How we SHOULD have fought the Remain campaign
M&C Saatchi boss reveals how the EU crusade was ruined and, in a sharp rebuke, highlights ad he COULDN’T use ...
DAVID Kershaw was the advertising boss charged with making us want to stay in the European Union. Notoriously, of course, the campaign failed and Kershaw, chief executive of M&C Saatchi, is clear about why – campaigning was too negative and there was no clear direction from the politicians.
What is more, he clearly believes the admen had answers that could have made a difference. ‘It was frustrating. There were an awful lot of good ideas which would have changed the tone of the campaign but which never saw the light of day,’ declares Kershaw.
The 62-year-old advertising veteran, who has been a top figure in the London ad scene since the 1990s and a long-term associate of the Saatchi brothers, knows what he would have preferred. ‘We wanted to talk about the future more,’ he argues and cites a poster tugging the heartstrings of parents thinking about their children’s future.
‘We had a pregnant woman in one of our proposed ads with a speech bubble from her bump saying “I’m in” – and talking to future generations, younger people, about the advantages of being in a reformed Europe rather than out of it,’ he says.
The poster was one of several that never appeared during the campaign.
This time they underestimated the sheer level of resentment at the Establishment
Kershaw, sipping a glass of rosé at his favourite West End restaurant Le Caprice, turns to the organisation at the head of the Remain camp.
‘Britain Stronger in Europe was being run by a cross-party committee and it was hard to get a clear lead.’ But even Kershaw knows that advertising can only take you so far, however. ‘Would it have made a difference to the result?’ he ponders. ‘I think advertising tends to reflect a campaign rather than dictate it. But we all believed in Remain on a business level and on a human level – we thought it was the right thing to do.’
Kershaw speaks with authority on the campaign since he is a founding director and group chief executive of the UK’s most successful political advertising firm by far.
It was M&C Saatchi’s predecessor Saatchi & Saatchi, which also worked on the Remain campaign, which ushered Margaret Thatcher into power in 1979 with its famous ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster showing an unemployment line.
His fellow co-founding director Lord Saatchi remains a key adviser to the Tories and the agency handled the Tory party’s advertising account – one Kershaw is confident of keeping under Theresa May, though that has not been decided yet.
‘It was much easier working for the Tories during the General Election because we were talking to the two or three people who were actually calling the shots,’ he says. ‘We thought we’d learned a key lesson in the Scottish referendum campaign, which we also worked on, because that ended successfully on a note of optimism, the vow to give Scotland more power within a set time frame, and we’d worked for a committee then, too.
‘But this time they underestimated the sheer level of resentment against the Establishment and the feeling of “Don’t tell me what to do” which was a strong part of the reason for the vote, too.’
The self-reinforcing nature of social media also played a part in encouraging entrenched opinions, he says. ‘People follow like-minded souls on social media and that led to some very fixed opinions on both sides,’ he says. ‘I understand why people behave like that – I’m an Arsenal fan, and I can no longer follow Piers Morgan on Twitter because though I like him I can’t stand his views on Arsenal.’
Kershaw’s agency came up with what is perhaps the defining political image of the last General Election: the poster of a giant Alex Salmond with a mini-Ed Miliband in his breast pocket. It neatly summarised the fears of many wavering English voters that a vote for Miliband meant handing Scotland’s SNP the whip hand in a Labour Government.
IN SOME respects he is an oldschool adman, virtually impossible to dislike and a master of schmoozing clients: ‘At 10pm on referendum night, I checked the odds on my phone as I was on my way back from the opera at Glyndebourne – with a client I hasten to add.’
But he is also a graduate of the London Business School and has run M&C Saatchi on a day-to-day basis since its inception 21 years ago. Now a third of its revenues are from its digital business and it numbers Samsung, Royal Mail, E.On, Shell, Unilever, The New Yorker, Malaysian Airlines and Boots among its clients and has offices in 19 countries.
M&C Saatchi will report interim results for the six months to the end of June on September 22 with the City expecting an 11 per cent rise in revenue to £97.2million and profits up 11 per cent to £10.7 million, according to investment bank Numis. ‘Our mobile digital marketing operation is the fastest growing part of the whole group and it didn’t exist four years ago. But it has to be a mix – the traditional ad campaign can be the best way to create emotion around a brand on a big scale, but tailored messages and offers on your mobile phone are more important the closer consumers get to actually buying the product,’ he says.
He, like his fellow founders Maurice and Charles Saatchi, Bill Muirhead and Jeremy Sinclair founded the company after quitting Saatchi & Saatchi. When American investor David Herro led a campaign to rein in what he saw as the agency’s excesses, the five of them walked out to start from scratch.
In a crucial difference to the agency the Saatchi brothers founded, Kershaw, Muirhead and Sinclair were all equal shareholders with the brothers in the new firm. M&C Saatchi has eschewed the mergers and acquisitions mania, funded by debt, which forced them out of Saatchi & Saatchi. ‘We aimed for healthy organic growth and, though we have taken stakes in local businesses in tough markets like the US and China, we’ve stuck to it. That model works for us, but it’s not the only model in advertising that works – Martin’s done it differently,’ he says. Martin is Sir Martin Sorrell, formerly of Saatchi & Saatchi too, who runs WPP, the world’s biggest ad group.
Does Kershaw resent his fellow adman’s success, as exemplified by Sorrell’s £70million take home pay this year? Kershaw himself took home nearly £700,000 in pay and dividends last year and his stake in M&C Saatchi is worth about £14million. ‘He has built a £20billion company and the value he has created means his remuneration is not unreasonable in comparison. It is when people are rewarded for failure that everyone truly gets annoyed,’ he says. ‘But I would hate to work with him, or even worse for him, because WPP, though best in class, is a topdown, hierarchical organisation.’
Kershaw shows no sign of retiring – ‘I’m the youngest of my fellow founding directors, the others will all have reached 70 this year’ – and he reckons helping Theresa May win the next Election will allow M&C to get back on the winning side.