Reloaded: Rupert Howell co-founder of HHCL on creating the agency of the decade

48:13And somebody, they weren't complaining is too strong, but somebody made some comment about working till midnight on Sunday to me the other day. And I said, I didn't have a day off for five years. They said, oh, come on. I said, no, no, no. I went into my office every Saturday and Sunday for the first five years of the existence of HHCL, as did not all of our staff. And in fact, we encouraged our staff, particularly as we got to years three, four, five, not to come in but the founders we'd been doing stuff we were there non-stop and you can only do that if you've got an incredibly supportive family which you know I was incredibly lucky you know my wife effectively brought up the kids almost on her own we were in there every day and in fact my first two the only two holidays I had in that first I'm gonna I'm slightly exaggerating I think it was three years actually not five years the only two holidays I had in those first three years were paid for by my clients oh really yeah so um uh the first one and there's a story behind this was thames television but uh the guy at thames television who was one of my first clients in fact he he went into a contract race with dame pack to be my first client and won it so it was actually our very very first client was thames television and uh the sales director there Jonathan Shire about a year in said to me he said I can't remember how the topic of holidays came up and I just laughed and said well don't be ridiculous Jonathan of course I'm not going on holiday I've started a business and stuff like that he said well it's ridiculous you've got to have a break so I tell you we've got a ski trip next week why don't you and Claire come on it this was for obviously for media buyers so there were a bunch of media buyers and and me and Claire taken by Thames Television on a ski train.

50:00So we had three days skiing holiday. And then about three years in, I was talking to the chairman of Molson, the Canadian brewer. And their chairman of their company was a wonderful man. He became a good friend called Norman Seagram, who was from the Seagram family. And Eric Molson was on the board as well, but Norm was the chairman. He was a little sort of five foot six, pocket rocket, bullet, bald, bullet headed, hard guy. and we did we did a great campaign to launch Molson in the UK which had the rather convoluted end line of Jim Dunn says don't drink it and it was basically this guy and it was his real name Jim Dunn who basically was um uh loved Molson so much he wouldn't let anybody else have it so in fact it was a precursor to the Walker's Crisp campaign with Gary Lillick it was exactly the same idea they just copied yes yes yes um jim dunn says don't drink it anyway and i remember i had a great client again but very nervous who who insisted i went out to canada to present we'd won the pitch this was not the idea that won the pitch it was a development idea and um i went out to canada to present to the to the committee of the board with norm eric Molson so it's pretty you know pretty big wig types and presented the Jim Dunk idea and uh I remember Norm looking he sort of hunched down he looked down the end of the boardroom table to me said well Robert he said it's brave but I knew he was then going to run it and it was very it was very successful and um you know again I'd explained to Norm that um you know he was going up against a body of brilliant creative work because in those days the lager advertising i mean you had couldn't give a full that's the heyday wasn't it yeah carlin that label you had george the bear before it all got effectively banned that well having fun in lager ads got banned effectively so now they're all poncey load of tosh um but they were brilliant i said you've got no chance with your budget against that lot unless we do something completely ridiculous So my favourite execution of it was Jim outside a pub, and he's drinking a Molson, and he said, you know, Molson Canadian lager, it's fresh brewed, this, that, and the other.

52:26He said, why would you drink anything? He said, no, that's right, he said, it's all great. He said, but I do not think you should drink that. You'd be much better off drinking this, and you pan out, and there's a tanker delivering lager through a huge fucking pipe to the pub and he said it goes on he said this is much better he said it's mass produced you know he said it's fantastic stuff this and it's so upset the rest of the log community and of course what that did is lift the profile of molson yeah amongst publicans and everybody else because that was part of our target audience and and again that comes back to you know the ad didn't get banned but it was controversial because it basically said all other lagers have come out of a tanker which they do yeah yeah as it happens as it happens whereas ours was bottled ours was not dropped yeah bottled and imported yeah it's totally imported malt from canadian uh and it was the original stuff no in fact it was made in a huge fucking brewery in in toronto and montreal is beside the point it arrived in a nice It is.

53:33And, you know, I think the thing we were really brilliant at was when we got into trouble was turning the tables and making it a benefit to the client, not a problem. Yeah. So I always remember on Tango, you may not know this one, but we had one execution which had a sort of Giles cartoon granny with orange balloons, but she comes out with a hat in and you think she's going to burst the balloons, but she blows up instead. Okay. So Exploding Granny, it was called. And it was, and he'd go, whoa, I'm sorry, I wasn't expecting that, you know. And it's the hit of Real Oranges, and she was all dressed in sort of orange plain, and she blew up, not the blues.

54:16Anyway, so I get a phone call from The Sun.

54:22And The Sun didn't know me, but they phoned the agency, obviously it got caught through to me. and it said look um we've had we've had complaints about you know explaining granny that this is sort of ageist and you know and is disrespectful to old age people so i said really have you got any comment i've got no point i said honestly i mean i said who made that complaint they said it was somebody from age concern i said okay anyway so the sun that day prince has in its comment column third you know they always used to have three comments and their comment the third one saying you know tango's taking it too far now age concern are very concerned you know blowing up granites disrespect for old people we should honor our old people anyway so i phone up the age concern and get through to the director general of age concern i said i've only got question for you.

55:17Have you actually seen the ad? He said, no, I haven't. The son phoned me up and explained it to me. It sounds absolutely horrendous. I said, have you got a video recorder? He said, yeah. I said, can I bike one round to you? He said, yeah, of course. I bike it round. So anyway, I phoned him up and I said, what do you think now? He said, it's hilarious. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Anyway, I said, okay. So I rang the son up. And I said, just so you know, Age Concern have withdrawn their complaint and it's not a problem. oh okay listen the next morning their lead leader column said have age concerned got nothing better to do oh no so first off that taught me about tabloid newspapers which is they create the controversy and then comment on the controversy and then and then complain about the controversy they've created oh but it also taught me you can turn things around just by doing a little bit of homework and having the balls to call somebody up and say do you know in the end tango got great pr but you've just described what's wrong with social media haven't you which is everyone's commenting on the comment and no one's actually done the research to find out whether the original thing is right or wrong well the classic one was the instant i mean whatever you think of it the instant sort of attack on the government's race report which came within a minute they cannot have read it.

56:37They cannot have read it. So these were pre-prepared complaints and their complaints may be valid but at least have the intelligence to wait for as long as it would take to read it and analyse it. I read a lot of comments and listened to a lot of discussion on LBC from people that had a strong opinion who hadn't read it and admitted they hadn't read it and they're reacting to what they read about it which I think is very satisfied affairs the secret to pitching new business agency success agency failure it I mean in the end you have to have the talents in place but it does come down to relationships and you know I think the reason why I was good at new business and HHCL was successful at new business rather than then successful at the ads which we were as well was because I'm I'm good at building relationships and uh I like I enjoy building relationships and I am not remotely interested in the status of who I build relationships with never have been yeah sure it's sexy to meet Jeff Bezos and Jerry Yang and all that stuff but I'm just as in I'm just as interested in building a relationship with their PA because I know in the end they don't give a fuck about me.

58:02But if the PA might, because most people don't bother to take the time to get to know them. And I enjoy, but I enjoy that. I don't just do it for the effect, although I like the effect. I enjoy doing that. I find that a good thing to do. It's one of the reasons why I probably would be a very bad politician and it's the big flaw in Boris Johnson, which is I like to be liked. And the only way you can be liked is if you put yourself out there and you create those relationships. And I like to be liked. I'm perfectly happy to accept not being liked, in which case then that becomes somebody I completely blank out in my life.

58:48And to me, they don't exist anymore. But if I get on with people, then I'll do anything for them. And I find that people will do things for me. And I think it's that that is at the core of being able to build those relationships. If you look at any successful service business, which the advertising business is, if you haven't got that, you never reach the heights you might be able to hit. If you've got genius, you can do well, but you need to do really well, I think. I think you need that ability to build relationships. And, you know, everything flows from that. A hundred percent. I've so seen that in my career.

59:38The people I respect most that have really transformed businesses have just had that ability to convince anybody of anything and build trust really, really quickly and authentically. and everything else follows from that doesn't it you know if you've got that the the business will flow afterwards so so this probably explains doesn't it because one thing i was going to ask you about is you had this incredible 10 years sold sold the business and then and then it hit a challenging moment and we were talking a bit earlier weren't we about the the moment andrew pulled you off the tango um work so how did that conversation go how did he i mean you i think you said that he was very good at sort of managing you know yeah he was i wasn't you see by that stage i was running chime yeah the agency and i've been asked many many times why the decline in hhcl happened and did i regret the sale to chime i mean the sale to chime happened for the best of reasons we had turned down every offer in town i mean everybody was trying to buy us every major agency.

1:00:45So I turned down the Y &R deal that became Rainey Kelly Campbell, Rolf Y &R, which was Robert Campbell and MT Rainey's terrific agency that did the Y &R deal. I was offered that deal two years before. In fact, I was offered a bribe by the senior management of Y &R in New York of a million dollars if I put the deal across the line. So I said, well, no, I said, well, I don't do that. You just put a million dollars on the price that will be shared equally amongst all the shareholders. But I turned it down because every sale of a great agency to a big multinational that I'd ever seen had led to a complete dilution of the ethos of that agency and only a marginal increase in the performance of the other agency.

1:01:31I do think Adam and Eve with DDB might be the exception to the rule in recent times, but there are very, very, very few that have ever managed that process. So we were reluctant to do it. But we had to do something. And the official line we always gave is we were made an offer we can't refuse, which is true. I mean, you know, Chime and WP, Martin Sorrell, because Sorrell put the cash element of the deal in, you know, they paid 12 times profits for us, which, you know, is about as rich as it gets. and um you know we we i used to say publicly well you know we couldn't turn that down but that wasn't the real reason the real reason was that adam lurie our planning partner wanted to get out of the business and we'd always said you know if any of us wanted to get out we'd commit to each other in five year chunks so five years in we all committed the five of us who founded the company we all committed to each other for another five years and in fact we then pulled in when we became HXL and Partners, Chris Satterthwaite, who went on to be chief executive of Chime after me.

1:02:43Chris, who's one of my best mates, we pulled him in as a founder of the new HXL and Partners and him and his team committed for five years. So we were approaching our 10th year anniversary, are we going to recommit to each other for another five years? And Adam said, I know, I don't want to do it anymore I want to go and write books and we had long hard discussions about could we replace Adam with somebody in-house and in fact the guy who was the planner on Tango would have been the candidate John Leach who's brilliant but I started feeling it was more me than anybody else that I'd sort of had enough of it I'd been carrying this business from a business perspective all the stuff we talked about earlier for 10 years and I was tired you know I'd done it from the age of 30 to the age of 40 uh I'd had three years of no holidays I then had you know another seven years of certainly no days off even when on holiday and just sort of constant constant work and I was sort of I was ready for a not a change of pace but a change of context a bit and Tim who had founded Chime by then Tim had constantly been saying to me come on come on we could put our businesses together you know he had what was regarded as the best PR business in the UK independent and we had the best comfortably the best advertising business and we were mates and so on so it made so much sense the issue would always be how are we going to run things and how's he going to pay for us because we were bigger than bell possibly oh right okay yeah yeah yeah i mean in terms of profits and revenue we were bigger um even though chime was a public company so they could have raised money on the markets and so on then sorrel came in because sorrel had been trying to buy hhcl for ages and wanted me wanted to put it into ogilvy's or thompson's or i see any of those yeah offered all of that.

1:04:48So Sorrell said look I will fund the deal effectively so basically the money we got for HXL we got half in Chime shares and half in cash which is what Sorrell put in and then he ended up with 21 % of the enlarged shine which he still has WP still. And Tim and I thought this is going to be great he didn't want to do any of the plc stuff i was fascinated by taking that on as a new challenge i'd never done it before i'd only worked for a big multinational or been an entrepreneur i'd never run a public company and suddenly i was going to be chief executive of plc listed on the main market as well not aim market and tim hated all that he hated the city and he just he loved being with clients and politicians and so i thought this is going to be great and And we had a year's earn out that went brilliantly well.

1:05:42We smashed it, got another three million on top of the price. All great. I handed over then to, you know, other people. And I suppose this is sort of blowing my own trumpet, but it was never the same without me. And I think what I gave it was I gave the company its daily energy. and without that energy it lost a bit of the sparkle it still had the genius but less of the sparkle and I I'm I'm not brilliant at multitasking it's why the new business director role being taken off existing clients worked so well for me yeah I love that sort of single focus and my attention turned almost exclusively to the city and sorting out Chime which was a bit of a mess because Tim didn't care about that stuff he cared about the clients and I thought this is going to be great he cares about the clients I'll care about the city all good and actually for a year we thought we were geniuses and we cracked the code particularly because we did together the whole creation and launch of go for British Airways so I'd won the go pitch Barbara Cassani was based in our offices because she wanted to be physically away from British Airways the pilots were all interviewed in our agency and all that stuff we got involved in the naming we i introduced her to wolf olins to do the design because i'd done first direct with wolf olins who were brilliant um and then i said right you know and bell pottinger should do the pr they did a brilliant job and i remember tim and i sitting down after the successful launch ago saying we fucking cracked it at last we can go to a client saying we can do everything for me from naming, design, advertising, PR.

1:07:34Now, Tim, I'm a good salesman, but Tim was a great salesman, the best I've ever seen. Could we get any other clients to give us the totality of their comms business? No, we couldn't. And, of course, we realized the impediment was that in the vast majority of companies, the advertising and marketing budget was held by the CMO. But the PR budget was held by the director of corporate affairs. And typically they hated each other. I mean, properly hated each other. Everyone used to say, oh, CFOs and CMOs hate each other. No, they don't. They don't always understand each other. But CMOs and corporate affairs always hated each other.

1:08:16Because it was jealousy over the budget. And we could not. The only time we ever got it to work was startups where you didn't have those people. You just had the founder and got on with it. Anyway, so that was the first problem. So there were three problems that happened that caused the demise of HXL. So first is that I took my eye off the ball and focused on the city. The second was that the proposition, although beautiful on paper, struggled in practice. and then third WPP that had promised us interested access to its networks shoved us shoved the agency and I should have known better into Red Cell which was a dog's dinner run by an idiot and it just never worked and it never could have worked and I should have not allowed it but I had my eye on other things.

1:09:14So it was my fault to a great degree. And then once it became clear that HXL was not going to flourish in that regime, it was too late really to rescue it. A lot of the talent had seen the writing on the wall and had gone. I was to go back in and rebuild it, which was one of the options. I just personally couldn't do it. couldn't do it. And then later down the line, the thing that led to me leaving Chime was, and I should have guessed this, much as I loved him to this dying day, he was astonishingly conservative in both a small C and a big C. I didn't mind the big C bit, but small C conservative, he hated change.

1:09:59And Chime needed to change in so many ways. And I particularly was interested in building up sport marketing. He didn't want to do that. So in the end, he didn't want to do any of the stuff I wanted to do as chief executive. And I had two options, either to oust him, which I was never going to do, A, because he was not a good enemy to have, and B, because I liked him, and C, because it was his company to start with. And so I just, on the anniversary, I'd done a five-year handshake with Tim and Martin Sol to say I'd do five years minimum. and I left on the anniversary of the fifth year of selling HXL to Chime.

1:10:39I left. And they tried everything to keep me. I mean, everything. But I'd had it. And that's because I couldn't do it. And in fact, Chris Sathaway was a much better chief executive of Chime than I ever would have been. And he built Chime into the biggest sport marketing business and all that. Because after I'd gone, Tim sort of retreated a bit into his own world of just looking after class. He actually let Chris do all the things and more. Not all the things. So there were a few things I wanted to do that Chris was allowed to do. And then Chris had much bigger and better ideas that he was then also allowed to do and built it into a very successful business till it was bought by Private Equity, which I was delighted about because I still had lots of shares.

1:11:24Oh, good. Excellent. Well, there's a happy ending in that sense. Yeah. And Chris is a great mate as well. But you've touched on something I think really important is the role of founders and how you can't, you know, it's very rare to be able to replace founders or integrate into bigger networks, isn't it? I mean, you see it so often as a book I've read, which I love is The Founder's Mentality, looking at the difference in market valuation between founder led businesses and management led businesses. And it's quite profound, isn't it? You know, you talked about the hard work, the relationships you've got.

1:11:57You just can't easily replace that. Well, it's true. That is true. But on the other hand, then look at examples like, you know, what Bill Gates did with Steve Ballmer, what Steve Jobs did with Tim Cook, is there comes a point actually where all of that flips on its head. And a founder is an impediment to a business growing because the nature of founder entrepreneurs is that they're control freaks. They care too much about everything. Yeah, yeah, that's true. And there comes a point when you get to a certain size where you need professional managers and the founder needs to get the hell out of the way or go into an advisory role.

1:12:36And in fact, Sergey and Bryn have done that, haven't they, at Google. So, you know, letting Larry take over and run it. But we're talking there about companies that got into the billions. The problem with ad agencies is they, well, A, they never get to that size. and so where's the point in the timeline and size line where you can actively hand over and the trouble is it hardly ever hardly ever reaches that that perfect inflection point because they never get that big i mean bbh have probably done it better than anybody else handing over but they did that by only selling 49 to publicists and therefore keeping control and they got to a big enough size by opening their own international offices to be able to fund out the fund the founders you know because John Bartle went first and then effectively um Hegarty and then effectively Nigel all of all of whom are good mates of mine and were very helpful to me in my advertising building the agency that's the other weird thing about advertising is we compete tooth and nail yes during the day but people were incredibly helpful yeah uh aside that you know mike greenley's uh gold greenley's trot was just down the road from us mike greenley's is one of my best mates you know now he you know they lent us a photocopier when i was broke just before a pitch you know it's kind of agencies help each other it's weird it's kind of a nice little community but that's partly because it's a village and it's small it is yeah and therefore that that notion of handing over to a second tier or something is very hard to make very very hard very hard to manage and i you know i've got that in my um in in in one of my existing chairmanships and at some point we'll have it with system one group yeah which is which is how do you manage how do you manage that process yeah because it is it is um it's difficult it is Very few people do it.

1:14:39And it needs two sides to tango. It needs the founder to let go. And it needs the management team to really take up the slack. And the slack is multidimensional and deep. it is isn't it and you need to get the individuals that can replicate that founder's behavior like you talked about the obsession with customers the the hard work you know all that all that energy that you bring you know you have to try and replace that yeah i'm not i wouldn't use the word replicate john i would because if the time is right unless it happens because they get run over by a bus which is different but if it's a voluntary and timely handover it should be because some of what's needed has changed because you've grown to a certain size where it needs different skill sets so yes you've got to keep the passion and energy but there might be there might be some skill sets that are no longer needed and others that are newly acquired and you know the interesting thing about I mean I don't know if you've watched the Gates documentary it's quite old now but it's called inside Bill's brain it's fantastic um you know he hasn't he hasn't left Microsoft he's still there chairing the board but he's really genuinely let the management run it yeah and he's gone off and what what like any obsessive like him he had to get obsessed with something else and he's obsessed with his foundation and you know and eradicating polio and etc etc but he's still got his wisdom in there and you know founders getting ousted is not a good idea unless they want to be ousted it's much better to somehow harvest their wisdom in a in a in a more informal way going forward that makes sense that's why you end up with you know advisory things or whatever anyway let's let's not get sidetracked what i've um what i've seen in my career happen time and time again, actually, is that that professionalization management takeover happens too early in so many cases in the life stage of the brand.

1:16:45And actually what was on a rocket fuel growing quickly starts to slow down because you behave like a much bigger corporate organization and you lose the entrepreneurial, you know, kind of low bureaucracy, fast moving, you know, you know great culture that made the company a success so i think for me you know spending a lot of time looking at this and looking at different companies i think it's timing and it's understanding life stage and and that kind of thing you can often kill something particularly when it's definitely no definitely there's no question that in retrospect we the sort of hand over hxl happened too early and if we'd done another five years i think we would have been able to open international offices and we'd have had a path more similar to bbh yeah but do i regret it well no not really because hhcl achieved i mean i have moments where i think oh that'd be interesting hhcl achieved astonishing things i mean it was agency of the decade won grand prix at can still talked about in reverence still everybody and i mean everybody who worked there says it's the best place they have ever worked ever it was an amazing environment we created to let talent flourish we were diverse before it was required uh in lots of different ways and uh it you know i'm very proud of all that but if we hadn't done what we'd done i would never have been a public company chief executive which taught me a huge amount that i was able to bring to bear in other things but also has prepared me for what I do now um the McCann thing would never have happened I mean what a weird thing that was for me to go from you know the best agency in the world to probably the worst and uh you know and to just to see why the biggest agency in the world could be so good in some places and so bad in others and it was the worst agency in the world in London but it was the best agency in Norway, in Italy, you know, in, I mean, in loads of places.

1:19:06It was the best agency in that country. And of course, what is it down to? It's down to the people. It is. It's down to the people. And I discovered, which is why I ended up leaving McCann, there was an inverse relationship between the engagement of the Americans and the success of the office. Yeah, makes sense. So every time the Americans came over, who were the two top Americans, were two of the biggest arseholes it's ever been my misfortune to come across. Deeply unpleasant human beings, big chips on both shoulders, come from wrong side of the tracks, greedy beyond anything I'd ever seen, didn't give a fuck about the clients, didn't give a fuck about the work, only cared about their own personal wealth.

1:19:55I mean honestly I'm not exaggerating horrible people and every time they came across to Europe which fortunately was only once a year for the big tour around to do the budgets it took me a month and I was only there three years took me a month to repair the damage because they the people I would have grown men come out of meetings crying because they were so fat you know I had one guy I I mean, this is actually a minor example. I had a brilliant bloke, lovely man, who ran the office in Belgium, which was a pretty successful office, but he had a comedy Clouseau accent. So his French, his English accent was, I mean, really extreme, like Clouseau.

1:20:45And about three minutes into his presentation, the first time I'd been in these round presentations, the global chief executive, American, and said, I can't fucking understand him. Why don't you fucking speak English, you fucking cunt? Oh, no. Right? And I said, hang on, hang on, John. I said, hang on, hang on. He speaks a lot better English than we do French. Yeah. I can't fucking understand him. Right? And this guy, I mean, I had to pick up the pieces for a month after that. He said, you know, I said, no, he doesn't hate you. Come on, he's just a stupid young. Come on, let's forget that. you know you you know in the end you he didn't did he approve your budget yes well then it's all and i had to do that and after three rounds of doing that i just couldn't take it anymore they were such arseholes and um so uh they didn't like me either by the way so uh he used to call me he used to call me that damn limy literally really believe it or not don't use that word he was I'm a Danish American.

1:21:43Jeez. My final death knell came because the holding company, IPG, were forced by Wall Street because at that time, McCann had been under an SEC, or Interpublic had been under an SEC investigation. So I had to make 104 offices Sarbanes-Oxley compliant, which I've got to tell you, is hilarious. Well, it's hilarious, particularly in places like Greece and Turkey, where you have to say you can't bribe clients anymore. and the bloke in Greece who was a really top bloke he opened I kid you not not exaggerating he opened a drawer in his desk and it had a array of Rolexes he said well what am I going to do with these oh that's brilliant he said these are the these are the what I give the clients you know to win pitches in Greece and he said I bought loads of jet skis to give them as well what am I going to do with those I said you don't have to sell them you cannot write private anymore I then had to fire the boss in Turkey and I put in a lovely guy called Tanker, who's American educated and kind of understood why we had to be Sarban Oxy compliant.

1:22:47He ran me, he said, said, Rupert, our biggest client is up for review in Turkey, it's Turkcell. And he said, I've got a slight problem, he said, because I've discovered that part of the arrangement is$50 ,000 in a brown envelope goes to the Prime Minister's office. Oh, no. I said, well, you can't do it, Tanker. He said, well, we'll lose the account. I said, you can't do it we have to be sarbonoxic compliant so he rang me 24 hours later he said we've lost the account wow and uh so i had to do all of that as well uh and i got it all done i got it all done so every mccann eme office became sarbonoxic compliant we had record new business for three years doubled the margin to seven to fourteen percent but i ended up hating the Americans with a passion and they hated me and I said IPG did this um succession management study and um I was told this by the CFO of IPG later is that they came around to McCann and they said well obviously John you know John your replacement would be Rupert Howell and he said oh my dead body with that fucking line he get my job and I was out within three months but it good thing is I was technically fired because the only good thing about American companies is their severance is spectacular.

1:24:04I bought a boat and a DB9 as with part of my settlement. Oh well done, well done, okay. But I mean he beat me to it by about a month. He said, it's so funny the Americans are so funny, he said can we go out for a cocktail after the board meeting? And I know that's like their language for let's go for a beer or you know you signal don't you with alcohol what kind of discussion you were. For the Americans we're going for a cocktail means man's man yeah and going for a beer means having fun going for a cocktail means we need to have a man-a-man-a discussion so he said look Rupert he said I can't argue with your record in Europe it's it's terrific you've hit every target but you know you you just won't follow you know my my directions and I said well John I've explained why not because if I followed them everything that I've achieved in Europe would go in the other direction and he said well I don't you know he said in the end I don't care about that you know I'm the boss you know you know it's my way or the highway he said that I tell you that's true he said those words yeah so I said okay well what would the highway look like and he pulled a letter oh really he said look you know this is what the highway would look like so I opened the letter and read it and was I'm not very good at a poker face but i was pretty good that day i nearly choked on my cocktail because it was treble what i would have asked wow so i said can i have a think about it he said tonight can you decide so i phoned him up and i said i'll take the highway isn't it amazing i know oh i haven't been i haven't been quite in that situation i mean i've been in a similar situation not not with those sums of money but you just look at it and go not only they're paying a vast amount they're also letting go of someone that's delivered the results just because of ego and well the other thing is the amazing thing is about and i you know i literally left straight away i cleared my desk on the monday and um about three weeks later i get a call from him he said rip it um can you can can you can you help me with something i said what he said well the opal client in germany is refusing to talk to anybody other than you yeah exactly could you just try and you know pacify him i said john you fired me yeah he said i know i know i know but could you just do that i said i'll tell you what i'll do it this once but please don't ask again yeah anyway so i did it i phoned the other client i said honestly the guys in the frankfurt office are terrific this is who you need to talk to this is who you can trust so i did that and then um itv came out the woodwork and Michael Grade is my best mate in media and had been for donkey's years.

1:26:54So he's an old friend. And he said, look, I've just got to ITV. It's a fucking dog's dinner. You know, I need somebody who understands the media and advertising world to sort out the commercial side of it. Would you come and join me? And I said, well, no, I'm going to take the whole summer off. He said, well, would you come and join me in September? Because this was, I think this was, I can't remember when it was May or something like that. and um i said yeah well i'll have a think about it kind of thing and michael's michael actually is probably as good a salesman as tim bell was and so persuasive and utterly brilliant i love michael and um he uh he persuaded me to go and join i2d and that would never have happened if i hadn't so yeah so yeah the way i look at it and you know that was that was a it was a brilliant eye-opening but bruising experience so I was on a main market PLC FTSE 100 PLC board a totally dysfunctional board half of whom hated each other I mean really it was a board split right down the middle which so one of the most obvious learnings from that was you that just cannot happen you cannot have it unless you've got a united board you can have dissent on issues but if you've got a board where dissent is on personality, you've got no chance.

1:28:15The board was terrible, but we did great things at ITV and I met lots of famous people, which was entertaining, and one or two have remained friends. But most of them, of course, as soon as you leave, would walk past you in the street. Actually, quite a few are not like that, to be fair. But I would say the majority are like that. literally people who were all over me like a rash you know a month later no not months later six months later i'd be in the ivy club and say hi and they'd look at me like they didn't know who i was and um there are some others who are genuine and wonderful incidentally the best of the lot is hampton deck i hear that i hear that so often so many people say that yeah i still see we still see deck and his wife ali yeah um a bit i see ant less because after he split up with lisa yeah uh but deck we still see and we go to the theater together when that was allowed and yeah come to things of ours and he's a lovely lovely lad i took him to the my my end gig at itd was uh the football world cup in south africa 2010 so i had the boys down there with me for a week we had a great time brilliant brilliant and so they're great and Amanda Holden's great I still see her occasionally because I was involved with her with Batsy Dogs and Cats and Phil Schofield only because his daughter is one of my daughter's best mates so I see Phil so I've been on the sidelines and all the fallout oh yes in him coming out yeah which there wasn't a single person in show business that didn't know he was gay but anyway it didn't matter it still caused a ruckus and actually a lot of upset for his wife and kids.

1:30:02Not the fact, but how he did it. So that was fun. And then, you know, I would never have done Reach because I met Simon Fox through ITV because we tried to hire him to run the PLC overall. And he turned us down. But I stayed in touch with Simon, which I think is an example of how I... Yeah. I only met Simon once because I was asked to interview him as part of the selection process. I thought he was fabulous, exactly what we wanted, what Michael Gray and I wanted to run the PLC. I was never going to run the PLC. I ran the channels. But I wasn't experienced enough to run a FTSE 100 PLC. And Simon had come from HMV that he'd rescued a couple of times.

1:30:43Really liked him. He has the most integrity of anybody I've ever worked with. He was an incredible guy. Really liked him. And, you know, after I left ITV, I sort of messed around in all sorts of things. and then he turned up at reach and um one of the ideas i was looking at was to um take over the intellectual property of the news of the world and create an online version so i still own urls like world of the news oh yeah and um i had had a lot of uh high level support uh but in the end the numbers just didn't work um unless we did it with an existing title like the sunday people that was owned by then Trinity Mirror that became Reach.

1:31:28So I rang up Simon and I took him through the idea. He said, it's a great idea. We don't know what to do with Sunday people. Let's talk about it. And again, we spent six months doing that. Could not make it work financially for both parties. And so we had a breakfast where we called it. You know, he said, come on, let's have a breakfast just to put the seal on it that we're not going to do this and so on. And I said, yeah, OK, that's very nice. and not thinking he might have an ulterior motive. And at the breakfast, he said, honestly, I've been here six months at Reach. It's a total mess. Would you help me turn it around?

1:32:02Because you understand media and advertising. Almost the exact same conversation I'd had with Michael Grade, you know, five years earlier or four years earlier. And because I liked him, and because I wasn't doing anything else particularly interesting, and because he said I didn't have to work full time, I could do four days a week. and then at my request after a year, we went down to three days a week and I could start taking on other outside chairmanships, I said yes. And the rest was history. We did a great turnaround. It was fascinating. And I learned really how the tabloid media works, which is a whole other topic.

1:32:40I was going to say, there's an episode in that one, isn't there? But all I would say is they're not bad people at all. Yeah. I in my entire time there I didn't meet a single journalist who I would classify as an unpleasant or bad person but the pressure they're under nowadays particularly to to break stories and to get eyeballs is causing all sorts of damage yeah to their profession to their integrity to them personally and to their victims or subjects depending on how you want to call it and um I was quite pleased actually to retire when Simon got ousted and the new chief exec came in it was a perfect time for me to say that's enough because I was starting to get uncomfortable with what the journalists were being asked to do for commercial reasons quite understandably because they will not survive unless those commercial targets are met but there's damage being caused by that it's the you're right the machine isn't it is incentivized to work in that way well if you put a story up online with a headline that says reasonably good news reasonably good news very good news AstraZeneca AstraZeneca vaccine gives 90 % immunity to this that and the other you'll get you know 500 clicks if you put up shock horror 50 year old woman dies of blood clot after vaccine you get 8 million and that is the be all and end all of the whole process which is there's been an inflation of shock tactics in the headline writing to grab the eyeballs because if you don't somebody else will and if you don't as a journalist you get fired you've got targets of the number of clicks you have to get and they talk about click bait and unfortunately click bait is driven by shock and horror massive exaggeration celebrity however vacuous, nudity, sadly still, but it's true, and violence.

1:35:01They're what put it up. The only thing that gets you up a click list that doesn't fall into those categories is in football. So any story about Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal, they're the four, get much bigger clicks from around the world than any other story. So, for example, if the story was Spurs buy Lingard from Man United, that would get 1 ,000 clicks. Man United sell Lingard to Spurs would get 10 ,000 clicks. Oh, really? Same story, different angle. Wow. So think about that in the context of any story you read. that's what's going on in social media that's and that all starts with the online news sites and um so we we turn we turn reach trinity mirror from a bit of a basket case into a into a viable machine but i think the next thing you know the the challenge is how do you how do you police that that's another whole episode isn't it because you know for the benefit of society how do we wean ourselves off that drug?

1:36:17Well, there's been a book, there's a pamphlet book written by a Norwegian psychologist that my wife gave me for my birthday, that's called Why You Should Give Up the News. And it's brilliantly argued that actually it's deeply damaging to your mental health. If I could summarise the book, which I won't do it justice, but if I could summarize it in one sort of idea, he said, basically, in the very beginnings of humankind, the news you got from, you know, whether it's from the beating drums or the smoke signals or whatever, word of mouth, was about topics that directly affect you personally. So the volcano is erupting.

1:37:01we should probably leave the cave is a personal, it affects you directly. And what's happened with mass media news is that 99.9 % of our news is about stuff we can do nothing about. And therefore, it makes us feel helpless. And helplessness is very damaging to mental health. So his solution is, do not read any newspapers and do not read any online news sites anything that's local to you will you will get to hear about through neighbors and friends and so on and anything that really matters you won't be able to avoid however hard you've got through water cooler conversations or whatever and if you really really can't give it up 100 give up everything except read the week once a week that makes a lot of sense and it's very well argued and so what i what do you know what it was affecting my mental health and the number of people who said to me i don't watch the news anymore and i very very rarely watch the news anymore and i have deleted everything i've deleted every news app apart from two so i've kept the bbc which even though you get a metropolitan elite left of center view is less exaggerated biased and frantic than anyone else and then to counterbalance it i've kept the sun which i know it's a naughty thing to do when you've worked for the mirror but the reason i've kept for sun is that the sun is actually slightly right of center it's not rabid right wing actually it really is yeah i've only really just started reading it online.

1:38:47Yeah. And I get, you get the slightly different point of view from The Sun, but I'm about to delete that too, because it's starting to annoy me. It's exaggeration. And I think I'm happier for having, I'm genuinely happier for having deleted Mail Online, which I mean, I've talked to the guys at the Mail, you know, I knew Paul Dacre well, and I knew the guys at Mail Online. Their strategy was to irritate people. It was to wind up Middle Britain. I mean, that's the genius of the Daily Mail is they know how to wind up. Paul said to me once, he said, Rupert, if ever you see a front page story about the BBC or the EU, it's because I've got nothing else.

1:39:29He said, because I know that if I put an anti-BBC or anti-EU story on the front page of the mail, it will sell and my readership will get appropriately wound up. I mean, it was totally open about it. you just think, have we really come, is this where we've really got to? It's the danger of a free press. And the critical thing is that you allow a free press with different points of view. And that's why Andrew Neil's new thing is important, because on television, all the news is left of centre. Only slightly, but it is. And he's going to do something he's not doing in Fox News. He'll do very slightly right of centre.

1:40:13He's just hired my old friend Alistair Stewart. Alistair's a Labour voter all his life. So, you know, he's not just, he's hired Pierce, who's a Labour voter all his life. He's not going to, you know, it's not, it's not, you know, he's not going to hire fucking Katie Hopkins. No. So, but we need that because there isn't balance. The alternative though, John, you have to think about the alternatives, you know, is do you want a poodle press like they've got in France or Germany? You know, where then, you know, I mean, French and German governments, they're just going at them now, but they've literally got away with murder over this vaccination incompetence.

1:40:52Oh, I can't believe that. I mean, people have died. People, I mean, thousands of people in France and Germany have died because of decisions taken by their politicians for political reasons, not their reasons. I mean, can you imagine if Boris had done that here? Yeah. he would have been in court by now, including by the telegraph that's Tory supported. So the question becomes, which do you prefer? And that's what I learned at Reach, because it had the express and the mirror and the star. So the mirror always took the left to centre line, the express to the right to centre line, the star took the piss.

1:41:33And that was kind of how it worked. And then we had all the regional papers and titles, like the Liverpool Echo, Manstrudely News, who had to remain centrist because their business model couldn't allow them to be either left or right. They had to be in the middle. And therefore, you know, more focused on, and obviously more focused on important local news. Local newspapers are really important things and they've gone, they're in real danger because they actually contain the news that does matter to you. Yes, they do. And I think you've touched on the most important thing, which is mental health, actually.

1:42:08And like you say, you're deleting apps and you understand the industry. You know what's going on. You're still deleting the app. I've done the same. I think I only I'm down to two now. And I've whittled my social media down to two as well because I just found myself, you know. Yeah. I mean, I don't use social media at all. And that's because of what I learned about it at ITV. So I had a Twitter account, a Facebook account, an Instagram account, and I deleted all of them. And I've done that partly for self-preservation because I would be arrested, I'm sure. Because I'm an obsessive, you know, and I've said this to you before, John, when we were talking about business, is email's my medium, which you've seen.

1:42:54I'm very quick on email. I'm on it all the time. Email's my medium. So those things aren't my medium. I'm not naturally at home on that social media, whereas somebody of your age would be. but I know that I would get into trouble particularly on things like Twitter and Facebook because I get so cross at the fucking morons and the moronic things they say you know I'm of that generation that shouts at the telly yeah but the joy of shouting at the telly is nobody else can hear you yes the danger of shouting at the telly on Facebook is it's never ever ever deleted it's there forever I just yeah I remember saying to Lloyd Emley the editor-in-chief of the of the mirror group i said honestly and he knew i was you know not labor supportive i said honestly lloyd i'm gonna get rid he said i would root because you know he said it's fine you and i having banter but you you know the banter he said i have with you i would you cannot on twitter you cannot no and i say to my kids my kids are on facebook now they don't know no interest in facebook is uh you know facebook's for kids they think or it is it is yeah it has gone that way there's all around tiktok and instagram and all that but they don't they don't put anything up that is anything other than completely anodyne and therefore my argument is well what's the point if that's what you're going to do just get rid of them i know i've had to do the same for my do you really want to see what your mates are having no i don't i don't give a fuck what you well i i get to that point where i want to jump in and have a rant and i think no no no no i can't do it see but you just get that stress it actually creates a bit of stress in you because you're feigning the anxiety of the issue or the point of view and you've got to make a choice either you're in it or you're not you know well you know my my version of that is whenever i got really angry i'd write an email but not send them and every single one of those i've saved to draft in my history well i've never sent well done because basically you vent and then realize to send them is only going to be prolong the argument yeah upset somebody and get you nowhere yeah that's good advice well listen i think it's been absolutely brilliant i mean i was going to ask a little bit about your non-execs and what you see you know are the big issues coming coming up in the future well you know people will say you know they plan their non-executive life and so on but that's not how it happens i was going to say how do you get a non-exec role because i've been i've been approached for a couple through relationships and again listen you know i'm an old white male okay I'm an old white male you will come become one of those at some point and the game has changed for us and most people would say well about time too so I'm not complaining I've had a very privileged life and privileged I didn't have a wealthy upbringing but I ended up your privileged upbringing only because my dad was in the army and in those days they paid to send you to a school like Wellington, which I would never have happened otherwise, obviously, because we had no money or anything.

1:45:58But I'm aware that as a well-educated white male, I've had every advantage in life, so I ain't complaining. So very early on, I worked out that I wouldn't get any non-exec roles by talking to a headhunter or putting myself on a database or any of that because nobody actively wants an anonymous old white male. So that meant by definition it had to be either people I knew or people where I had very, very specific skill sets. And actually all of them, all four have come from people I know. So my first one of my current lot, and in fact, every non-exec I've ever had has come from people I know well.

1:46:46So my first one which is Roxy the music streaming business is I was introduced to the chief exec by not a close friend of mine but a sort of acquaintance called Michael Mazinski who has a really interesting ad agency called the London Agency and Michael had approached me about becoming a London ambassador just because it's a hilarious title I countenanced it and also a great friend of mine called Bruce Haynes is non-exec chairman of the agency so I went to meet Michael a few years back liked him a lot and said well I'll help you if I can but I don't want to be paid I don't want any sort of title but you know you can give me commission if I help you get a new client something like that anyway and we sort of ended up chatting a lot and then suddenly he ran me one day and he said I'm great friends I'm a shareholder I'm great friends with the chief exec founder and shareholder in Roxy I think you'd be perfect for them as a chairman and he's looking for a chairman so I went to meet Rob Lewis the chief exec and we just it was one of those things we hit it off instantly I'd won the pitch within 10 minutes and he won the pitch for me by showing me the product which is spectacular yeah I just fell in love with it completely and the rest is history so that's how that happened then the next one well system one happened because of Simon bridges at canaccord so simon i met when uh i was a non-executive chairman of an israeli ad tech business called matomi uh which was founded by my former mccann israeli country manager who was my favorite country manager became a very good friend lan shaloa genius absolute genius top israeli businessman not just in advertising and elan asked me to he was ipoing it on the london market asked me to join the board I did he then wanted didn't want to be chairman so I took over as chairman and our brokers were Canicorn Simon Bridges did a brilliant job really liked him we became good friends we both like cricket so we go to Lourdes together and then he said to me about a year ago I've got a little company that I like a lot who I think you know will be looking for a new chairman would you be interested because it's kind of in your in your sector so I said tell me about them I said oh yeah it looks interesting I'd heard of it as brain juicer and I didn't know John but I'd come across him and Orlando so I said okay well you know they're interested sure and then again the rest is history then the my medicinal cannabis business is a very old friend of mine the founder chief executive funny enough we just got the 9 million euros this week is the to start to buy the site that we've got optioned and build the greenhouses but the founder CEO Simon Crane is a very old friend of mine who I met when he was chief exec of QPR and Wasps and he worked at the Coca-Cola company as head of strategy in Atlanta and then came back to the UK ran QPR and Wasps and I met him then because I had a sport marketing business and we became good mates and he rang me up just out of the blue and said i've got this company i need a non-executure would you like to do it i said yes and then my final one was which is pinwheel which is the sustainable living app it was the guy i was a consultant to a guy who founded smart energy gb and when he was thinking about what he wanted to do next and started talking about this idea two years ago he said would you be my chairman and i said yeah sure so i've helped him build the whole thing you know one of the things i my advice i the wonderful Zoe Harris, who's now marketing CMO of On the Beach, the travel company.

1:50:31Oh yes, I've met her, yeah. I discovered she was CMO of Confused.com but didn't like it. Yeah. And she's gone to On the Beach. Well, I trained her, trained her, I discovered her at Trinity Mirror as a sort of marketing manager there. Ex-planner from WCRS, she was the planner on Sky at White Collins and then cross sides to become a she'd been on both sides of the agency client equation and one of the few people who did it comfortably uh absolutely wonderful woman super smart great fun brilliant in every way and uh i sort of took her under my wing she was reporting to me to start with and she was one of those people who'd completely hidden her light under a bushel all her career so the thing I forced her to do was to start building a network so I got her I introduced her to Wackle the Women's Advertising Club of London because my old friend Sue Far sort of runs that so she's now a prominent Wackle member I got I got her to join the Marketing Society she's now a prominent member there I got to do I said you just got to get out and meet people and start speaking at conferences of course it turns out she's bloody good at it everybody loves Zoe when they meet her because she's a very colourful, vibrant, you know, sort of slightly out there character as well as super bright.

1:51:51She's more a planner by mentality than anything else. And, you know, that led to her getting offers for Confused.com and now on the beach and so on. And she will go right to the top of anything she does. The only thing she needed to do that she hadn't done, and she credits me with all of this, is learn how to network. yeah and it's just you've got to do it you've got to you've got to do it well i think that's a very very very good point to end thank you rupert that's been wonderful very happy no i enjoyed well it's been fun to chat awesome thanks mate yeah really good cool all right we'll see you soon take care mate take care bye

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