Bob Rightford: Ad man who made SA sit up 1933-2018
● Bob Rightford, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 84, started South Africa’s biggest advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather South Africa.
He revolutionised the industry in this country and helped make it one of the best in the world. Until he started shaking things up in the 1970s, the local industry was so conservative, few people knew it existed.
Then he and his team of disrupters produced magic with the Volkswagen brand after winning the account in 1979. Not only did they make David Kramer and his red velskoene famous, and transform the Kombi from a boring workhorse into something hip and cool, they caught the attention of the doyen of advertising, David Ogilvy.
World stage
His company, Ogilvy & Mather, bought Rightford’s agency, Rightford, SearleTripp & Makin. It became a creative advertising hub for the global group which put both it and the South African industry on the world stage.
Long before Rightford retired in
1994 the local industry was punching well above its weight.
Ogilvy later described Rightford as one of the half dozen “most remarkable” professionals he’d ever worked with.
Rightford was born in Cape Town on November 7 1933 and grew up in the then poor, working-class suburb of Observatory. He got a good matric and wanted to go to university but there was no money. His father was a bus driver, and the family struggled.
And so he did a printing apprenticeship and got a job as a compositor at the Cape Times.
In 1955 he joined Ramsay, Son and Parker Publications in what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia. He soon joined ad agency Barker McCormac & Van Zyl, and then the Grant ad agency, which transferred him to Johannesburg in 1961 as an accounts executive.
For the next 10 years he was transferred back and forth before becoming MD of De Villiers & Schonfeldt in Cape Town in 1971.
Valuable lesson
He helped turn it into South Africa's biggest-billing agency but was fired for supposedly accepting a bribe from a client — an Afghan carpet. He was shattered but said it was the most valuable lesson he ever learnt.
In 1974 he bought 48% of struggling ad agency Mortimer Tiley in Cape Town, which he helped revive.
Two years later he persuaded his friends from De Villiers & Schonfeldt, Brian Searle-Tripp and Roger Makin, to join him. They bought out the founders and changed the name to Rightford, Searle-Tripp & Makin.
Many agencies were falling by the wayside and Rightford thought he knew why. Clients were looking for something newer, sharper, brighter.
He and his partners began hiring mavericks with creative flair. And they created an environment that would get their creative juices flowing. It was chaotic, dynamic, vibrant, energetic and above all happy. And it worked.
They pioneered the idea of creating a relationship between the consumers and the brand, so that drinking
Carling Black Label or driving an Audi made you better, cooler, superior.
Rightford was a hard taskmaster who knew exactly what he wanted and let his creatives know if he felt they hadn’t delivered. But he protected them from interfering clients. Usually clients fired agencies. With Rightford, it was the other way round.
Rightford is survived by his second wife, Alison, two children and three stepchildren. — Chris Barron