Rupert Howell is one of the founders of the advertising agency HHCL & Partners famous for campaigns for Tango, The AA, Ronseal, First Direct and Go amongst to name just a few. They were awarded ‘Agency of the Decade’ by Campaign in the 1990’s and experienced phenomenal growth for over a decade before being sold to Chime.
We covered so much ground in this bumper 2 hour episode, so here's the list of what we touched upon:
- How Rupert made HHCL the best agency of the 90’s
- Ruperts New Business Mantra – Honesty. Respect. Trust.
- Why saying ‘I don’t know’ and ‘we got it wrong’ is so important
- How the agency’s sole focus is Advertising but the Clients sole focus is the business
- Why new business should always be separate to the day to day account management
- How Rupert became ‘the finest new business director of all time’
- How to win a pitch even after you have lost it
- Why the pitch process begins with the phone call and only ends when its announced in Campaign
- The sole purpose of the pitch is to win and not to solve the clients business problem
- Why HHCL had a strike rate of 65% for new business
- What the company annual report can tell you for the pitch process
- Why you should try and get your customer promoted
- How Carling Black Label inspired the most successful Tango Advertising of all time
- How Tango destroyed Fanta and forced Coke to withdraw it from the market
- How a call from a Surgeon led to the Tango Slap commercial being withdraw from market
- Why the ‘4th Emergency Service’ transformed The AA and how the bold idea was sold in
- How spending time with an AA team out on a call led to the idea
- The importance of winning your internal teams and why they matter as much as your customers
- Interrogating the product until ‘it confesses its strength’
- Why the harder you practice the luckier you get is just as true for an agency
- The real hard yards of the start-up phase that meant not taking a day off in 3 years
- How tabloids create controversy and how to respond to it
- Why relationships are the secret to really succeeding in business
- Turning down offers to sell the agency including a £1million bribe
- Why HHCL accepted an offer from Chime with the support from Sir Martin Sorrell
- Why so few agencies ever succeed after being acquired by a network
- Why HHCL was never the same after Rupert left and why he would never go back
- The importance of timing for Founders handing over to the next generation
- Dealing with bullies, bribary and negotiating an exit from McCann with a boat & DB9 as consolation
- Which celebrities are still speaking to Rupert after he left ITV
- Why social media is driven by click bait and negative headlines
- Why you should give up the news, except perhaps local news
- The Pros and Cons of a British free press
- How to get a non-exec role
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