The Greatest Advert for Advertising Ever

Working Paper No. 2B

In 1984 I was lucky.
I was given a job as a trainee account planner at Abbott Mead Vickers.

It was a gruelling process gaining entry to the advertising industry. A couple of hundred graduates had applied to each of the big agencies. I’d had to write a letter and CV by hand. I’d had to hitchhike to London three times for interviews. I’d had to buy, out of my dole cheques, copies of Campaign, so as to swot up on the ads and opinions of the day. I’d had to buy a suit, made almost entirely of polyester. I had to hide the holes in my soles.

Gruelling barely describes it.
But had I applied a year later, it would have been a lot more gruelling.

Instead of a couple of hundred applicants, I’d have been competing for a job against a couple of thousand.

And consequently, I’d almost certainly have failed to secure that job at AMV and instead found myself working for a company servicing photocopiers or some such. (Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t got anything against the servicing of photocopiers but I’m not sure it would have suited me or, more importantly, the photocopiers.)

What changed in 1985 to make advertising such a desirable destination that a couple of hundred applications turned into a couple of thousand?

Answer: Someone took their trousers off and put them in a washing-machine, whilst some music was playing.

That washing-machine was in a 1950’s American launderette. The music was Marvin Gaye’s ‘Heard it through the Grapevine’. The someone was Nick Kamen. R.I.P.
The trousers were Levi’s 501s.

Levi’s ‘Launderette’.
It was the sexiest commercial ever made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q56M5OZS1A8 Of course, sales of Levi’s 501s skyrocketed.
But there were other unintended consequences.

The estate of Marvin Gaye saw a huge surge in sales.

Nick Kamen became a superstar... He appeared on the cover of The Face... At the time that was like Beyoncé appearing on the front of last month’s Vogue.

And young people who had never before even thought about the existence of an industry called advertising started to wonder whether that might be a ‘sexy’ place to work.

Thousands of young folks joined my polyester-clad journey to employment in the industry; the number of potential recruits mirrored that of the sales of 501s.

Agencies got to pick some of the brightest most creative brains in Britain.
And advertising got better as a consequence.
But here’s the question:
What is the industry doing now to attract such talent? Deliberately or unintentionally?