5 Minutes with… Richard Denney
Richard Denny’s career as an advertising creative began in 1996 at Y&R. Within a year, he’d picked up a Gold Lion for his St Mungo’s interactive cinema commercial. From there, he went on to develop iconic work for iconic clients at some of London’s most iconic agencies. Saatchi & Saatchi created an environment for his work on Visa and the NSPCC, including the multi award-winning Carlsberg ‘Old Lions’ campaign (probably the best pub team in the world). After moving to DDB as creative director, Rich created even more award winning work, developing campaigns for the likes of Volkswagen, Budweiser, Harvey Nichols, The Economist, Kwik-Fit, Tropicana and Virgin Media.
In 2011 he joined MullenLowe London as joint ECD and quickly turned the agency around, creating campaigns for Halfords, Morrisons, Unilever and MicroLoan. In 2016 the shop was named 'Most Effective Agency of the Year' at the inaugural UK Effie awards for work on MicroLoan and the Electoral Commission, and followed it up by retaining the title in 2017 with work for RedrawTheBalance - which also won EuroEffie gold.
In August 2017 Rich moved to independent agency St Luke’s London as executive creative director, and it’s there that he’s worked on campaigns as diverse as SHN – an unofficial project for the NHS during covid-19 – as well as launching memorable new work for Butterkist, SWR and Ocado.
LBB’s Alex Reeves caught up with Rich to talk about all of this and more.
LBB> What was your upbringing like and what sort of kid were you?
Rich> I grew up in Hastings - a seaside town. I was creative. I was quite full on. I definitely wasn't academic. I was a bit of a ball of energy. I suppose I was quite disruptive. Teachers either liked me, or I was a pain in their arse.
My granddad, Dick Denney, invented the Vox AC 30 which created the sound of the '60s. He was an inventor and designer, and he was a bit of a showman as well. So I was brought up around design, but also entertainment. He was a real entertainer. Whenever we went over there he'd always be playing Harold Lloyd or Laurel and Hardy – a lot of silent movies. So I loved performance.
When I came to the careers advisor, he'd already written me off. He said, “What do you want to do, Denney?” And I said "Either art or acting." He said, "You're not going to carve a career out of that. Get a trade." As blunt as that. There's nothing wrong with trades, and if you think about carpenters and electricians, they can also do that in film and television and stuff like that. But you're not really exposed to that unless you have that kind of background.
I applied to college. I didn't have the grades, so I did a National Diploma in design and art. In the first term, the students in my group noticed I was too advanced for this class. One suggested I go and speak to the college dean. So I set up an interview with him. I was proactive. My dad taught me, "Don't wait for things to come to you; go out and get them."
I went to the dean, he looked through my work and agreed I shouldn't be in that course. But I hadn't got the grades. So he moved me straight away, but while I was doing this two-year National Diploma, I had to take some other subjects. So I took photography and A-level art.
LBB> How was your college experience?
Rich> I loved it. It was the first time I actually felt at home - in an environment with like-minded people. There were different cultures, ranging from people doing fashion and art to makeup (my now wife went to the same college). I found my tribe. Then I applied to colleges, and I ended up at Maidstone at the Kent Institute of Art & Design doing Design and Communication Media.
I had a bit of a laugh, but still didn't know what subject I wanted to do. I had mates who were brilliant designers - glued to their screens. I didn't have that discipline. I loved photography and I loved illustration, but I couldn't commit to one thing and didn't have the dedication. As a result, I got to learn lots of different things from typography to illustration and animation.
I was blessed that my head of year really liked me. He said I'd be brilliant at advertising. So he put me in contact with a past student, Rob Porteus, who was working at Y&R at the time with Majella Lewis.
LBB> What was your first experience in advertising like?
Rich> I went to see [Rob and Maj] at this London ad agency and it was unbelievable. People had offices, there was a buzz going on, work up on the walls, there was a pool table and they had a bar – the whole atmosphere. And I was like, "This is work?"
My tutor's brother in law, who was a lot older than me, worked in a below-the-line agency and he wanted to go above-the-line. He said, "why don't you team up?" So he introduced me to Dave, my old partner. We put a book together, we went back to see Rob and Maj and they helped us shape it. There was probably more crap than there was good, but it was ideas and there was determination and energy.
Then we got some metal Citroen 2CV model cars cut in half – ‘our two CVs.’ We sent those around. We got a placement at Y&R.
LBB> What work early in your career helped you shape your approach to creativity?
Rich> It was a great period when Y&R worked on Perrelli (’power is nothing without control’), some really iconic posters, and they'd done some stuff on Eurostar.
It was really a really good learning curve, with some great creatives there. And I quickly became friends with the head of production. He said that the best way to be is to be proactive, look for briefs, make an opportunity to get yourself famous.
In my first year, I had an idea for St Mungo's, the homelessness charity. We wrote a script and we took it to our creative director who said it was brilliant. The head of production approached St Mungo's and we made a charity ad. On the opening day, we sat a homeless guy outside the cinema (Screen on the Green in Islington). And then in the cinema, he comes up on screen and says, "Remember me? You might have ignored me outside, but you can't ignore me now." We won a Gold Lion with that in Cannes in our first year. That was the start of a proactive desire to prove our worth and show people what we were capable of. That, as well as learning our trade.
At the time we had the Royal Navy. I was getting to go on shoots on that, do mailers and posters and shelf wobblers - all different things. So I was learning a lot.
Everyone wanted to do film and TV at the time. My first TV ad was for Amoy. It was a kung-fu gran. And the endling was, ‘A little bit of China on your table’. Then we had the Honey Monster, the Sugar Puffs account. We quickly ended up doing quite a lot for them. We built up a relationship with the clients at quite an early age.
My then partner, like me, is a mad fisherman. So he decided he wanted to go and live in Canada and fish. So he left. They teamed me up with a new partner – another Dave – and promoted me to the board. So I was, at the time, the youngest member in Y&R's history on the board.
We got to work on Land Rover - ’been anywhere interesting lately?’ and worked on Virgin Mobile. That got us spotted for our next move, which was to [Saatchi &] Saatchi's.
LBB> That must have been a big shift in culture at the time.
Rich> The thing that I took from Saatchi's was what they had engraved on the doorstep. The very first day we walked in it had ’nothing is impossible’ etched in the step. For me, that was a real mantra. If you haven't got the budget, then you reimagine how you could do it and make it happen. My thing has always been about proactive nature. Don't wait for things to come to you; go out and get them. That's a spirit that drove me forward.
I think that was the real pivotal moment in our creative career, because we wrote Carlsberg 'Old Lions'. Alongside the film, we turned it into a real proactive opportunity within that brand. ’Carlsberg don't do…’ So a lot of the stuff that you see today was sparked from what we started. ’Carlsberg don't do pub teams. But if they did, they'd probably be the best pub team in the world.’
That got the attention of Jeremy Craigen at DDB, where I'd always wanted to work ever since I joined the industry.
At DDB, it was a highly competitive creative department. But, it was also a unified creative department. And that was Jeremy Craigen, who's still my mentor today and dear friend. Absolutely strategic with incredible execution and craft. It was competitive because everyone wanted that special bit of work. And everyone did have a special bit of work - whether you were really experienced or really junior - you would tip up at an award show and everyone would be getting up and collecting awards. Everyone! It was a unified team clapping.
LBB> You worked on the Volkswagen account there, which has a lot of history. How did you get that right?
Rich> You'd see Jeremy and show him the work and he would quickly spot things that you maybe hadn't seen, or say "That's absolutely not good enough." We went in there to see him early on Volkswagen. We wrote some scripts and he went, "Look, you're not quite there yet." He gave us 'Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads?', and said, "Take that away and read it like the Bible." We'd written some ads and they weren't quite Volkswagen ads, that intention, the wit, the way that it's done - the observation of the line. And also direction.
Sometimes, less is more. That's what we learned from Volkswagen. A great example of that is 'Ordinary Prices'. They're in the showroom, he says the price and he's got coffee. Now, a lot of brands, maybe Ford, you might see him spit the coffee out, but you don't in a Volkswagen ad. You cut, and you hear the spitting out of the coffee. The gag is there but you hold back. You start applying that to your thinking - less is more, treat the consumer with respect, you don't have to spell it out.
We worked on Volkswagen, we worked on Budweiser, and won awards along the way. That took us into our moment where we ended up at DLKW as ECDs.
LBB> You’ve worked at St Luke’s as an ECD since 2017. What’s made you most proud in that time?
Rich> The last couple of years, the most testing times have been the most exciting and inspiring, starting with ‘SHN’, right at the beginning of lockdown. If I was in a network, that idea wouldn't have happened. I still freak out at the fact that it came to me. It's weird. I can't explain it. I feel blessed and gifted that I had that thought.
When everyone was starting to talk about lockdown, the week before we had a trial run of working from home. Neil [Henderson], our CEO, sent us all an email the night before, talking about testing times and what was coming up. He doesn't normally email everyone on a Saturday, but he sent this email because it was really poignant to him. It was this doctor on LBC radio who was talking about how bad it was in hospitals and how we needed to protect the National Health Service and ourselves. And it really stuck with me. My mum’s a retired palliative care nurse, and I have friends and family in the health service.
Automatically, I just started thinking about it. They were talking about staying at home and saving lives. It's [the NHS] not our account, but I couldn't help myself. I remember saying to myself "Stay home now... SHN. That's the reverse of NHS!” So I got my laptop out, sat in my kitchen and I flipped it around. I was like, "Oh, my God, #StayHomeNow." I chucked it to Al Young, who's chief creative officer and he was like, "Oh my God, that will travel."
And Al wrote a line on it: ”Don't send our NHS backwards”. I loved that. So we put that on it.
We decided if we approach the NHS, it'll never happen, or they'll kill it because you’re fucking with the logo. We could have approached my previous agency, MullenLowe, but they were too busy sorting all this out [the official NHS UK comms for the government]. So instead, I put it on my socials.
Within hours it went everywhere.
We animated it the next day, and that just went viral.
People started owning it, the public, nurses drawing ‘SHN’ and having their portraits taken. We realised society wanted it. This is their NHS.
So we set up a free website. We quickly got calls from people at different agencies who had ideas. There was a great thing from one of the creatives at BBH, which was 'National Hero Service' on a t-shirt. I said, “You don't have to ask for my permission, it's not mine. Do what you like.” He was selling them and making money for the nurses, staff and key workers. People started turning it into vinyl stickers and different things. We just followed it.
After that, media partners Global and Clear Channel asked for the assets because they had free out-of-home space. So they put it out nationally, on all their social media. And before we knew it, we had different celebrities sharing it.
Then, my friend Malcolm Venville helped us make a film. We put that film out and that went mad.
That was a real important moment because we made a lot of noise at St Luke's about something we cared deeply about. Everyone that got involved did it for free. So that shows what creativity in a crisis can do. It was brilliant and it's something we're really honoured to have done.
LBB> It’s been a strong couple of years for new business too. Tell us about that.
Rich> During lockdown, we had some incredible pitches that we won some brilliant new clients from, including Ocado, Bells, SWR, Butterkist, Gu, River Island.
SWR [a British railway] was all on Zoom. I'm proud of that because what we pitched with, we've made. In fact they told us to push it if we wanted. Sometimes you win these pitches and you have to change the work. They buy you as well as the work, so they might want to revisit the work. But they were both passionate about Sandy and Wes - our two birds - and they got the line "spread your wings".
We went straight into production on it. They said they wanted to revisit the brand world on it so we were able to rip up their book and push it. It was fantastic that we could create a brilliant new brand world for them with the incredible talent of Nexus’ Smith & Folkes, great writing and a brilliant voice director getting performances out of our actors. What you've seen is the labour of that pitch in August 2021.
LBB> The Butterkist account has done some of the best tactical work in the UK recently, perfectly responding to Boris Johnson’s ‘partygate’ scandal.
Rich> That was a pitch that we won towards the end of last year. Everyone's seen popcorn memes on social media, which influenced that idea of 'go grab the Butterkist'. It is the nation's favourite popcorn. So our whole pitch was about unmissable moments and owning those popcorn moments. We wanted people to think about things like 'Should have gone to Specsavers’. Could we become part of the vernacular? Could we do things that are totally disruptive and have society love us for them? (Like KFC did brilliantly during lockdown with #RateMyKFC).
We pitched that idea, 'Go grab the Butterkist' and we shot a suite of assets of different people interacting and eating popcorn so we could do little social posts. But, we also waited for those unmissable moments.
We had to be careful that it didn't have a point of view on it. It just said 'here for the drama', like a social post where you see Spongebob Squarepants eating popcorn going, "I'll just sit and watch this." We're waiting for those moments and we've got loads of them.
It's beyond cinema and TV. ‘Partygate’ was more showbiz than showbiz itself. So tipping up outside Number 10, with an ad saying 'here for the drama,' now that's our brief. The teams that we worked with were all coming up with ideas and we were constantly asking, "Is that idea as unmissable as the challenge?"
If you think about it, it's a classic poster, but the brief is: ‘how can we make that poster get seen by everyone?’ In 48 hours, the word ‘Butterkist’ got 8 million tweets. And that media reach was 86 million people because it was right at the heart of the moment. You couldn't miss it.
