David Abbott
Advertising executive Born: October 11, 1938; Died: May 17, 2014
DAVID Abbott, who has died aged 75, was an advertising executive who created some of the most memorable adverts of the 1980s and 90s.
It was he who wrote the adverts for Yellow Pages which told the story of the writer JR Hartley looking for an old edition of his book in second hand book shops. He also wrote the Bob Hoskins ads for BT that had the famous catchphrase “It’s good to talk”.
Those adverts and others for Sainsbury’s, Volvo, Ikea and many other famous brands built Abbott’s reputation as one of the most talented copywriters of his generation but he was also known for approaching his career with great intelligence and sensitivity. He built his firm Abbott Mead Vickers into the UK’s largest advertising agency but there were some products he would never sell – cigarettes, for example, partly because he had watched his father die of lung cancer.
Abbott was born into a Roman Catholic family in Hammersmith and grew up in Pinner. His father ran general stores selling household goods and for a time, Abbott ran the shops after leaving his studies at Oxford when his father became ill.
However, his heart was not in the business and after his father’s death, he sold the shops and pursued a career in advertising. His first job was in the advertising department of Kodak, for whom he wrote trade ads.
His career really began to take off when he joined the Mather and Crowther agency and then the London office of Doyle Dane Bernbach, where he was seen as a rising star. After a time in New York, he was sent back to London to run the operation there.
In the late 1970s, he founded AMV with old friends of his Peter Mead and Adrian Vickers and they won some important clients for whom Abbott demonstrated his great skill for a subtle sentence that could sell. Fellow advertising executive Robin Wright once said that Abbott was the single best copywriter in the history of advertising. “His copy was easier to read than to ignore, so enticing was every next sentence,” he said.
The peak of the firm’s success was in the 1980s when AMV had the contract with Yellow Pages, BT and many others. It was offered cigarette advertising deals but Abbott refused. “I remember my father sitting on the bed,” he said, “coughing for 10 minutes at the start of every morning. So there was no way that I was going to advertise cigarettes.”
He detested what he saw as vulgarity in advertising – he hated French Connection’s fcuk campaign for example – and always aimed to treat his audience with respect. His partner Peter Mead said of him: “He had a warmth and an understanding of the better parts of the human psyche. Yes, he was selling things to them but hopefully he was selling things that didn’t insult their intelligence or hector them or irritate them.”
In his retirement, Abbott wrote a well-received novel The Upright Piano Player, which was published in 2010. He is survived by his wife Eve and their daughter and three sons.