notice there’s advertising in it as well. I sold advertising. And I thought wouldn’t it be good if this was the first magazine ever that only had good advertising in it? You go through Campaigns and, what I don’t want understand is that, although it’s aimed at people who appreciate good advertising, what you’ve got is crap trade ad, crap trade ad, crap trade ad. I tendered the price of the page depending on how good the advertising was. I went through lots of Creative Reviews and Marketing Weeks and phoned up the clients and offered them a spread for two and a half grand on the condition that they let me enrol a creative team to do the ad. The client wasn’t allowed to interfere and the only brief to the creative team was ‘make an award-winning ad’. I ended up selling 30 thousand quids’ worth of print ads. It paid for the whole process. 

I was going to bring a new magazine out every six months but I had to stop because I took on Creative Circle. D&AD had decided to abandon their USP, which was ‘the best of British design and advertising’ and had become the same as the One Show, the New York Festival of Advertising and all the other international awards. I felt the annual wasn’t as good, it wasn’t as single-minded. I said to Creative Circle ‘you could have that positioning’. The message I got back was ‘we’re in trouble’. They asked me to be on the committee and I said no, make me the president. It was very cheeky but I had nothing to lose. I got a £50,000 annual produced for nothing, it got nominated for D&AD and I made them £118,000 profit in the first year. I got them sponsors – they’d never had sponsors before – and I used the same process as I used on the magazine. 

 

I never did the magazine to make money - mainly because I had a £25,000 launch party and invited loads of people. But any process that starts with a good idea and ends with a party is a good process. It’s the same as our Mexican wrestling book. That ended up with a party at the Café de Paris where we flew Mexican Wrestlers in for the first British Mexican wrestling bout. Creative Review called it the ‘party of the decade’. 

I’ve got loads of good ideas for my new mag. It’s more fun doing something than not doing it. The last time I learnt things about myself that I never knew.