Anthony Simonds-gooding
Ebullient marketing man who approved campaigns such as ‘Heineken refreshes’ and Captain Birds Eye
ANTHONY SIMONDSGOODING, who has died aged 80, was the flamboyant Irish-born marketing executive behind memorable advertising campaigns such as Heineken’s claim to “refresh the parts other beers cannot reach”. He went on to run Saatchi & Saatchi and, less happily, to launch the ill-fated British Satellite Broadcasting venture.
Simonds-gooding began his career with Unilever, where as marketing manager for Birds Eye frozen foods he achieved his first notable success with the “Captain Birds Eye” television commercials that brought fame to the brand’s fish fingers. He moved on to the brewery group Whitbread, first on the marketing side and later as managing director.
Whitbread held the UK licence for the Dutch-based Heineken brand and it was Simonds-gooding’s bold decision to approve the “refresh” campaign. Market research suggested it would not play well, but it eventually ran for more than 30 years and drove a shift in British drinking tastes from ale to lager. With similar counterintuition, he approved the tag-line “reassuringly expensive” for the French lager Stella Artois.
Simonds-gooding once described himself as “at the bottom end of intelligent and top end of average”. His friend the film director David (Lord) Puttnam called him “incredibly quick-witted”, and he was loved by advertising executives for his willingness to embrace their ideas, as well as for his irrepressible bonhomie and a sense of fun that expressed itself in some startlingly loud ties. One practitioner described him as not so much a tower of strength for the industry but rather “a brightly coloured maypole, around whom we in the creative community carelessly skipped and frolicked”.
In 1985 he was persuaded to cross the client-agency divide and become chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi. The role was effectively that of troubleshooter between disparate factions within a loosely assembled, fast-growing international collection of strong personalities. On his first day he found a large bunch of flowers from the founding Saatchi brothers, Maurice and Charles, who had gone on holiday with a note saying simply: “Welcome Anthony, over to you.”
Within two years he moved again, to become chief executive of the fledgling British Satellite Broadcasting, which set out with the initial backing of the Thatcher government to be Britain’s first nonterrestrial television offering. Simondsgooding believed ministers had assured BSB of “a clear run with no new competitors for three to five years”, but he found himself head-to-head with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television, whose jazzy mix of sport and news rapidly gained popularity as sales of its satellite dishes eclipsed those of BSB’S more expensive “squarials”.
“Suddenly, we no longer found Mrs Thatcher quite so supportive,” Simondsgooding recalled. “It appeared that the technology gains for British industry we might have promised were not as compelling as the support that the Murdoch press could offer in elections.”
Murdoch’s newspapers were deployed not only in aggressive sales promotions for Sky, but in denigration of BSB and its management: as costs soared and the launch of the BSB channels was delayed, Simonds-gooding was accused of squandering capital, not least on executive salaries and perks, including his own. It did not help that he was quoted as having told a City analyst: “I’m having the greatest fun spending other people’s money”.
Having finally begun broadcasting in
March 1990, BSB claimed 750,000 subscribers to
Sky’s 1.5 million.
But both were haemorrhaging cash and before the year’s end BSB’S shareholders sued for peace; the two ventures merged as BSKYB, with Sky in the driving seat and Simonds-gooding out of a job. The encounter left him with “a bitter taste”, and he became an early campaigner against what he saw as excessive concentrations of media ownership and power.
Anthony James Joseph Simondsgooding was born in Dublin on September 10 1937, and brought up in County Kerry. The family had military antecedents, his father Major Hamilton Simonds-gooding having served in Hodson’s Horse, an Indian Army cavalry regiment, until India’s independence.
Anthony was educated at Ampleforth in North Yorkshire and served in the Royal Navy before joining Unilever as a management trainee and being sent for a stint with its advertising agency, Lintas, where he learnt the ropes of the trade.
After BSB, Simonds-gooding took on a portfolio of non-executive business roles, including the chairmanship of the software group Oxford Metrics. He was also chairman of the Rose Theatre at Kingston upon Thames and of Design & Art Direction, a charity which promotes excellence in advertising work through awards and training, and which he rescued from financial embarrassment.
In later years he gave another portion of his energies to fundraising for cancer charities. He was volunteer appeals director and vice president of Macmillan Cancer Support, playing a leading role in the creation of the “coffee mornings” campaign which raised many millions. In 2013 he became chairman of Breast Cancer Haven, a smaller Londonbased charity which he encouraged towards national ambitions. He was appointed CBE in 2010.
Though most of his working life was in London, Simonds-gooding kept a house at Glenbeigh in Kerry, where he was a popular social figure and president of the local racing festival. At the age of 60 he took up painting, for which he always felt he might have talent, having “spent 30 years at business meetings doodling my colleagues’ faces around the table”. His portraits of weather-beaten Kerrymen at race meetings and cattle markets, exhibited in London and Dublin, became collectors’ items. His sister Maria is also a well-known Irish artist.
Anthony Simonds-gooding married, first, in 1961, Fiona Menzies; they had four sons and two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1982 and in that year he married, secondly, Marjorie Porter. She survives him with five children of the first marriage, one son having predeceased him, and a stepson from the second marriage.
Anthony Simonds-gooding, born September 10 1937, died October 16 2017