The man who made us buy things
Brian Searle-Tripp, advertising king of SA
Brian Searle-Tripp, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 80, was a legendary creative director whose work revolutionised the South African advertising industry and transformed it from obscurity into one that punched well above its weight on the global stage.
He was one of the gods of the local industry, along with his partners Roger Makin and the late Bob Rightford.
Those in advertising used to say that to be in conversation with this formidable trio was the equivalent of talking to the Beatles, if not better, because “these were the original artists”.
They started Rightford Searle-Tripp & Makin in 1976 in what was considered the advertising backwater of Cape Town with almost no capital, existing from one client to the next.
Famous velskoene
This all changed when they produced magic with the Volkswagen brand after winning the account in 1979.
Searle-Tripp directed the commercials that made musician David Kramer and his red velskoene famous. They transformed the Kombi from a boring workhorse into something that anyone who wanted to live the life and go to places less travelled had to have.
More than this, they showed for the first time that TV commercials could be as compelling to watch as any movie.
They caught the eye of the legendary doyen of advertising, David Ogilvy. His company, Ogilvy & Mather, bought 40% of Rightford, Searle-Tripp & Makin and later the remaining 60%. It became a creative advertising hub for the global group, which put both it and the South African industry firmly on the world stage.
They produced work that was cheekier, bolder and more creative than that of agencies around the world with vastly superior budgets.
Ogilvy urged his executives to hire fewer MBAs and more “ordinary” people from SA.
RS-TM, he enthused, was the “jewel in the crown” of Ogilvy & Mather worldwide, and according “to many of the top bananas in our New York headquarters, the best in our entire network”, which covered 54 countries.
Inspired genius
By 1994, when Searle-Tripp left the agency, O&M RS-TM was the largest and most successful agency in SA, with a slew of local and international awards testifying to its cutting-edge creativity.
Searle-Tripp was widely regarded as the inspired genius behind all this.
He was born in Johannesburg on June 11 1940.
After matriculating at Kingswood College in Grahamstown, he went to commercial art college in Johannesburg for a year and then to London’s Central School of Art and Design.
There he lived the good life to the detriment of his studies. Remorseful about wasting his father’s money, he returned to SA, settled in Cape Town and joined De Villiers & Schonfeldt, where Rightford was the MD and Makin his copywriter.
Rightford was fired for allegedly accepting a bribe from a client in the form of a R12,000 Afghan carpet. He always denied that this was a bribe.
He was hired to save the small, struggling Cape Town agency of Mortimer Tiley and in 1973 persuaded Searle-Tripp and Makin to join him.
Ads on a matchbox
They won the Lion Match account, and their first campaign became marketing history. They made it their business to meet and get to know all the Lion Match sales representatives and bounced their campaigns off them, which was unheard of for creatives at the time.
They suggested that they sell advertising space on the blank side of the matchbox, which increased their Lion Match billings from R50,000 to R268,000 in a year.
This obvious but brilliant idea was the outcome of one of their brainstorming sessions, which became famous in the industry, where the emphasis was on quantity of ideas rather than quality. They made it a firm rule that no idea should be withheld on the grounds of being ridiculous or impractical.
At the end of the process, among the chaff would be found maybe just one useful idea which sometimes, as in this case, was brilliant.
Instead of placing small ads in lots of newspapers, which was the norm for a high-frequency, low-priced product like Lion Match, they blew the client’s entire budget on eight full-page ads in the Sunday Times spread over a year, demonstrating a boldness and conviction that became their signature.
Treading on risky political ground, they presented the match as the friend that united people who had lost touch because of forced removals, pass laws and migrant labour. The Lion Match ads won accolades from New York’s top ad agency, Doyle, Dane, Bernbach. Even if they didn’t sell a single match, said Bill Bernbach, they gave the brand a personality.
Changed the name
The “humble match”, as Rightford called it, won them their first Loerie, the South African ad industry equivalent of an Oscar, and their relationship with Lion Match lasted until their retirement.
Having revived the dying agency, they bought out the founders and changed the name to Rightford Searle-Tripp & Makin.
Many of the established agencies of the time were falling by the wayside and the three partners thought
they knew why. Clients were looking for something newer, sharper and brighter.
They hired nonconformists, rebels and eccentrics and offered them an environment that would get their creative juices flowing. It was chaotic, dynamic, vibrant, energetic — and it worked.
They changed the way advertising was produced, recognising that the old reliance on unique selling propositions and supporting evidence was no longer the way to go. 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.
They were the first agency to find out what black consumers wanted. Defying apartheid laws, they went to the shebeens and spoke to people. Many felt that Searle-Tripp’s work on South African Breweries’ Carling Black Label revived and saved a dying brand.
Brand-building was a new concept when they
started RS-TM. For Searle-Tripp it was an art form at which he excelled, both as a print ad specialist and a pioneering director of TV commercials.
His commercials linking the “Volksie bus” to iconic personalities like Kramer and Jeremy Taylor, who he hired to recreate the song Ag Pleez Daddy with VWinspired lyrics, were masterclasses in how to build brands, and made advertising history.
He developed a personality and character for VW that was uniquely South African.
He and his team turned the VW Golf from a drab, bland, colourless car no single young person would be seen dead in, renamed it the Citi Golf after rejecting the client’s insistence on calling it the Econo Golf because it was so cheap, put it in bright colours — “Red , yellow, blue ... this one’s for you” — and turned it into one of the funkiest, sexiest car brands around.
The advertising was so hip and new that every boring person in SA felt the drive to own a Citi Golf to
reverse their image.
Fashion designer Jenni Button, who was a junior art director under Searle-Tripp, said after she left to launch her fashion labels that she’d learnt about brand-building and how to create desire during her time at RS-TM.
Perfectionist workaholic
Searle-Tripp was the mentor young designers clamoured to work with.
The arty, worn leather jacket and jeans he wore and the E-Type Jaguar he drove belied the perfectionist workaholic he was.
He was known as RS-TM’s creative magician, a man of huge passion and intuition, obsessed with producing the perfect piece of work.
He had what Ogilvy called a “divine discontent”. While everyone else was celebrating a campaign and congratulating themselves on a job well done, he’d be saying, “we could tweak it a bit more”. Good enough was never good enough for him.
While working on a Liqui Fruit campaign he decided the film production company had not delivered on his expectations. He told the client their TV commercial was “crap”. After a long standoff they told him to find another production company and try again.
Clients either appreciated his criticism or fired him. Usually the former. On average his client relationships lasted 15 years.
Sun International and Wilkinson Sword were two of the big names he “lost”, but there weren’t many.
His relentless drive for perfection won global awards. This was never more tellingly demonstrated than with his famous 1983 film ad for VW Golf that was modelled on Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.
His fixation with perfection resulted in a set built from scratch that was astonishingly authentic, down to the smallest detail.
The commercial was a creative masterpiece. But he turned it into an award winner. When the film crew showed him the footage, he didn’t think it gelled and spent days and nights on it in the editing studio.
By the time he was finished, he’d “pulled something magical out of the hat”, agreed those who witnessed the before and after.
It won the Loerie Grand Prix for best campaign and individual elements of the campaign won gold and silver Loeries.
Hands-on training
In 1994, at the age of 54, Searle-Tripp felt the agency had grown too big and, always a teacher at heart, left to start a school of advertising for copywriters and art directors called The Red & Yellow School of Logic and Magic.
Attracted by his reputation, applications came from as far afield as Germany, UK and Canada. Graduates became creative directors at agencies all over the world. Their exceptional quality was attributed to his hands-on training.
After 10 years in charge he retired.
Searle-Tripp died after getting pneumonia. He is survived by his wife, Marina, and daughter Katherine.