Dave Dye: The Way I See It

As one of the industry’s most respected and awarded art directors, Dave Dye’s exacting standards and keen eye have earned him a ‘sackload’ of Lions and Pencils – as well as the nickname ‘Herr Dye’. While his award-winning work for the likes of adidas, Mercedes-Benz and The Economist has gone down in advertising history, Dye got his big break writing ads for frozen mangetout in 1985.

Not content with working at pretty much every top London agency, from Simons Palmer Denton Clemmow & Johnson to Leagas Delaney, BMP/DDB and AMV/BBDO, he also launched two of his own – Campbell Doyle Dye in 2002 and Dye Holloway Murray in 2007. Now head of art and design at J. Walter Thompson, he tells Selena Schleh about hurtling round mountain roads while strapped to a Land Rover and why there was no golden age of advertising

I was born in London, in 1964, and baptised at St. Monica’s church in uber-hip Hoxton Square (back then, the uber-squalid Hoxton Square).

My earliest memory is hearing the Beatles’ Penny Lane coming out of the Roberts radio in my nan’s kitchen.

I had a happy childhood, spending the first half of it in Bethnal Green in the East End of London, and the second half in Waltham Abbey, Essex. My dad was a decorator and my mum worked as a secretary.

Growing up, I wanted to be a lot of things: a policeman, then a bionic man, an artist, a commercial artist, a designer, and finally an advertising art director. I wasn’t really a good student, though. My curiosity developed after I left school.

I studied fine art and graphics at the ‘legendary’ Loughton College in Essex and got into advertising because I liked the idea of creating things that millions of people would look at.

It took a while to get my foot in the door. On my way out of the office of Barry Brooks [of Brooks Legon Bloomfield] – yet another creative director who didn’t want to hire me – I asked: ‘Got any real briefs I could work on?’

With all the enthusiasm of a man paying for his dry cleaning, he reached for the nearest bit of paper and handed it to me. It was a trade ad for Findus mangetout. Brilliant! I thought, and then spent the next week coming up with idea after idea. All bad. Any marks I made on paper, I considered to be ‘an idea’.

When I turned up the following Thursday, direct from being rejected by yet another creative director, he said: ‘Let’s have a look at your folio.’ And proceeded to say exactly what he’d said the week before. He’d not only forgotten he’d briefed me, he couldn’t even remember seeing me one week ago!

Awkwardly, I tried to give him a get-out: ‘Great… thanks for going through that with me… again… obviously I’ve answered that brief… you set me.’ Needless to say, he looked a bit puzzled when I handed him a huge pile of paper (or crap, to give it its correct name). After flicking through it, like you might flick through a big wad of notes – and fortunately not looking at any of the ideas – he said: ‘Why don’t you come in for a couple of weeks and see how you get on?’ I left three years later.

In the early days of my career, I was a bit serious. Focussed and determined, but probably a pain in the ass. I was trying to produce Bartle Bogle Hegarty-type work at Brooks, before realising that clients that wanted the former wouldn’t go to the latter.

Until I got hired by Simons Palmer Denton Clemmow & Johnson in 1991, I’d only worked at very nondescript agencies. The good ones like BBH, Leagas Delaney and BMP would like my work, but never commit – it was as though they were worried I wasn’t from an ‘approved’ agency.

But within two days of being offered a job by Chris [Palmer], I had headhunters calling to say BBH and Leagas Delaney wanted to hire me, which was nice but irritating, when I’d spent the past six years desperately trying to get into those agencies. It’s also testament to how highly regarded Simons Palmer was. Also, they had a policy of hiring creatives from ‘bad’ agencies – people like Sean Doyle, Paul Silburn, Tiger Savage and Tony Barry – figuring that if they gave those people an opportunity, they’d make the most of it. 

When I got to Simons Palmer, I found it was all about the creative work – irrespective of whether it was a [low] budget mailer or a big budget TVC, the standard was the same. It made it tough to get work through Chris and Mark [Denton], but if they approved it so, it seemed, did the client.

I won my first D&AD Pencil [for adidas Just To The Signpost] in 1996, while at Leagas Delaney. The ad hasn’t dated too much because the art direction doesn’t come from a style, it’s purely conveying the idea: the red makes it feel hot, the type getting smaller to make it feel like you are moving along the road. There’s no artifice. It’s a human observation. I’m sure people are still doing that today.

Good agencies tend to have their own style or way of doing things. As a young creative, your number one goal is to get your work through your creative director, and they generally buy their kind of work. So subconsciously or cynically, that’s what you end up producing. Working at a few decent agencies, you pick up different ways of doing things, like when you build up your tools by going through PlayStation levels.

I’ve learned a few lessons from setting up my own agencies [Dye co-founded Campbell Doyle Dye in 2002 followed by Dye Holloway Murray in 2007, re-launched as Hello People in 2013]. One: avoid setting up an agency just after two planes fly into the Twin Towers [Campbell Doyle Dye].

Two: don’t name an agency after the founders at the height of a digital revolution [Dye Holloway Murray].

Three: never start an agency where all the partners do exactly the same job [Campbell Doyle Dye].

Four: when creating your agency’s debut piece of work [Lucky Star for Mercedes-Benz], make sure it mentions the client’s name and doesn’t cost £1m – it’s likely to put off rather than attract clients.

And finally: setting up an agency is all about chemistry. I’d bet that if you’d mixed up the members of the Beatles and Stones, neither group would do as well.

One advantage of CDD being run entirely by creatives [Dye’s co-founders were Walter Campbell and Sean Doyle] was that it was 100 per cent creatively focussed, which meant we won a lot of awards. In the first three years we had over a hundred entries, a couple of Pencils and half a dozen nominations at D&AD alone.

The cons? It’s pretty easy to judge the functionality of one tech solution against another, but advertising is more subjective, and three – or two – subjective opinions about creative work is tricky. Sean and I would like ‘simple and funny’, Walt would like ‘big and poetic’. In our early pitches I would present two, wildly different routes, and the client would inevitably ask: ‘Which one does the agency recommend, the funny one or the black-and-white one?’ I’d get splinters on my arse trying to be even-handed.

A year or so later, with not too many clients biting, it was decided we needed to change. One creative partner needed to judge the work, and that creative partner was me. That solved the issue of a lack of clarity but created a new one: Sean and Walt didn’t want me telling them what work was right or wrong. It’s understandable – we were equal partners – but ultimately it led to me leaving, and the agency then folded within a year. What a waste.

I wanted to have another swing of the bat, because I felt I’d learned a lot over my five years with CDD. People tend to swing from one extreme to another; with CDD we weren’t unified, so that became my big focus when setting up the next agency, when it should’ve been having the right name.

The digital revolution was really kicking in and I didn’t want the agency to be named after its founders. I wanted to be called Thingy. I thought it would sound funny on a headline – ‘Thingy win Vertu’; or the receptionist answering a call – ‘Hello, Thingy’. Sadly, my two partners thought it sounded flip, so we went with the non-cool Dye Holloway Murray, which sent out the wrong signals at that moment in time. It screamed ‘traditional’.

I love tech, but it won’t replace thinking. Nowadays there’s an over-reliance on new tech at the expense of human insights. Our industry has flipped from psychology to a tech-focussed business. But I think it’s going to change, I think there will be a correction in the creative markets – there has to be. Clients pay comms companies to help them make more money, by selling stuff.

But it’s hard to sell stuff to people if you don’t understand what makes them tick. That’s the basis on which we set up Hello People, that while tech has transformed people’s lives, it hasn’t transformed their psychology.

I moved to Mother in 2014. I was very flattered that an agency I loved had created a role especially for me: their first head of art in nearly 20 years. It was a good year – I did some nice work, the PG Tips Keep It Tea campaign in particular, and met a lot of good people, such as [co-founder] Mark Waites – you only had to waft a script in his general direction and it would improve – and [global creative partner] Carlos Bayala, one of the most thoughtful, creative people I’ve ever met.

I’ve only ever done the job [of head of art] where I’ve overseen all the agency’s output, but unfortunately Mother never operated like that. Instead it’s lots of independent pockets, which has worked great for them, it just wasn’t what we’d talked about before I joined [Dye left Mother and moved to J. Walter Thompson in 2015]. I talked to various agencies, but the scale and mandate for change at J. Walter Thompson made it too tempting to turn down.

Advertising is a less confident, bullish industry than the one I joined in 1985. Society and technology have evolved. You can’t go back, we have to embrace today and try and do what we do well: make our messages simple, compelling and entertaining. I love the challenge of solving problems, so it’s still an exciting industry for me.

Digital, digital and of course digital has been the biggest change to the art director’s role. We can produce work very quickly and for very little budget, which has meant that we are now given less time and smaller budgets.

As a glass-half-full-type guy, I don’t like to hark back to ‘the golden age’ of advertising: it’s both better and worse now. Yes, ads used to be seen by millions of people at the same time, so they’d generate water-cooler moments, fame and large amounts of cash. But as a creative, it’s never been easier to realise your ideas.

I’m very hands-on at work. Solving problems and making stuff is the best bit. I keep the theoretical stuff for my blogs.

I started my blog Stuff From The Loft while in the process of moving house and closing down an agency. The first two events made me realise just how much stuff I’d accumulated – work, roughs, reference material, pitches, books, magazines etc, and I thought I’d dump it all onto this unused web address, davedye.com, that a friend had bought me years earlier.

In the process I thought I might as well give it some context and write the story. People seemed to like seeing roughs and the evolution of campaigns, because you rarely see those imperfect start points.

About six months in, I was Googling an old Tom McElligott ad and was appalled that barely any of his work came up. So I scanned his ads and wrote a post on him, called ‘Hands up who’s heard of Tom McElligott’ – ironically, because I thought everyone had. The numbers went berserk. I was getting five and a half thousand [hits] a day, every day, for about six weeks, and watched it spread from country to country on the little Wordpress map.

People started talking on Twitter and Facebook about this ‘amazing pre-internet copywriter’, then VICE picked the story up and did a big piece. The only niggle was that a few ex-Fallon guys got in touch to point out that some of the work I’d featured was under the creative directorship of Pat Burnham, though funnily enough the only ex-Fallonite who wasn’t bothered by this was Pat Burnham himself. To try and make amends, I thought I’d interview Pat alongside his work, so it all started from there.

I can’t think of any brands or products I’d like to work on but haven’t yet – I’ve been lucky. But there are hundreds of people I’d still love to collaborate with: Rolph Gobits, Gary Larson, Woody Allen, David Shrigley, Nigel Bogle, Nacho Gayan, Charlie Brooker, Gerry Graf, David Drummond and Adam Curtis… I’d better stop now!

Awards are still coveted, but not to the same degree they once were. Originally, most awards were charities, set up to promote the creative industry to big businesses and they felt like gentlemen’s clubs. Now, they’re driven by growth, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it means their focus is on growing entries year on year and getting as many agencies in as many countries to enter as much as possible.

The problem isn’t that the juries are made up of the same old familiar names – the Hegartys, the Wiedens etc – it’s that they’re made up from unfamiliar, unproven names. It sounds more democratic, but awards, by their very nature, shouldn’t be democratic. The result is there’s a little less respect for the juries. Also, the boom in categories has meant that, aside from Grands Prix, nobody seems to be able to recall who won what.

The best piece of advice I’ve ever been given? Brian Stewart, an old boss of mine, once asked whether I was happy with a piece of work I was presenting him. I said I wasn’t sure. He replied: ‘Well if you’re not happy with it, how am I supposed to be?’

Be curious, optimistic, honest with yourself and don’t give up is what I would tell anyone starting off in the industry today.

If I wasn’t an art director, I’d be a key cutter or a film director. On balance, probably a film director – the money’s better.

Chronologically, my mentors in the industry have been Brian Stewart, Derrick Hass, Mark Reddy and Mark Denton. The first two encouraged and taught me. The third gave me belief in myself. The fourth hired me.

The Guardian Skinhead commercial [Points Of View] is the best piece of advertising I’ve ever seen. It states the paper’s philosophy in a way you can’t ignore, disagree with or forget. In 30 seconds.

Although it didn’t win any awards, I think the best piece of advertising work I’ve ever produced was the 2012 D&AD cover. I suppose what it won was the competition to be D&AD’s 50th anniversary cover, against 50 other creatives – very good ones. I set out to be totally candid about the process of creating, without worrying about what people would think about it, or me.

If I could change one thing about myself, I’d have more hair. 

Fountain pens are my greatest weakness. I buy a lot of them. Keep that between us, though – my wife hasn’t a clue.

If I could time travel I’d go back to Leagas Delaney in 1997 and try to find my vintage Parker Duofold fountain pen.

My biggest fear is Trump. (The US presidential candidate, not the bodily function). And bears.

I last cried two weeks ago, while watching Room.

The closest I’ve been to death was at the end of a three-week shoot for Kawasaki in Scotland, when photographer Duncan Sim challenged me to take his place and shoot a roll of film. ‘His place’ was a homemade metal shelf, bolted to the front of his old Land Rover, and he’d been chained to it for days while we drove at speed around mountain bends, trying to get exciting pictures of motorbikes.

I couldn’t say no. After giving me a loaded camera and chaining me into position, Duncan and his driver, Malcolm Venville, tried to scare me by hurtling around the edges of the roads as fast as they could go, without actually driving over the edge. Every time we cornered, I desperately tried to stop sliding from side to side by hooking my feet into the bumper and tensing my leg muscles.

I thought, there are a few possible outcomes: either my legs will give out and I’ll slide off the side of the trailer, or the car will slide 500 feet off the road, or the shoddy rig will simply give way and they’ll run over me. I wasn’t keen on any of the options, to be honest.

Pomposity, arrogance, rudeness, bullying and laziness all make me angry. Luckily, I work in advertising, where those things don’t exist.

My hobbies are photography, parenthood, avid film watching and five-a-side-football. I’m also a donor of huge sums of money for Arsenal season tickets.

One of my nicknames was Dave ‘The Eye’ Dye, started by my old partner Sean Doyle. He also came up with ‘Diddly Eye Dye’. ‘Herr Dye’ was Campaign’s No.1 advertising nickname one year, supposedly because I’m ‘so exacting in my standards’. But I think they made it up.

I’m an occasional Tweeter, a sporadic Instagrammer, and an obsessive Pinner [Pinterest user]. Although I have a bit of a Facebook allergy.

I have too many heroes to mention, but one of my biggest died in New York in January 2016 [David Bowie].

Do I ever Google myself? Yes. Do I care what people think about me? Yes. I wouldn’t trust anyone who answered ‘no’ and ‘no’. Although I find I’m caring less and less.

The wheel was a pretty good human invention.

The worst human invention has to be the paper weight. Who’s working in an office so windy that they need to tether down all their paperwork to stop it blowing around?

If I was prime minister for the day, I’d bring back the C.O.I. [Central Office of Information, the UK government marketing and communications agency], then appoint J. Walter Thompson.

My ambitions are to produce work that I like. That runs.

How would I like to be remembered? Answering a question like that is a sure-fire way to make yourself look like a dick.

At the end of the day, what really matters is the usual stuff: world peace, health, family… And Arsenal winning the Premier League.