Chris Norton: 0:07

Imagine being hired as a high-paid creative director and then getting fired because nobody actually wanted you in the room. That's exactly what happened to Patrick Collister. He joined a French-owned direct marketing agency and was billed out at a thousand pound an hour, and he quickly learned that every account director saw him as a threat to their numbers. It was humiliating. It was career defining, and it was the start of something far better. Patrick went on to become one of the most respected creative leaders in the world, with a career spanning Ogilvy, google and beyond, and today he's here to share his marketing mistakes that nearly broke his career and the same missteps that helped him reinvent it.

Chris Norton: 0:43

Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the podcast that helps you grow your brand and develop quicker, all by learning from the unfortunate mistakes of the world's top marketers. I'm Chris Norton and my mission is to help you, the senior marketer, learn the hard lessons without paying the price, all so you can build a brand that thrives. Today's guest is Patrick Collister, former executive creative director at Ogilvy and ex-head of design at Google, and a man who's seen both the brilliance and breakdown of modern marketing. Patrick shares the inside story of one of the most iconic TV ads the pitch horror that got them blacklisted from a contract, and one embarrassing mistake at a direct marketing agency that opened the door to understanding the future of digital comms.

Chris Norton: 1:26

If you've ever struggled to sell big ideas, faced resistance from clients or worried about embracing risks in your campaigns, this one is packed with insights that you don't want to miss. Patrick will break down how to spot when an idea is risky or just misunderstood, how to lead creative teams through pushback, and why every great marketer needs to understand direct response to master brand storytelling. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's hear how you can turn your next marketing mistake into your biggest creative opportunity. Patrick Collister, welcome to the show.

Patrick Collister : 2:05

Greetings Chris.

Chris Norton: 2:08

Now you have had a fascinating career. I'd look for your long CV you call it novel length CV on your website. I mean, I knew you had a varied career. Anyway, you've worked for some amazing massive agencies. Just tell me how you got into marketing at the very beginning. What intrigued you? Why did you get into it?

Patrick Collister : 2:29

Oh my God, I have a horrible feeling it was my dad. I'd been traveling around Africa and I came back to the UK and my parents were scared, stiff. I wasn't ever going to get a job, you know. And I did. I really enjoyed traveling, and then I was persuaded to go to the university careers appointments board and I came back with a whole load of application forms and I think my dad started filling them in and sending them off on my behalf. But I got a letter back from an agency called Ogilvy, benson and Mather inviting me in for an interview, and so that's where it all started. I swear I think it was my dad.

Chris Norton: 3:17

What a way to start, though Ogilvy. He's like the number one, wasn't it? It was amazing. What was it like to work there then?

Patrick Collister : 3:24

Well, it was Ogilvy, benson and Mather and um, uh, at the time, what was it like? Well, it was absolutely bloody amazing. I mean, I was in London for the first time ever and um, I mean, what happened? As I was actually up in Norfolk trying to write a novel and um, just prove, I'm shallow all the way through. I came down to London for a party. A mate of mine was throwing a party, he was working just off Bond Street and he said let's meet, and he named a little cafe in South Moulton Street. Anyway, I sat in this cafe and I watched a stream of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen in my life just coming in and out and I thought, look, I've got to leave Norfolk behind. This is what's happening. Anyway, I heard later that, just by chance, the Lucy Clayton modelling school happened to be Ned's daughter, liz Gaff.

Chris Norton: 4:18

But anyway, I thought Is that why your mate?

Patrick Collister : 4:20

picked it? Yeah, absolutely. I thought I was going to be surrounded with beautiful women who would enjoy my company rather than run from me screaming, so it all came together nicely.

Will Ockenden: 4:35

And have you always been working in the creative side of things, or did you kind of start in a different discipline and then move?

Patrick Collister : 4:42

towards creative. I started as a trainee copywriter in those days. Um, I mean, people often forget agencies made quite good money in those days because it was commission based. So the way it worked was when, um, an ad was placed in the media, the client didn't pay a fee for it. The client didn't pay the agency, the media owner did, they paid commission. So thank you very much for putting this ad into the times or the guardian or on itville, where it was, is 15 of the media uh fee and so, uh, you know, actually it was originally set at 17.65 percent, going back to the 18th century and greats and all that. So I mean 17.65%, negotiated 15%. You can run quite a good business on that and, by the way, you get rewarded for good ads.

Patrick Collister : 5:38

If an ad worked really well then the client would want to repeat it, so you didn't have to be back at the ranch writing a new one. And so there was more time and there was more money and that meant agencies or the big ones could afford training programs. So I mean, ogilvy still has a fantastic uh training program for suits, but back in that in those times they also uh, took, took on creative people as well. There were two other agencies did it JWT and McCann's and so I had to do something called a copy test, which was basically like O-level English, describe a delicious dish and write an autobiographical piece. And so I wrote me O-level English piece, I sent it off and I got a letter back inviting me in for an interview and the creative director said to me well, the readers report here on your copy test. This is my impersonation of Dan Ellerton, who was the creative director. It says either this boy will be a brilliant lateral thinking copywriter or a boozy toad.

Chris Norton: 6:55

What's a boozy toad?

Patrick Collister : 6:58

Which one are you? And I have to say, sadly, I never was a brilliant lateral thinking copywriter. I had to work very hard at it, so the jury's out on that one.

Chris Norton: 7:10

Less is more in copywriting, though, isn't it in advertising copyright sometimes?

Patrick Collister : 7:15

Well, only sometimes. I mean, as the great Howard Gossage once said, people will read something that interests them, and occasionally that may be an advertisement. So long copy ads. Back in the day uh told people um long stories about uh products and about brands and and if they were interesting then people would uh happily read them. It's become a fashion. You know it used to drive me nuts the can press award. Uh, there'd be a visual conundrum and then the puzzle was explained in the bottom right hand corner with a logo and a tiny line in eight point type, and that passed for press advertising for about 15 years.

Will Ockenden: 8:00

Um, I'm glad to see that words are making a little bit of a comeback I was going to say what do you make of the kind of the current state of of creative, then I mean, that's a fairly big question, but you've, you know, you've, you've seen decades of top rate creativity. Where, where were you at in 2025?

Patrick Collister : 8:19

well, this is really interesting because, of course, most money now goes into digital and when I was the non-executive director of ad lib, which was a fascinating company, using AI, gen AI, at least two years ahead of anybody else, I tried to put together a presentation for clients the best of display advertising and I found eight examples over kind of 10 years, of display advertising. It is absolutely. You know, advertising is bereft at the moment. There is so much shit just being shoveled out there. You know by an algorithm, but of course you can understand why you know. Know by an algorithm, but of course you can understand why you know.

Patrick Collister : 9:07

If you're a client and you can buy a billion media impressions for next to nothing, then why wouldn't you? And the terrible problem with all of that is you know it works. I mean it works at a marginal sense. So, for example, when I was at google, even at google, I was absolutely appalled to discover that a click-through rate averages across the google display network. You know, 0.05 percent, in other words, 99.95 percent of all ads are ignored and um is that because the ads aren't good enough?

Patrick Collister : 9:43

and there's no longer a focus on these, you know, brilliant bits of insight they're terrible, they're almost all terrible and um, um, it is really interesting. I mean, I'll get on. I mean, if we're going to talk about brands later I'll talk about apple. It is really interesting that apple, um, uh, apple display ads are still clean and clear and they have a message that you can understand. But at Adlib there were brands coming to us with print ads asking us to put this into the Google Display Network. And you know, sometimes I mean just imagine the size of an ad when it's going to be running on your mobile phone. I mean, you know, I mean people were asking us to try and get 200 word advertisements squeezed down into a handful of pixels. You go, oh, can't be done.

Chris Norton: 10:37

The skyscraper ads. I remember them well. Yeah, and so how do you define creativity then? Cause you're, you're quite, that's your background creativity. How do you define creativity, do you think?

Patrick Collister : 10:51

I think I've got. I mean, it's a really interesting question. I ask people this question what do you think creativity is? And I was sitting in a room filled with creative directors in Canada once and one of the guys creative director of a big agency said to me do you know what? No one's ever asked me that before. And he had to stop and think.

Patrick Collister : 11:13

For me, creativity is nothing more and nothing less than solving problems. And so if you go all the way back to our earliest ancestors, lucy, who's Australopithecus afarensis, to our earliest ancestors, lucy, who's australopithecus uh afarensis, our earliest known ancestors, she woke up one day with these, you know. Now, the point about these is that me, they mean we are creative people, literally, you know. So, chris, you're able to pick things up this morning, you made breakfast, you're able to, uh, get dressed, you're able to make things um, and no other creature on this planet can do that and um. And so we are literally creative. We are creating things constantly. But also our ancestors were creating solutions to big problems, and one of their big problems was the fact that they were small, uh, very slow, and they tasted a bit like chicken. So what are you going to do to solve that problem when it's existential? Well, you have ideas, and that's what she was able to do. Have ideas, bang stones together, one side, sharp. Suddenly you've got something that you can turn into a weapon. You know, it becomes an axe, it becomes an arrowhead. It becomes a weapon. You know, it becomes an axe, it becomes an arrowhead, it becomes a spear, it becomes an intergalactic, you know, missile, and so we're still trying to work out what sharp means today.

Patrick Collister : 12:35

But it's solving essentially a problem, and so that, for me, is again in marketing. You know, the problem is that the brand has competition. The problem is that you've had a tariff slapped on you. The problem is that sometimes the problem is that you're too successful.

Patrick Collister : 12:59

I mean, I had a fascinating story the other day story the other day the guy who runs bloomsbury press published jk rowling and was talking about the fact that they made so much money that it was going to be very, very easy for it to be top heavy and just absolutely uh floor the company and or make them subject to hostile takeover bids. So, so, um, it's about solving problems. But when I was running uh agencies, I used to say look, it's not just, it's not about artistry, though you do have a creative department, which is people by um, writers and art directors, who have very particular skills. But actually within any organization, creativity is answering a simple question which is how can I do today what I did yesterday, but better? And people who? That? That's creativity, because you find ways of of doing whatever it is you're doing better and and then suddenly you change the organization around you so it sounds like um, from you know you're talking about our, uh, ancestral heritage.

Will Ockenden: 14:40

It sounds like humans are hardwired to be creative in some shape or form. But is it fair to say, um, a lot of people these days think they're not creative and therefore they don't even try to be creative. I mean a lot of conversations, um, we have, you know, people, people won't even come up with an idea because they say, look, I'm not a creative, I'm not a creative type, I can't solve that problem is that, is that, is that an issue you face? Is that a perception people have of themselves?

Patrick Collister : 15:08

uh, well, I think the word is at fault. Actually, um, the word. A lot of people associate the word with kind of finger painting. Do you know what I mean? And when I ran some of my creativity workshops, executives would turn up absolutely filled with dread that I was going to make them connect with the inner child and start dabbling with finger paints and so forth. Whereas if you talk to people about innovation, whereas if you talk to people about innovation, if you talk to people about improvements, then they're very happy to talk about that and they're very happy to talk to you about their role in making those improvements.

Patrick Collister : 15:47

So so creativity itself, uh, embarrasses people, which is daft because actually it is an innate human ability. We are all creative. I get really cross with people. You know. I say you may not be able to draw like Raphael, but, for example, when I was the creative director at Ogilvy, I had two people in the studio, both of whom who could draw brilliantly and both of whom were about as creative as a brick. You know what they had was a facility. And so a lot of people mistake creativity for the ability to write music or paint or whatever and put it into a niche. It's not, it's solving a problem. And that kind of create artistic creativity is when certain kinds of people feel the need to express themselves in ways that they hope other people will understand, because it makes the human condition feel better for both of us, both parties often the most creative idea is quite risk, risky, like the best ideas are quite risky.

Chris Norton: 16:53

So if you've got risk averse clients or bosses or whatever they are, how do you convince them to do something really, really creative and different? How have you done it?

Patrick Collister : 17:04

Well, they're not risky. I mean, honestly, I have no idea. I had a wonderful conversation some years ago with the blessed John Hegarty of this ilk, who is know who is the most marvelous man, and he was saying to me that he thought Risk sounded like an indie band from the 70s, you know. Or Risk Management, you know. I mean it's meaningless, like Curved Air. It's not risky, you know, for people. You're making a decision based on gut instinct and experience and, by and large, those two things will help you make a decision. I think what you're really talking about in terms of risk management is a fear of making a decision, and it is really fascinating, isn't it, that actually the most instinctive, the best marketing directors don't stay in marketing for very long. They move into general management, the reason for that being is that they aren't afraid of making decisions. Let's go with it.

Patrick Collister : 18:08

So I mean, for example, I mean we're going back a bit now, but the great Anthony Simmons Gooding started as a marketer. He bought, at the time of the three-day week, a Stella Artois reassuringly expensive campaign. This is when people were struggling to earn a living, when the country was on its knees, and most people would have advised him not to run the campaign because it was. It sounded tactless and um and unsympathetic to people, but actually he ignored them because, uh, his gut instinct told him to. And for the next 30 years, uh, he turned Stella Artois into a massively successful brand, and so it is. It's about decision-making.

Chris Norton: 19:07

It's only a risk if you think that you are going to make a bad decision, and talking about that bad decisions or creativity, one of the reasons I got you on the show is because of your well, you made one of the ads that is iconic to me, and it wasn't plain sailing with that either was it to the creative process. Do you want to tell us which advert I'm?

Patrick Collister : 19:29

discussing. Well, magnificently, you're talking about an ad that suddenly was getting airtime only about six weeks ago, even though I wrote it go back in the late 80s. But it's for milk. Accrington Stanley, two little boys have been out playing football and they need a drink. And the kid reaches for a bottle of milk and his mate says milk, ugh. And our little Liverpudlian lad says you know, ian Rush says if I don't drink enough milk, I'll only be good enough to play for. Accrington Stanley, accrington Stanley, who are they.

Patrick Collister : 20:10

Exactly, that's right. And every time Acc has played, god bless them. That's what. And every time ackers played, god bless them. That's what the visiting supporters would chant. Ackrington stanley who are they exactly? But ackrington stanley, uh, actually grew to love the association. Uh, over time and um, but originally um mean, it's so interesting all of that. It's gone now. It was the National Dairy Council and Margaret Thatcher Milk Marketing Board as well.

Chris Norton: 20:43

Exactly.

Patrick Collister : 20:43

That's right. And Margaret Thatcher privatized milk. In fact. I mean, when I was a student she was called Thatcher Thatcher Milk Snatcher. Really Kids used to get half-pint bottles of milk every day at school. Yeah, I remember the government paid for that and then that was Margaret Thatcher who denied us the ability to grow up healthy and strong. Anyway, she also did for the Milk Marketing Board later, um later, but anyway they existed and that's what we're trying to do to get people, the mums, to buy more milk.

Patrick Collister : 21:21

Um, but when I first wrote the script, ian rush was the um, he was the, the great player of the day, played, played for Liverpool. And so I had this idea about Ian Rush. Ian Rush says, and in the script, ian Rush says I'll only be good enough to play for Everton, who of course, is on the other side of town. And my producer said well, look, you know, we've got to ask Everton's permission. So he got in touch with Everton and said we've got this milk script. He says you know script. Ian Rush says if I don't drink enough milk, I'll only be good enough to play for Everton. Are you alright with that? And Everton said no, we are bloody, not on your bike. Anyway, dear Roger Shipley got in touch with a number of Premier League clubs who all said pretty much the same thing, and then he had the genius idea of going to the very bottom of the league and I think actually Akron and Stanley had just dropped out, which they did briefly, and that's how it got to be a much, much funnier, much better ad.

Chris Norton: 22:26

Akron and Stanley is just funny as a word it is, and everybody remembers the exactly.

Patrick Collister : 22:33

Exactly Because. But you see, I mean, one of the marvelous things about creativity is when you make a mistake, often it leads to something better happening. I mean, my mate, Adrian Holmes, wrote another TV commercial. It was much loved and often appears in, you know, top 100 commercial lists, but it was for Heineken and it's a girl who's learning street cred. The water in Majorca don't taste that water.

Patrick Collister : 23:04

You know, gosh, and originally that whole idea came from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion. That got turned into the film my Fair Lady. So he just adapted it for Heineken. And originally it was the rain in Spain. So she thought, yeah, the rain in Spain falls mainly in the pine anyway. 24 hours before the shoot, the George Bernard Shaw estate rang up and said no, you can't use that, we don't want you to.

Patrick Collister : 23:34

And so suddenly the copywriter is absolutely bricking it you know, the following day, 30,000 quids worth of talent was going to be turning up at Shepparton and another guy, mark Antonio, alfredo. Mark Antonio said I'll tell you what, adrian, he said when I was at school I used to win poetry prizes by taking famous poems and then just changing the words, you know. So you know, no one really noticed. So let's have a go at this. So the rain in Spain, rain water in Spain, with the water in Majorca.

Will Ockenden: 24:08

Anyway, there you go, it's so much better brilliant advert as well that's when you, when you um you, you come up with a, a vintage ad like that. How quickly, when do you really, you know, like the milk ad, I mean, how quickly was it? Did it become a kind of a legendary ad? Do you get a sense straight away that it's gonna, you know it's popular, or is it years later you look back and think, wow, that was, that was good.

Patrick Collister : 24:36

Um, what do you think? I don't know. I mean, it never won any awards. It did for the little boy, by the way, who, um, whose name is Carl Rice, and um, um, we found him, or the casting agent found him in a playground of a school in Liverpool and he enjoyed the experience so much that he decided to become an actor, and he did. I mean, he's been in Corrie and he's been in EastEnders, that's right. Well, I think I'm right in saying actually, through all of that also, he became a script writer and he's one of the writers of the most recent Avengers film, and so I mean that marvelous chance encounter in the playground has given him fantastic life, whereas the other little kid, who you don't see, by the way, he got sent down for murder six months ago.

Will Ockenden: 25:29

So I mean well, it's funny you should say that months ago. So I mean, well, it's funny you should say that, um, we, one of our clients, um, a, a beer brand, was launching a new milk stout, um, a little while ago, and we, we came up with the idea of re recreating some form of the advert and we started doing our research and we, yeah, one one of the children was easy to identify and was clearly quite successful, and the other one was just a complete dead end. But that makes a lot of sense if he's been sent down yeah, who did it?

Patrick Collister : 26:01

and it began to get views and then I used it when I went to google um. I used it to um to recreate, uh, the campaign, but as you would do it using digital and social media, you know, in the 21st century. So take the same brief how do you get kids to drink milk? How do you get parents to buy milk and get their kids to drink it? What would you do today? Milk and get their kids to drink it. What would you do today? Um and I had a lot of fun with that showing how a 40 second tv commercial you would turn into a kind of a youtube channel. You'd get, uh, user generated content. You'd have curated content as well. We'd get ian rush by the way glorious, I think is the director of football for schools at Liverpool, so he still has a role there. I think he's still a top scorer as well. I've been trying to get him back involved as well.

Chris Norton: 27:03

Isn't he still a top scorer of all time as well, I think, ian Rush.

Patrick Collister : 27:07

It wouldn't surprise me.

Will Ockenden: 27:10

So does media fragmentation now mean that you just don't get singular big ideas like that anymore and you tend to get kind of fragmented ideas? Is that, is that what you're seeing, or is this still a space for an amazing insight driven idea that that kind of rolls out everywhere were?

Patrick Collister : 27:30

well, it's really interesting. You should say that because, um, I began to notice, um, cmos opting for sequences of small ideas rather than buying a big idea about three or four years ago. Interesting, um and uh, and it is fascinating. I mean, if you look at again, uh, I spent quite a lot of time being a dweeb looking at advertising, award shows and their winners and I found it really fascinating.

Patrick Collister : 27:57

At Cannes last year, I could find only two big ideas among the I think it was 890 award winners, and what I mean by that is an idea that has legs, that will run across different channels. And the two big ideas were one of them was KitKat, and there's an idea that's been running since, I think, 1947, have a break, have a KitKat. And the other one was Apple, and it was shot on an iPhone. Now, shot on an iPhone is a really big idea and they've made it work in film, in social, in print, because all it is is a demo. And looking back at Apple's advertising over the last five years, what they've been doing is the kind of advertising I was doing with milk, of advertising I was doing with milk brand advertising, with stories in which there are personalities you can relate to locations, places you can relate to and the product is featured.

Patrick Collister : 29:13

Over the last 20 years, if you look at of rules of brand advertising have been abandoned to a large extent and yet there's apple, the most valuable brand on the planet, still doing it the old-fashioned way and, I presume, for bloody good reasons. Where they run the ads may well be new on new platforms, you know, on um uh, youtube and Facebook, but certainly the ads that they're creating in-house, by the way, is interesting, obey all of the old rules, which is to be entertaining, to be pleasant, but also, people understand what the rules of advertising are. If you can see that the product story has been woven into it, you really applaud the advertiser. Um, I used to, I, I used to, when I was running with marketers, I, I put a reel together of can award winners and I'd take off the last four seconds and then I would ask them if they could tell me which market we were in, not which product or product sector. But you know, are we in financial services perhaps, or whatever? And it was spectacular how people had no idea. Wow.

Chris Norton: 30:25

The big reveal at the end. Do you mean so you're cutting out the big reveal?

Patrick Collister : 30:29

Yeah Well, yeah again, the pack shot that explains everything, or nothing, as it may be the podcast is all about embracing marketing mistakes.

Chris Norton: 30:40

With your experience that you've got, you must have made a few what, what mistakes in marketing or jump out at you that you've made in your career? Um, that you could share with people that they'll find useful.

Patrick Collister : 30:54

Well, I mean to be honest, chris, I've made all of the normal mistakes of stubbornness, pride and, frankly, stupidity that you could make. I guess I made a terrible mistake at one stage of going into as creative director of a direct marketing agency, and it was a terrible mistake because, first of all, it was owned by the French, and the second thing is that this company had had a very difficult financial history that I knew nothing about, and what it meant was that all of the account directors were judged and remunerated on how successfully they ran those accounts and what it my time was billed out, I think, as a thousand pounds an hour at the time, which meant that not a single account director wanted me to go to a single meeting with their clients because I was going to massively damage their numbers, which meant that I simply wasn't able to do the job. Anyway, after about a year and a bit, I got the sack, which was a blessed relief to both parties. In many ways, it was an enormous mistake joining this company, but, on the other hand, what it did do is that it opened up direct marketing to me just at the time when direct marketing was coming out of being what people respectfully called folding, called folding shit, but into.

Patrick Collister : 32:35

As a result of the digital age becoming almost all communication, all advertising you know is now direct. I mean, if you haven't got a url and if there isn't a whole series of consumer experiences that comes out of your communication, then you're a bloody idiot. So I made a terrible mistake. I earned less money, I got fired, I was humiliated and embarrassed, but it was brilliant and I ended up learning so much more and meeting some fantastic people.

Patrick Collister : 33:11

I mean one of the things I found really fascinating when I ran a top agency I got to know loads of other creative directors and then I went into direct marketing and the creative directors I met in direct marketing were more business oriented, more thoughtful, had wider interests outside the industry than any of the people I'd come across in advertising. So in many ways that was a blessing in itself and of course, they've all gone on. People like Emma Della Foss, you know, has gone on to be the chief creative officer for Ogilvy and then for Edelman and has now just retired, but you know so many of them. Steve Harrison, with creative director, started his own business which he sold to WPP. He's now a writer of books. Amazingly smart guy, have you had Steve on your podcast?

Chris Norton: 34:15

Steve.

Patrick Collister : 34:16

Harrison.

Chris Norton: 34:17

No.

Patrick Collister : 34:19

You should.

Will Ockenden: 34:21

There's a question at the end where we ask you to recommend our next guest. You pre-empted us but that's great, we're getting into it.

Patrick Collister : 34:28

I mean, what other mistakes, I don't know if they're mistakes. I mean, again, we're talking about 25 years ago and one of my clients was British Nuclear Fuels, bnfl. And so before I agreed to work on it, I did my research, I did some background and so 25 years ago ago I became pretty committed to nuclear power as a source of energy for this country, and the fact that actually successive governments have failed to make a decision now leaves us really monumentally in the shiz. But anyway, at the time I did my research and I thought, yeah, nuclear energy is definitely where we need to be at. And so BNFL was kind of preparing itself for one of two things they weren't entirely sure either privatisation or escalation of the number of nuclear power plants around the country. So BNFL needed to run an advertising campaign to get people softened up to the idea of nuclear.

Patrick Collister : 35:44

So I went up to Sellafield and spent quite a long time there and every ad I wrote and put into research bombed. You know I mean there were some fascinating things I found. You know there's a river that runs through the middle of Sellafield and the Sellafield Fishing Club regularly hoik out really substantial-sized salmon from there. And you know, greenpeace I've heard anywhere All of these ads completely bombed and bombed again. And then I noticed once there was a sort of a hut there and I said what's that? And they said that's the visitor centre. And I laughed. But anyway, I wrote an ad about the visitor centre.

Patrick Collister : 36:29

Oh my God, suddenly in research people were going oh, oh, there's a visitor center. And what they were saying is well, it must be safe. Then, if they've got a visitor center, then the plant must be safe. Do you know what I mean if I told people, uh, and so it was absolutely. And so as a result of that, um, the visitor center expanded. It's probably became five times its normal size. Um, it became, uh, what all of the advertising was about. And, um, and I'm afraid I I shouldn't have done this, but I did, I punched air the day sellafield overtook wordsworth's Dove Cottage as the major tourist attraction of the North West.

Chris Norton: 37:17

My first job was actually working in a visitor centre for a nuclear power station.

Patrick Collister : 37:21

Really.

Chris Norton: 37:22

In communications. Yeah, I used to do the PR for it. It was in Hesham 1 and Hesham 2 that were the power stations next to the sea. To build them. Obviously they're a bit of an eyesore. So what they do is they build them and then they build. They built like a beautiful nature reserve and they build the. They build a stunning nature reserve with all the areas that they've dug up and then they bring wildlife in and then obviously they put a visitor center and it was all education about how great and clean nuclear power was and it was like really, really good and we had some amazing days. Lots of schools came down and I and this was about 25 years, about the same time, that was my first job and I know what you mean, because at that point, um, uh, nuclear fuel was powering the, uh, about a fifth, I believe, it was nuclear energy, wasn't it of our?

Will Ockenden: 38:13

of our mix.

Chris Norton: 38:14

And now it's like it's not as much, and I think they're a bit far behind with yeah, like you say, a lack of investment from various whether it's the Tories or Labour or whoever's not investing, and they keep delaying, delaying to build more, smaller. They're building smaller generative power stations, but it is a great thing, um, but everybody's terrified that. We were terrified of it, weren't they?

Patrick Collister : 38:38

well, one of my favorite moments I heard uh, they told me that a frenchman had turned up at the visitor center and he was saying to them uh, can I see the radioactive man please? And I said what he said no, no, I have seen it, the radioactive man. He has light all around him. He's so a bit like ready break. If you remember you know, yeah, I remember that. What, what are you talking about? He said no, no, I have seen this. And they said where. He said I've seen it on the news.

Chris Norton: 39:07

And eventually they worked out he'd seen a sketch on not the nine o'clock news and he thought it was real yeah, the ready break man to say that what a great bit of branding that was to make the ready break man full of energy from his porridge, exactly it was only it worked, if only it worked like that when you have porridge.

Will Ockenden: 39:28

um so um, patrick, what you sort of fast forward to, to, to I'll the art of creativity, don't? The things that caught my eye was a topic around wild ideas that lead to innovation, and kind of digging deeper into that, some of these specific creative techniques you can actually encourage people to use to come up with truly innovative ideas. Now, do you want to talk us through a few of them? I mean, the first that caught my eye was the idea that we need to be better at defining the challenge before we can even start to think about a creative solution. What do you mean by that?

Patrick Collister : 40:24

Oh, I suppose I'm just. I'm just ripping off Einstein here. You know, einstein said if I had just 10 minutes left to save the world, I would spend nine minutes considering the problem, and it's absolutely right. Yeah, reframing the nature of the problem is absolutely right, god, examples are not flooding into my mind right now.

Will Ockenden: 40:55

there are loads so this is about really scrutinizing the brief is it first and foremost? And and trying to understand what the real problem is.

Patrick Collister : 41:09

Yeah, it is. I mean, I guess the best story about this is space, and when the Americans put a man up on the moon, one of the things they discovered about zero gravity was that, um, pens wouldn't work. So I mean, the whole thing about putting an astronaut out into space is research, I mean, and so they need to be able to write. Anyway, the pens wouldn't work, you know, because the ink just got absolutely, for some reason, gravity of it, and so they spent, uh, an estimated 10 million dollars on, uh, the technology that would create pens that wrote in space, and paper mate then became the brand that used that technology and all the rest of it. Anyway, when the cold war ended, russian astronauts and american astronauts got together and the americans said, well, we've discovered, our pens wouldn't write in space. So we created the technology to make pens work in space, and the Russians said, yeah, but it had the same problem. We use pencils.

Chris Norton: 42:26

You're talking about ballpoint pens. It amazes me how much technology actually comes from space, like because someone told me the other day we were talking about this you know the power drills and your batteries that you replace. They were all invented because there's no, obviously no electricity in space. Freeze-dried coffee invented because of space. I mean it's their fault, but yeah, I mean there's probably millions of things that have been invented just for space.

Will Ockenden: 42:54

Which is surprising given what a niche concern people actually being in space is. I mean, it's a tiny fraction of 1%, isn't?

Chris Norton: 43:02

it.

Will Ockenden: 43:02

Katie Perry.

Patrick Collister : 43:04

But I remember talking to somebody once about British Airways, and British Airways had put a brief into the ad agency to write some ads about their new wide-bodied seats in business class. And so one of the techniques I teach in terms of writing a better brief are the five whys. So the first why is well, you know, why are you making wider-bodied seats? Do businessmen have bigger arses than they used to have? And to which? Well, no, no, no. So why? Well, to be honest, you know, we're losing quite a lot of custom to Swiss Air, and you know and businessmen prefer to travel with them why? It's because they've got wide seats. Well, it's not just the seats.

Patrick Collister : 43:59

And so, bit by bit, it came out that British Airways was losing a lot of custom, business custom to other airlines. And because the service was bad, because the staff, the cabin crew couldn't care less, because the business lounge I mean, for example, swiss Air, when you got off at Swiss Air Heathrow you could shower, and so there was an arrivals lounge. British Airways didn't have that at the departure. So there were a whole load of reasons and the agency said look, I mean, you know, we can write a campaign for wide-bodied seats, but that's not the problem, you know the problem is that actually you're delivering shit service and if you really go back to basics, then that's where you need to start and start rebuilding from there, and so didn't that take a lot of research for you to figure that out?

Chris Norton: 45:01

though I mean from a brief, you're gonna have to do a lot of research to figure out that. Actually, this isn't the problem. That's really interrogating the brief. Beyond where you've gone there, you've gone and used the different airline and compared them and compared the services and then looked at the departure lounge and how you're being treated. I mean that feels to me like a….

Patrick Collister : 45:22

That's what marketing is, for God's sake, yeah, but I mean, you know, in the old days, what happened is that there weren't that many marketers and they used to get their agencies to do their marketing for them. Now you've got enormous marketing departments and you rather hope that people would be doing this, but I, I'm absolutely I'm gobsmacked by the number of marketers who just want to remain invisible and just work on tiny little projects.

Chris Norton: 45:51

You know, and um, yeah, anyway, yeah you've just alienated about a third of our audience there let's.

Will Ockenden: 46:02

Let's bring it back, let's bring it back. So um, I'm fascinated by um and I know it's hard to pinpoint just one technique that will generate brilliant ideas, but I know there are different techniques. You know, once you've defined the problem and got to the heart of the real challenge and all this stuff, what you know. What workable techniques would you recommend for a team that perhaps don't consider themselves terribly creative?

Patrick Collister : 46:26

well, again, I mean, I'd say make stuff. Do you know what I mean? I mean, oh, again, creativity isn't necessarily about writing advertisements or anything like that. You know, if we're talking about innovation, I used to talk to my people about dyson. You know, dyson's first um, uh, oh god, if I call it a hoover he'd kill me. Uh, his vortex cleaner, um, he made over 1500 prototypes before he felt confident enough to be able to start, uh, not even mass producing them, but produce them in numbers. So 1500, I mean I'd say to a copywriter okay, give me 1500 scripts, you know, go like. But what he was doing was just making sure that what his vision was perfected. Um, and I would say that to a lot of people just, um, you just make stuff proto.

Patrick Collister : 47:23

I mean, the wonderful thing at google I discovered was prototyping. Don't just write reams of documents about stuff, go and bloody, make it and then see what happens to it. And one of the fascinating things is that certainly Gen Z expects a brand to be innovative if it's going to be relevant at all. I mean, one of my favourite stories for that, I think, was L'Oreal. They created this app for your phone called Makeup Genius. So you held the phone and your camera to your face and then you can start trying different makeups. And at Google, all of us boys in the zoo thought it was fantastic. I look great with purple eyeshadow. I have to tell you In the wider world it was a bit of a disaster.

Patrick Collister : 48:15

I mean, I think, only 200,000 downloads, and so L'Oreal were a bit miffed by that. But then elsewhere in the forest they were doing a brand survey and young people go oh yeah, you know makeup genius. Look, I know what makeup suits me, so I didn't download it. But you know the fact that they're doing all of this cool stuff with technology. They're my kind of brand bang, you know. And as a result of that, you know, if as a brand, you're not innovating, then, frankly, you are going to get left behind.

Will Ockenden: 48:53

Nice, and how would one apply? You know well, okay, put it this way as a marketing team, as a comms team, is there still a place for the brainstorm? And I know, that's something of a cliche. Let's all get around a table and try and come up with some great ideas, do you? You know, is it important to still hold brainstorms, and if so, what should we do in a brainstorm?

Patrick Collister : 49:18

How do we get the most from it? Well, there's a lot of argument about this. To be honest, I think brainstorms are great, but you need somebody who is a trained facilitator to do it. I mean, I sat in a brainstorm once where a very senior person in the agency strode and said I've had a fucking great idea. Now I want to brainstorm it for the next half an hour. And so everyone just sat there and then after 10 minutes he went well, you're all useless, and straight out that's how.

Chris Norton: 49:47

That's how will runs his brainstorms to be honest.

Patrick Collister : 49:51

I've got seen, but it is true, an idea has to start in one head, but actually I've been in rooms where someone's had an idea and then, five minutes later, no one could tell you where it started or who it started with.

Patrick Collister : 50:08

And then the build, the build, and that's really exciting. And again, I have to say that, as a creative person, learning humility which I I did how your ideas can be taken by other people and criticism applied to help all of you make it better. I mean, at the moment, I'm trying to write a novel and I've written it and I know that it's good in parts and I know that it's terrible in parts. So I've become part of a writers group for just four weeks and and people are people are taking my work apart, but they're doing it in order to be constructive again, the paradox, um, and something much better will come from it. So, yeah, I always love brainstorms, um, and. But then encourage people to go away and take what they thought was really powerful, that had happened, and work on it, and it would be amazing what people brought back and how different, uh, the gifts they brought back were well, I'm curious what you, I'm curious what you do after a brainstorm then.

Will Ockenden: 51:22

So typically you end up with five or six, you know, and you might, you might qualify them red, amber and green. Let's say, you end up with five or six ideas that feel like they've got legs. What do you then do? Would you, you know, would you delegate an idea to a person to further think about and work up and then reconvene?

Patrick Collister : 51:38

well, this takes me back, uh, to where we started before, which is the whole business of leadership. Someone, somewhere, has to make a decision. You know, I often used to think I mean agencies spend enormous, uh, quantities of time and energy on pitches and most of those pitches really are shit shows because senior people are just locking horns it's like rutting stags until, out of stress, you know, a route emerges, whereas actually if at the beginning of the process somebody defines a direction and you just pursue it, rightly or wrongly, you still end up with a much better pitch. And so decision making. And again in marketing, you know, cmos, those who've got a really great hunch you know for the brand and instinct for it, know which of the rules they can break and certainly in terms of kind of brand extensions, where you can go and how those are going to enhance the brand, and and so it's about decision making and it's not about risk.

Patrick Collister : 52:47

Going back to risk, I mean, you know John Hegarty always used to say to clients look, I'm not going to talk about risk. He said you know, do you want to have a risky day? Of course you don't. You know, do you want to go and see? Do you want to have a risky meal because you don't was gonna. Course you do, he said. But if I say to you, would you like an exciting day? You go well, on the whole, yeah, I would you know. Would you like an exciting campaign? Would you like an? You know, would you like an exciting campaign? Would you like an exciting idea? You know, would you like an exciting meeting? You go, yeah, on the whole, yeah. And so you start, you embark on something optimistically, knowing that the outcome is going to be interesting at least, if not startlingly innovative.

Chris Norton: 53:33

I'd love to get John on the pod. Actually'll read, I'll read his newsletter. He's brilliant. He's um. He's similar to yourself. He's very. He's a very different sort of creative thinker, isn't he?

Patrick Collister : 53:42

I I have the greatest admiration for that man. I can't tell you. I mean, you know the blessed hegsy. He really is the most astonishing man. Not only uh did he build an incredibly successful company, not only did he make dozens of other creative people famous and rich, by the way, uh, he's just remained an incredibly decent bloke. In the years I've known him he's never turned down a request for help. He's been always there to help students, to help newcomers to the business. He really is admirable. So if I were you, I'd approach him.

Chris Norton: 54:29

I'll have to drop him a line before we go. I just want to ask you talked about because the brainstorm thing led us to pitches. Have you got any pitch horror stories? I love a pitch horror story of where things have gone spectacularly wrong.

Patrick Collister : 54:45

I've got loads, I've got loads. We did a pitch for Dry Blackthorn Cider, which is down, I think, in Taunton, matthew Clark Brands. Anyway, we walked into reception and we said we're here. I think that, strangely enough, the marketing director was called Matthew Clark too. But anyway, we said we're here to see Matthew Clark and she looked up and said oh, she said right about this moment. I think Matt must be walking into your reception.

Chris Norton: 55:17

Ooh, In London, yeah, 300 miles away, we had somebody else on the podcast who did exactly the same thing. They arranged a pitch and they headed down to Chiswick where I used to live to go down to the Discovery Channel. They were pitching for the Discovery Channel it's someone I used to work with, actually and they'd prepared this deck and they were heading down on the train and they got a phone call. The client had arrived at the office and they were like 20 minutes from London, so like 200 miles away. It's horrible, isn't it?

Patrick Collister : 55:54

Oh God loads.

Patrick Collister : 55:57

I mean, we did a big, big pitch for the post office and so the guy leading the pitch, the CEO on their side in the pitch rules had said that after the agency's been briefed they would not be answering any questions and they wanted radio silence until the pitch day.

Patrick Collister : 56:24

And my boss at the time was Martin Sorrell, who happened to come across this individual and had a conversation with him. Anyway, ripple dissolved to a month later after we spent many thousands of pounds and done a lot of work and a lot of polyboard has been created. Anyway, this guy opened the meeting by saying I thought the pitch rules were made quite clear to you, but one of your team did decide to talk to me about it and so we've decided that whatever happens, you will not be successful. Now would you like to continue? And of course we went, you know, to be honest, to this day I would like to punch him on the nose for spite, you know, for for making sure that we wasted time and money before delivering that line. That's a little tin pot dictator and I hope his testicles are scribbled and what's Martin like to work for.

Patrick Collister : 57:22

I'm a big fan of Martin Sorrell. It's just become a cliche to have a go at him.

Will Ockenden: 57:29

But I think he's brilliant as well. He's revolution as well. Will's a big fan.

Patrick Collister : 57:34

He's revolutionised our business twice, by the way. I think he's an astonishing person and I have great admiration for him. I really do. And he loves cricket, you know he and I share a love of cricket, and so when I was at Ogilvy all back in the day, I used to have a match against WPP every year, and that's what I liked about him he played to win, you know absolutely.

Will Ockenden: 58:05

And he's still as busy and as committed as he's ever been, isn't he Sharp?

Patrick Collister : 58:12

as a bloody razor, he is. He is. I was desperately worried on his behalf when I heard that he had got cancer, but that seems to have been knocked on the head, which is great. You know he is. He's just absolutely fantastic. He's got a real tongue-in-cheek sense of humour. Again, it's been fashionable to say that he's a humourless accountant and he's neither. So, yeah, I admire him a lot.

Chris Norton: 58:41

I just said he'd terrify me on the podcast.

Will Ockenden: 58:45

No he'd take us down. I wouldn't dare have him on the podcast. If he steps ahead of us, wouldn't he?

Chris Norton: 58:50

Sir John Hegarty, yes, but not so much, martin. He terrifies me. He'd he steps ahead of us, wouldn't he so john hegarty, yes, but not so much. Um terrifies me just. He'd just own both of us, wouldn't he well, I mean the wonderful.

Patrick Collister : 58:59

I mean, uh, there was a time when wpp was doing brilliantly well and he had earmarked himself for a performance-related bonus of 50 million quid. And I said to him, honestly, how can you justify that? And he looked at me through narrowed eyes and it was one of those moments when I thought I'm probably dead now. But he then lightened up because I'm a creative person, you know. Do you know what I mean? I wasn't really serious. So he said to me listen, and actually what he said made a lot of it. He said if I make those targets, let me tell you that every single shareholder will be thrilled because they will be, uh, uh, doing extremely well. Out of including you, patrick, with your long-term incentive plan, you will be punching air as well. So you should be encouraging me to make those targets and the day I make my 50 million, well, you might make 50,000.

Chris Norton: 1:00:08

We all know who's winning there. Patrick, absolutely, I could talk to you all day, but I don't want to take up too much of your time. If people want to get in touch with you, to you know, use your training or whatever how?

Will Ockenden: 1:00:19

can they?

Chris Norton: 1:00:19

get hold of you. How can they find you?

Patrick Collister : 1:00:22

uh, oh god. Well, I'd say I've got my uh website, creative hyphen matterscom. I haven't updated it for six years, so I mean quite often when I run courses on uh integrated uh communications, it's a case of do as I say, not as I do. I'm afraid I really really should do something about it. Or feel free to email me, patrick, at creative hyphen matterscom Fantastic.

Will Ockenden: 1:00:52

Thank you very much or.

Patrick Collister : 1:00:53

LinkedIn. Linkedin is good. I'm having such an interesting series of discussions on LinkedIn at the moment about AI. I mean, here's one of the fascinating things I've just been borrowing images from elsewhere and showing people what AI does relative to what creative people do, and my last three posts have all had hundreds of thousands of views, and some of the comments I've been getting back are so smart and so intelligent.

Patrick Collister : 1:01:28

It's a paradox for me that AI it's. It's a paradox for me that ai looks as if it's freeing up creativity, but what it's doing is punishing creative people, um, to do that, and so I've really been enjoying the debate and, as I say, I thought I was really uh, I thought I was dead against. The UK governments and the US governments desire basically to trample all over copyright laws, in other words, allow the bots to have free access to pretty much anything on the internet, because then that general knowledge will allow the applications of ai to create all kinds of opportunities for us. But, oh, I don't know any longer. Uh, I'm still on the fence thanks to a lot of the comments that I've been receiving. So, yeah, I'm a fan of linkedin as well.

Chris Norton: 1:02:28

It's become fashionable also to decry linkedin these days, but um I like, it's where I met you, chris it's true, I've met, yeah, we've connected on linkedin and, yeah, I think it's great, I've got a newsletter on linkedin plug for the newsletter and all about the podcast. So if you listen to the podcast every year, do you? I do a linkedin newsletter? Linkedin newsletters are amazing, by the way, because they they can get such so many subscribers so quickly. I got I'm up to nearly 1300 um subscribers and that's in. I think I've done about 10 episodes 10, not episodes. 10 newsletters now, not that many. So, um, but I I read sir john hegarty's like I said. So, if you, if you, if you're listening to john, we want you on the podcast, we'd love you to have you on um, but we'll get patrick to tap you up for us because he knows you. So thanks for coming on, patrick. That was amazing, yeah, brilliant thank you, patrick, fascinating.