Jim Thornton: A Life In Advertising

40 years in advertising.

40 years of working for the biggest advertising brands and outlasting at least five of them.

And 40 years of working for the biggest brands that advertise.

40 years of constantly trying to do something different, something entertaining, something interesting.

40 years of outstanding success, catastrophic failure, spectacularly landing on my feet, humiliatingly and publicly falling over.

But 40 years later, like Elton, I’m still standing, only about two feet taller than Elton, and with all my own hair.

It started at JWT back in the last century. July 23 1986 to be precise. Sitting in an office with a typewriter, a landline, a layout pad and magic markers.

No desktop, laptop, email, photoshop, no mobile phone. (And nor would there be for at least another 12-15 years.) The only media available were Cinema, TV, Radio, Press, and Outdoor.

We’d have six weeks to work on a single press ad. Which meant about five weeks of messing around followed by a week of actual work.

Reference materials were books, VHS tapes, cassettes. And at JWT, a reference library full of folders containing pictures painstakingly cut out of magazines and newspapers and filed by the resident librarian.

My art director would draw up the visual, and I’d write my copy according to the space the typographer allowed me on the layout. I’d type up scripts with Vision on the left hand side, and Audio on the right.

Whilst there, I launched Persil Washing Up Liquid for Unilever by hanging plates on a washing line, and the first ever game of Fantasy Football for The Daily Telegraph and won awards for The Observer.

At GGT – still in an office with a typewriter, a landline, a layout pad and magic markers, I became a CD working into Robert Saville and Jay Pond Jones. And persuaded all The Fast Show characters to appear in a campaign for Holsten Pils.

At TBWA/GGT in 1998, I finally got a mobile phone. And sent my first email.

I was working into Trevor Beattie, and was the CD on the then biggest ever single UK pitch – the integrated NatWest business

We created an entirely animated campaign for them that ran in every channel that existed in 1998 including Internal comms, DM, retail and mass media.

That got me a job as a CD at Mother in 1999, working into Robert Saville and Mark Waites.

And sharing a laptop on which we could illegally download songs from Napster and enjoy the plethora of subversive comedy that was starting to spring up on the internet.

Where, amongst a zillion other things, I launched Talk to Frank with Kim Gehrig and Caroline Pay

Created with Ben Mooge a globally award winning campaign for the launch of QTV.

Oversaw the creation of the long-running Anyone For Pimm’s (or Pimm’s O’Clock) campaign with Darren Bailes and Al McCuish.

Challenged Sky’s dominance with a campaign about a streaker for the now-defunct ITV Sport Channel, again with Daz and Al.

Launched Saucy Noodles for Supernoodles in the UK – with ads in Chinese. Tried, and failed, to launch a radio comedy channel called Radio Bob. And had the time of my life

In 2003 I joined Leo Burnett London as CCO where I had my own desktop computer, and latterly, my very own Macbook.

There I had to shape a department that had only recently been merged with DMB&B. A department that went on to win more D&AD pencils than Leo’s London ever had. And it created hugely successful work for Department for Transport, Heinz, Department for Health, Kellogg’s, McDonalds and many others.

I made one of the best campaigns of my career with the late, great David Beverley – for Scottish Widows – that never ran (It’s a long story.) And I became the first person ever to put live ads on stage by taking over one night of Saturday Night Fever at the Victoria Apollo with the original cast.

We rewrote the script to include ‘ads’ for nearly all our clients, as well as having The Comedy Store Players performing improvised ads in the interval. We charged our clients ‘stagetime’ and donated all the proceeds from that and the sold out night to Comic Relief.

Oh and the night was opened by Richard Curtis….

After Leos I needed something different, and to see my children, so I picked up my Macbook and founded my own consultancy under the name of my alter ego, Lord Plumpton Ltd.

And that was when his Lordship joined Twitter and Instagram for the first time and had a ball. This was proceeding rather well until the crash of 2008, when everything dried up instantly.

So I went back to Mother freelancing for a year or so, running The Post Office and making an ad with the utterly charming Sir Roger Moore.

I then took two turnaround ECD jobs at Naked and Arnold KLP. Both of which proved impossible to turn around and hence no longer exist.

During this period I kept bumping into Darren Bailes on the train who by then was ECD at VCCP. He had his head in his hands because he had too much work. I had my head in my hands because I had too little. That was when he invited me to be his Number two at VCCP, where I’ve been ever since, working on the award-winning Be More Dog for O2, and over-seeing the ‘by the people, for the people’ spoken word campaign for Nationwide, amongst many, many other things.

It’s also where, just when you thought technical innovation might have plateau’d, along comes AI. Suddenly, the Macbook looks like it might actually become the entire Creative Department…

But, having lived through every technical development of creative tools since the typewriter, I can categorically state that every innovation has been seen, at its inception, as a dire threat to the business, accompanied by all manner of doom-laden prophecies.

Yet here we all still are. And here you all still will be long after I’ve gone.

The tools – and they are just tools – may change, but the brilliance required to mine those truths and create compelling original stories from them that anyone actually gives a monkey’s about, will only ever come from humans.

Humans talking to humans. None of that should ever change.

But what an opportunity for creatives?

The means of production have been almost entirely in their hands for the last decade or more. I say almost because the iPhone, editing software and after effects meant anything you could see, you could film. But these AI tools mean anything you can imagine, you can make into a film.

You only have to see the incredible one minute films made entirely with AI by people at VCCP in the annual Faith Film Competition to realise just how transformative these tools can be.

Yes, the industry’s going through some profound changes, but in my 40 year experience, this seems to happen every 10 years, and it nearly always adapts and evolves and emerges the stronger for it.

It’s brilliant to see the raft of new agencies cropping up, all started by outstanding creatives like Lynsey Atkin, Andy Jex and Rick Brim, all with ambitions to change the model and make brilliant work.

It’s been amazing to have been part of an agency that, for the last 14 years, has repeatedly kicked the Hold Cos arses and stolen their business.

It’s been even more amazing to have been part of an agency that works so far upstream with so many clients, solving business problems, creating commercial propositions and becoming an effective adjunct to our clients’ marketing departments.

But while it may have been 40 years in advertising, it hasn’t all been doing advertising. I’ve always enjoyed a side-project…

In 2007, having lost both my in-laws in the space of 14 months to separate RTAs, I helped launch a magazine called Eulogy, to help guide people through every aspect of death and dying. Sadly it died after one issue, which would have been an excellent joke, had it not ended up costing me lots of money.

In 2009 I curated and co-created a series with Mark Williams (of Mr Weasley and Fast Show fame) called Other Villages for people who live in villages and would like to know more about other villages’ which lived on an early version of a Podcast channel called Audioboom.

In 2012, inspired by Danny Boyle’s London Olympics Opening Ceremony, I invited people on instagram to contribute the photos they felt were evocative of #thiswondrousisle. The students of the Graphics Dept at Farnham Art College brought them from the digital world into the analogue world with a beautifully designed book of all the pictures called, obviously, This Wondrous Isle.

A couple of years later, inspired by a story of stunningly bad parenting told by a member of the VCCP Creative Department, I invited everyone at VCCP to submit their stories of crap parenting, either theirs or their parents.

These were then compiled into a book called Kids Bounce as an antidote to all those perfect parenting books that terrify us all in the first stages of parenting.

The book was written, designed, edited, and illustrated by members of the VCCP Creative Dept and then given out to people going on Maternity and Paternity Leave for the first time, just to make the whole first-time-parent thing less terrifying.

In 2021, Michael Lee, our group CSO, and I launched The VCCP Stoke Academy, designed to open the door to jobs in our industry that would otherwise remain closed.

It is now a registered charity, The Challenger Academy, running programmes in Stoke Primary schools, Secondary Schools, Sixth Form Colleges, FE Colleges, and Universities.

And in 2022, after months of driving up and down the M40 whilst setting up VCCP Stoke, Michael and I launched the Landmarks of the M40 calendar. Largely as a joke. Only we completely miscalculated the depth of love for our motorways, as it was picked up by The Sun, The Guardian, The Times, 5Live, Times Radio, and Have I Got News For You, and sold out as a result.

And that is a not terribly brief summary of 40 years of creativity, fun, challenges, laughter and ideas that generally started with ‘wouldn’t it be funny if...’

But in the end, it really won’t be any of the work that I’ve made, or businesses that I’ve worked with, whose memories I’ll treasure. It will be the people. The human beings. The brilliant, maverick, neurodivergent, funny ha-ha and funny odd brains that this industry attracts in droves.

It may no longer be ‘the last refuge of the otherwise unemployable’ that it was 40 years ago, but it’s still the people that make this so, so much better and way more fun than a ‘proper’ job.

And thank God, because I never, ever, ever wanted ‘a proper job’.

Jim Thornton was ECD at VCCP