Читать книгу Murray Walker: Unless I’m Very Much Mistaken - Murray Walker, Murray Walker - Страница 8

The move to Masius wasn’t easy. Aspro and Esso had been as different as chalk and cheese and now things were as different again with my new clients at Masius – the Mars Confectionery and Petfoods companies. These were wholly owned by Forrest Mars, an American with a complex personality and an unusual business philosophy. Forrest didn’t think or act like other people; he was a one-off maverick and even his own father, Frank Mars, who owned a hugely successful confectionery business in America, found him too much to stomach. Legend has it that he gave his son $30,000 (a massive amount of money in those days) plus the rights to use the recipe for Mars Bars (named after the owner, not the planet) anywhere outside America, and told him to ‘germinate your arse to the other side of the Atlantic.’ Forrest set up shop in Slough in 1932 and started his business with the Mars Bar which is still, of course, very much one of Britain’s leading brands.

In those tough early days Mike Masius would go down to Slough every Saturday for Mr Mars to tell him how much money he could have for advertising the next week. ‘Mars are marvellous!’ was the rather plonking claim but great things start small and under Forrest’s distinctive and forceful leadership the business became one of the most successful the world has ever seen, eventually taking over that of his late father and, for a long time, being the largest privately owned company in the world. It began with the Mars Bar, led to other brands like Milky Way, Maltesers, Bounty, Galaxy, Spangles and Opal Fruits, and then to the start of an entirely new and innovatory product – canned petfoods.

So in some ways for me this was a similar situation to Aspro: popular, low-cost products with mass distribution through grocers, confectioners and tobacconists and with tough and aggressive competition from talented and experienced organizations like Cadbury, Nestlé and Rowntree. But the Mars advertising philosophy, enthusiastically embraced and promoted by Forrest himself, was entirely different from anybody else’s, being incredibly hard-nosed and product-based in comparison with anything I had experienced before. So I had a very steep learning curve amidst some extremely sharp and demanding people, but at last I felt I was where I wanted to be and I relished the stimulating atmosphere.

Mars were based, coincidentally, in the same road and trading estate in Slough where I had worked with Aspro, while Petfoods were at Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. Both worked to the same unique management philosophy laid down by Forrest Mars: everyone clocked in and out, even the Managing Director; rather than receiving a bonus for being punctual you got less if you were late; only the man at the top had a private office, and his had no door; everyone ate in the same canteen. There were no status perks, no company cars, and no sports and social club.

In addition, Mars executives were not allowed to accept gifts from suppliers – no matter who they were. Jack Wynne-Williams was a very keen shot and used to return from weekends in Suffolk with his Pontiac station wagon full of birds, which his secretary, Mona Fraser, then sent to selected clients and agency people. One day she sent some pheasants to ‘Mac’ McIntosh, the boss at Slough, who returned them with a very nice note, the gist of which was that Mars company policy prevented him from accepting gifts from suppliers, which of course Jack was.

Jack phoned him. ‘My god, Mac, do you think that if I wanted to bribe you I couldn’t do better than a few pheasants?’

‘Of course not, Jack, but you miss the point. If I accept the pheasants from you how could I stop my buyers from accepting a Jaguar?’

The company had a very generous pension scheme and while everyone was threatened with a drop in salary if the company’s turnover decreased by £1 million (it never did), they also got a raise each time it went up by that magical figure. There was an occasion at Petfoods when hitting the next million required a railway container of product to leave the factory limits that day – at a time when no locomotive was available. People just rallied round and pushed it out. Everyone was paid far more for their job than they could get anywhere else and the result was that the Mars companies not only got the best people but kept them. They had a reputation of being heartless hire-and-fire organizations but this wasn’t true. They were awesomely efficient with operating systems way ahead of their time, knew who they wanted and got them, but they were no more ruthless with their people than any other decent organization. Once you were there it was actually quite difficult to leave because you could only do so by getting a job at least two levels higher and that was unlikely.

Knowing this, during my time at Aspro I had applied for a job as Brand Manager at Petfoods and after two long individual interviews with the Personnel Director and Personnel Manager was told to report to the Washington Hotel in London’s Curzon Street – and be prepared to be there for 36 hours. When I arrived I found I was one of the last six of several hundred applicants. After socializing at three meals, more individual interviews, wire puzzles, group discussions, debates and psychological tests which lasted well into the second day, I staggered home. The last thing required of us was to have a 60-minute debate on a subject of our own choosing – ‘But not, Gentlemen, anything religious or political for obvious reasons.’ There was a rather thick Scotsman amongst the six of us who had been opening his mouth and putting his foot in it the whole weekend and, obviously eager to demonstrate his leadership qualities and quick thinking, he leapt in with, ‘I propose that we discuss the significance of the Roman Catholic Church in today’s world.’ As one, hardly believing our luck, the rest of us said, ‘Isn’t that religious?’ So then there were five. One then quietly said, ‘Let’s talk about the pros and cons of capital punishment.’ It was a chap called Neil Faulkner. He was head and shoulders above the rest of us, got the job, had since become the man most likely to succeed at Petfoods and was now my client contact at Melton Mowbray.

The way Mars and Petfoods evolved their advertising was just as challenging as their personnel selection. They were the first in the UK to work to the USP philosophy, which involved intensive research to find out what potential buyers wanted from the product and from that the creation of a Unique Selling Proposition (not Unique Sales Point as so frequently incorrectly described). Hence, among the brands I worked on, ‘PAL – Prolongs Active Lije’, ‘Opal Fruits – Made to make your mouth water’, ‘Liver-rich Lassie gives head to tail health’ and ‘Trill makes budgies bounce with health’. In my broadcasting life after I had left the advertising world, I was constantly described in interviews as the originator of one of the greatest USPs of all time – ‘A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play’ – but I certainly wasn’t, unfortunately!

I was like a fish out of water when I joined Masius. The total billing was less than £5 million but in the years to come it was to rocket to stratospheric levels. I had joined at just the right time but I didn’t realize my good fortune – I was far too busy struggling to keep afloat in this fast-moving organization and trying to give the impression I knew what I was doing: learning the two companies’ very specialized operating procedures, working out how best to cope with their very tough and competent but very human executives and implementing what they wanted, or thought they wanted, inside the agency with the research, art, copy, TV, media and marketing departments. All businesses have their internal rivalries but we had them considerably less than most. We were all working for a benevolent dictator whom we liked and respected. The ‘Grocers of St James’s Square’, as we were sneeringly referred to by a lot of advertising people who were later to eat their words, made dynamic progress but the whole business nearly came to a standstill very soon after I joined it.

At the time, Forrest Mars was trying to get Masius to merge with the Ted Bates advertising agency organization in America, but Mike Masius and Jack Wynne-Williams were steadfastly refusing. Just a few weeks after I had joined we were told that Forrest Mars was coming in on the Saturday morning to collect a pair of shoes that he had had repaired (most people with his income would have bought themselves a new pair but Forrest wasn’t like that) and that we were all to be on parade, sitting to attention at our desks, in case the great man wanted to address us. Which is where I was when my phone rang. It was Jack.

‘Murray, Mr Mars is in reception. Would you bring him to my office?’

There was just one person in Reception – a balding, middle-aged chap wearing a very ordinary blue suit and one of those strange American homburg hats with a wide ribbon and the brim turned up all the way round. This can’t be him, I thought, but there’s no-one else here so it must be.

‘Mr Mars?’

‘Yes, son.’

‘Welcome to Masius, Sir, and do come this way!’

Mr Mars not only collected his shoes but, after again failing to persuade Mike and Jack to merge with Bates, demonstrated his displeasure by announcing that he was going to stop advertising his major cat food brand, Kit-E-Kat, and also transfer the top-selling Spangles to another agency.

Those two brands were vital to us and we were very badly hit but Jack just said, ‘There’s only one way to recover – go out and get more business.’ Which we did, and prospered. The happy ending was that Kit-E-Kat, bereft of advertising support, lost sales heavily and the advertising was restored at an even higher level less than a year later.

An example of how Forrest Mars’ mind worked differently to other people’s was his question about the agency’s very successful use of the world-famous American cowboy film star Hopalong Cassidy to promote Spangles.

‘How much is this guy Cassidy paying us?’ he asked.

‘Er, it’s not like that, Mr Mars, we pay him actually.’

‘Why’s that? Just look at all the publicity he gets from us!’

True enough, but needless to say Mr Mars wasn’t daft. He did the things he did and acted the way he did to provoke people into thinking. And it worked.

In those days British pets were fed household scraps and the marketing objective was to persuade the owners to substitute canned Petfoods products. This wasn’t easy when the household scraps cost nothing and PAL, Lassie, Kit-E-Kat and the rest were not only regarded with suspicion but had to be paid for. Nor was it easy to get a doubting trade to stock them, when it was generally believed the contents were mainly factory floor sweepings. I used to make shop calls with Petfoods sales reps and we would solemnly open a can of Kit-E-Kat before a buyer’s cynical eyes and eat some to show how good and wholesome it was. That usually won them over and so it should have, for at the time it was mostly whalemeat, which most of us ate during the war with no ill effects. Eventually we won the day, for who feeds their pets household scraps these days? It says a lot for the vision and determination of Forrest Mars.

One of my brands was Trill, the packeted budgerigar seed, and on a visit to Melton Mowbray I was presented with a unique problem by Tom Johnstone, the Petfoods Marketing Director.

‘With Trill we have over 90% of the packaged budgerigar seed market and we very much want to expand what is an extremely profitable business,’ he said.

‘Yes, Tom, of course.’

‘In a static market, the obvious thing to do is to buy our competitors but we don’t want to do that because if we did we could well run foul of the Monopolies Commission.’

‘Yes, of course, Tom.’

‘So what we have to do is to increase the budgerigar population and then we’ll get 90% of the extra business.’

‘Yes, of course, smart thinking!’

‘So that’s what we want you to do, Murray – come up with ideas of how we can do that.’

‘YOU WHAT?!’

‘Off you go then and we’d like your proposals within a week with full advertising and budgetary recommendations.’

Back I went to the agency, got everyone round a table, outlined the brief and sat back to worry. Two days later we were all back together.

‘Here’s the deal, Murray. Most people have just the one budgie, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, what we want to do is to create a guilt complex by promoting the belief that an only budgie is a lonely budgie and thus motivating their owners to go out and buy another one.’

‘You what?’

‘You heard, Murray, think about it.’

The more I thought about it the more I liked it. It made sense even if I wasn’t too sure about whether sole budgies pined for company and what effect multiple budgies would have on their owners. So we worked up a pool of commercials, publicity material and costings and back I went to Melton where I made a sale. It worked – but I never found out what effect it had on the lonely spinsters who kept their bird for company.

Another product that Petfoods and the agency tried to introduce, unsuccessfully this time, was a very high-quality cat food which we decided to brand as ‘Minx’. After all the usual investigatory research it looked as though we had a winner. The formulation was nearly 100% cod (humans turned their noses up at it then) but we were looking for something else to give it a promotable health benefit.

‘How about we put some cod liver oil in it?’ said the Petfoods nutritional experts.

‘Sounds great. Cod liver oil has all sorts of health-giving overtones so we’ll go with that if the research supports it.’

It did and from that came the USP, ‘Minx gives your cat inside satisfaction plus outside protection’. The commercial researched well and the next step was to sell the product to a limited-area test market. Bill Rudd was the Regional Sales Manager and off he went to the big buyers, starting with one of the major Co-operative Societies. His contact there was a grizzled old-timer, and when Bill had gone through all the details including the advertising and the brand’s USP the buyer rang for his secretary.

‘Maisie, I want you to do something for me. Go to the chemist and get me some outside protection and then I’ll give you some inside satisfaction!’

Consternation in court. In all the time we had been working to develop the claim its double entendre had never struck us. We were too close to the product. So we had to start all over again and think of something else. Pity. It might have sold a million.

Masius was a wonderful place to work. A great location in our own modern office block in St James’s Square and a business that was booming. Every year I was there saw a record income and there was a constant buzz of excitement and achievement as new accounts flowed in and very few flowed out. I shared an office and the Mars and Petfoods accounts with a super chap called Ian Pitt who had been a Major during the war and who had been taken prisoner by the Germans. We faced each other across joining desks overlooking the Square and got on like a house on fire. Our job was to underpin and retain the Mars/Petfoods accounts which were of such importance to the agency. We achieved that thanks to help from a lot of fine people. No two days were the same and life was a constant challenge.

In the 1970s Forrest Mars made a further adventurous leap into the unknown when he entered the potato business. As disposable incomes and the desire to spend less time in the kitchen increased, more and more women were buying ready-prepared products like boil-in-the-bag and frozen foods, which needed less preparation. Enter Yeoman Instant Mashed Potato and another new field of endeavour for me. Masius’ job was to create the advertising that would pack Britain’s grocers and supermarkets with hordes of eager housewives fighting to buy and experience this exciting new product that was going to unchain them from having to hump heavy potatoes home, wash, peel, boil and mash them. Fantastic.

‘Yeoman gives you perfect mash – every time!’ the TV advertising declared but the housewives turned out to be frustratingly apathetic about this sensational new product and it made agonizingly slow progress, not made any easier by Cadbury’s ‘Smash’ that blew us into the weeds.

This was the time that there were a lot of IRA bombings and one day when I was in Kings Lynn I said to John McMullen, the Marketing Director, ‘Do you ever have any bomb scares here?’

‘Yes, occasionally, Murray.’

‘What do you do about them?’

‘Do? Nothing. Why?’

‘Isn’t that taking a hell of a chance? What would happen if there really was a bomb?’

‘Listen, Murray, at any time of the day or night we are processing five hundred tons of mashed potato and if the machines are stopped it all goes solid. If you think I’m risking that for a bomb that never was, you’re mistaken.’

Brave words. Unfortunately, John wasn’t too amused when a processing glitch resulted in vast quantities of Yeoman powder being blown out of the factory on to the homes and gardens of Kings Lynn. Good thing it didn’t rain.

Mars were also one of the pioneers of the vending machine business in the UK with a business called Vendepac. We take machines for drinks, cigarettes and confectionery for granted now but food vending was very avant-garde then. To test consumer acceptance, Mars converted the whole of the canteen at Slough to automated food and drink and since everybody, bosses and workers alike, ate there it was inevitable that Vic Hender, the Research Director, would soon be lining up for his automatic lunch. He was not well known for his acceptance of things going wrong and when he stuffed his pre-decimalization half-crown (those were the days!) into the slot for his chicken pie nothing happened. Adopting the time-honoured British procedure, Vic gave the machine an almighty thump, at which point a chap looked out from behind and said, ‘Steady on Guv, I’m putting them in the back as fast as I can!’

One of the agency’s greatest successes, which was in full gallop when I joined, was the Babycham business. One day four men appeared in front of our receptionist, Dorothy Hickie, and said, ‘Our name is Showering. We’re from Somerset and we want to talk to somebody about advertising.’ Before they knew where they were, the Showering Brothers, Francis, Herbert and Ralph, and their nephew Keith, found themselves in Jack Wynne-Williams’ office.

‘There’s nothing in it, Jack,’ said Mike Masius, when he heard that Jack had taken their business on a fee-paying basis. ‘It would cost you more to go and see them in Shepton Mallet than we’d get from the fee.’ Mike wasn’t often wrong but he was this time. For what the Showerings were wanting to market was perry, a drink made from fermented pear juice – a sort of bubbly, pear-based cider. In those days the traditional pub drink for women was still port and lemon, and in those rapidly changing times it was understandably seen as unsophisticated. Masius took the Showerings product and turned it into magic. They put it into small, dark-glass wine bottles with coloured foil tops, called it Babycham, associated it in advertising and promotion with a loveable, animated baby chamois, and provided the pubs with attractive wine glasses carrying the logo and featuring the claim ‘You’d love a Babycham!’

It worked like a charm. The girls could now ask for a seemingly sophisticated, champagne-like, modern drink which wasn’t going to cost their man a fortune and which wasn’t going to get them legless. The pubs and Showerings had a high-profit winner; Masius had a client which coined us money and which, in time, led to a flood of new business as the satisfied Showerings family introduced new products. The Showerings had regular board meetings at the agency’s offices and one December they produced a Christmas-wrapped parcel and said, ‘Jack, as a thank you for all you’ve done at Masius we’ve brought you a present.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jack, ‘that’s very nice of you. It’s usually the agency that buys the client presents in this business. I’m very grateful.’

‘Aren’t you going to open it then?’

When he did he found it contained a car key.

‘And Jack, if you take it to Jack Barclay’s showrooms in Berkeley Square there’s a Rolls-Royce waiting for you to use it in!’

It was an incredible gesture of friendship and appreciation which I’ve never known to be equalled before or since. Jack subsequently gave me the job of getting a personalized registration number for his pride and joy – JWW 347.

I was always at my desk in the West End by 8:00 and seldom home less than 12 hours later. My clients were sophisticated, experienced and demanding and although they were all nice people they didn’t permit any resting on the oars. Each week I was at Melton Mowbray, Slough and Kings Lynn making presentations, taking briefs, maintaining contact and generally keeping in touch with the knowledge that not only were they among the agency’s most important accounts, which our competitors would kill for, but that they were also those that were enabling us to expand outside the UK. From the time I joined in 1959, the mother agency in London was following in the footsteps of the Mars and Colgate organizations by vigorously and successfully expanding, first in Europe and then throughout the rest of the world. As the Mars Empire grew so did ours, for they gave us their business in the new countries they entered on the basis that it was better to use an agency that knew them, even if it didn’t currently have an organization in a new territory, than to use another that didn’t know their ways and products. It was marvellous for us, because not only were we guaranteed an immediate income in any new country we decided to enter but we could offer interesting and exciting promotional opportunities with very real prospects to our many good people who might have left us.

So Masius opened offices in the major European countries – Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Austria – initially to handle Mars and Colgate brands, but which we could use as bases to pitch for other business. Later we added America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to this list, until we became not only the biggest agency in Britain (bigger even than the long-time No. 1, J Walter Thompson) but an enormously desirable partner or takeover target for the mammoth agencies in America like Interpublic. I was eventually to be visiting most of the Masius agencies outside the UK regularly as my responsibilities increased but meantime I was a very busy part of expanding the business in the UK.

In 1964, five eventful years after I had joined the agency, Jack Wynne-Williams made me a proposition. The agency had been in existence for some 21 years, Jack was now in total command, but the old guard on the Board weren’t getting any younger. There was a need to look to the future, for young blood to take over. There were four people whom Jack jokingly referred to as his Young Turks, one of whom was me. None of us were necessarily going to reach the top – in the event only one of us did, and it wasn’t me – but Jack had decided that we had enough potential for him to want to keep us all. One by one he had us into his office to give us all the same message.

‘I’m going to give you a chance to put your money where your mouth is by offering you an opportunity to buy into the agency. It will cost you £30,000 and Warburg, the agency’s bankers, will lend you the money with an annual interest payment of 10% [very reasonable at the time]. You will be obliged to sell the shares when you retire or leave the agency but in the meantime if we continue to do as well as we have in the past the dividends will cover the interest and, in time, the share value growth should more than enable you to repay the loan with a sizeable profit. But, of course, there’s no guarantee. So it is up to you. Think it over and let me know.’

Now, ever since I was a boy my mother, who was very good at playing the stock market, had drummed the basics of it into me. With agency bonuses and other money I had built up a share portfolio of my own and hadn’t done too badly, but this was something else. £30,000 then was the equivalent of not far off £500,000 now and putting myself in debt to that extent was not something that appealed to a naturally cautious chap like me. The agency had done and was doing very well indeed, and there was no reason to suppose that it wouldn’t continue to do so, but it was a very volatile business – its assets were its people, who could leave at short notice, while any contracts that existed with clients weren’t worth the paper they were written on and if they lost confidence in us they would be off like a rocket. On the other hand, the whole of life is a gamble and I was never going to have another opportunity like this.

I talked it over with Elizabeth and in fact neither of us hesitated. The next morning I went back to Jack and said I was on. He told me I’d made a wise decision and he was sure I wouldn’t regret it. I certainly didn’t. From then on there were occasional other share offers as directors retired and sold up, and I bought every one I was offered. My faith and good luck paid off because the agency prospered greatly and everything that Jack had prophesied came to pass. I certainly never made a better financial decision.

Before very much longer I was elevated to the Agency’s small Management Committee and became a theoretical prospect for Managing Director but for very good reasons that was where my agency progress ended. One of those reasons was the fact that my double life as an agency executive and an increasingly busy broadcaster meant that I’d have to give up the latter and devote all my time to the business and there was no way that that was going to happen – I liked my other life too much. But I also had no illusions about whether I was going to be able to reach the top: it mattered more to others than it did to me. I had a very happy life: a happy marriage, a fine home and a broadcasting hobby where I was making consistent progress and which could go on long after I had retired from the business. Things were going very well for me, and as it happened I was about to make a massive change of direction in my agency life.