Richard Brim speaks from the heart

Ace of Hearts is helmed by the power trio of Richard Brim, Martin Beverley, former CCO and Head of Strategy at adam&eveDDB, and Polly McMorrow, former CEO of McCann London. 

The differences between Ace of Hearts and industry convention, says Brim, start from the ground up. And to illustrate that point, he has a story to tell, from the golden age of advertising. 

“When Nigel Bogle went to the Cadbury’s factory and saw a caramel machine closing down, and this endless stream of molten caramel, he asked, ‘what do you do with that?’ ‘Oh, we throw it away,’ they said. He walked on, then said, ‘you know what you should do? Cover it in chocolate and call it a Curly Wurly’.  

"The secret  sauce is to be  good, be  close, be tight, have  fun. That’s  what we have here."

“And to me that story epitomises what we should be doing, what this industry can do to survive AI. To put creative thinking at the heart of business. It’s not about separate, siloed disciplines, it’s about all the disciplines and no disciplines, and putting that curly-wurly, creative thinking at the heart of business.” 

He talks of creative innovations such as taking equity in a brand as a creative business partner, or launching a subscription model, where the agency sells a client an idea and the longer they use it the more expensive it is to rent. “It’s on us that it works,” laughs Brim. “It’s a gamble, and we’ll see how it pays off. But it opens up how creativity and business view us. When we are at our best and have a really tight team, the value of creative thinking can give us a powerful advantage. That’s what John Lewis had. The secret sauce is to be good, be close, be tight, have fun. That’s what we have here.” 

Above: John Lewis' Christmas spot from 2015, created by adam&eveDDB.

Brim started his career path at St Martins in the late 1990s. “The Gallaghers, Sensation [exhibition], the YBAs [Young British Artists], it felt London was the centre of the universe,” he says. “I recall buying my first Campaign from a Soho newsagent for £4, and the front page story was ‘ABV launches Guinness Surfer’. It was a golden age.”  

A stint in Hamburg, then Rainey Kelly, were his early training grounds. He recalls getting the hairdryer treatment from CD Graham Storey, after delivering a poor job for a print ad featuring a shopping trolley. “He said, ‘What is THIS? The perspective’s all wrong, you’ve not considered the lighting. It’s what we asked you to shoot but it’s not...”. He laughs. “It was a real lesson about the details that matter so much.” 

“The Gallaghers, Sensation [exhibition], the YBAs [Young British Artists], it felt London was the centre of the universe.”

Details matter, both technically and tonally. Brim’s choice of shots Innovator is Dani Coyle, a tonally perfect photographer and filmmaker for luxury brands, and Burberry’s global creative head when Burberry on TikTok won at the 2024 D&AD Awards. “You can spot Dani’s work a mile off,” he says, “which is already half the battle in this industry. Her stuff is properly social, the kind that actually belongs on the platforms it lives on. Fun and playful, with an edge you can’t manufacture. But what sets her apart is her taste. Joy is easy, but joy with taste is almost impossible to fake, and she does it like she’s not even trying. Which is a rare quality. Nothing she makes feels forced. That’s the instinct the industry needs more of.”  

Above: Ace of Hearts' spot for Save the Children.

Thinking back on the icons of his youth, “you’re made up of people who’ve influenced you,” he says, recalling and reiterating one crucial piece of advice from his early days. “This is really good fun, what we do, and when people around you are having fun, the best work comes out of it.” 

"It’s a hard thing to do, to leave an agency like adam&eve.”

That sense of fun extended through his years at adam&eveDDB, and working on John Lewis. “We talk about those days really fondly. Toward the end, when you have something that is so successful, it was becoming harder to maintain and keep it interesting and keep it relevant,” he says. “The brief was the same, and because it was so prevalent to the nation, we had to take in how people were feeling. We’d done Man on the Moon, which tonally was very sad. The next year was Brexit and Trump, everything that people didn’t think would happen happened, and we didn’t want to lean in too politically, so out of that came the dog bouncing on the trampoline [Buster the Dog]. It was a very good thing to be a part of. I was very lucky. It mattered to people. Reporters would be going through bins at agencies trying to find out what the ad was going to be.” 

He’d discussed, off and on, setting up a new agency with Beverley, drinking in the pub after work. “But it’s a hard thing to do, to leave an agency like adam&eve,” he says. “We were always talking about doing it, and then there was a point when we had run out of excuses, and we had some amazing succession plans, and the agency was in a very good shape, and we really needed to do it. And so finally we did it – and it’s been amazing.”