An original mad man

ADVERTISING: John Hegarty is the man responsible for Audi’s tagline and making Levi’s and boxer shorts fashionable again. As…

ADVERTISING:John Hegarty is the man responsible for Audi's tagline and making Levi's and boxer shorts fashionable again. As he prepares to return to his roots at the Shark Awards in Cork, he tells BRIAN BOYDwhy he's optimistic about the future

ADVERTISING COPYWRITERS are a bit like non-performing songwriters, in that they're anonymous individuals but their work is known by millions. You wouldn't give John Hegarty a second glance if you passed him on the street but his work is as well known, and as referenced and copied, as many a massive-selling pop-music hit. He is the man behind the famous Levi's Launderette ad campaign (in which Nick Kamen stripped down to his boxers to the strains of I Heard It Through The Grapevine) and the man behind the simple but highly memorable strap line for Audi cars: "Vorsprung durch Technik."

Launderette and Vorsprung weren’t just hugely effective ad campaigns for the products concerned; they also seeped into the general culture. As a result of the Levi’s ad, it wasn’t just sales of 501s that went through the roof. Boxer shorts (previously verboten in a man’s wardrobe) became a cool and necessary purchase, and I Heard It Through The Grapevine became a worldwide hit all over again. To this day, it’s impossible for a certain generation to separate the song from the ad.

Vorsprung durch Technik also took on a life of its own. Here was an advertising slogan that was used as a punch line in an episode of Only Fools And Horses, was name-checked by U2 on Achtung Baby(and Blur's Parklife) and featured in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

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But Hegarty, now in his 60s, isn’t trading on past glories. The company he cofounded in 1982, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, is still picking up advertising awards by the truckload – most recently for its Johnnie Walker Keep Walking campaign.

Hegarty is the only man to be knighted for services to the advertising world. Next Friday, he makes a trip back to the familial home (both his parents are from Co Cork) as honorary president of the Shark Awards to give a keynote speech titled “10 reasons why this is the best time to be in advertising”.

“It’s great getting back to Cork, and the annual Shark Awards in Kinsale are very much the Glastonbury Festival of the advertising world,” he says. “It has a much friendlier atmosphere than the other advertising award shows.”

The reason for the title of his Kinsale speech is a riposte to those who believe advertising has been caught in a pincer movement – squeezed on one side by the recession and on the other by the triumphant march of new technologies, which pose real threats to the tried and trusted advertising shop windows of television and the print media.

“Yes, the digital world is knocking on the advertising door and there is so much new technology tumbling out of Silicon Valley,” he says. “But the first thing for us to understand is how these new technologies work, how consumers use them, and if their advertising value can be exploited.

“There’s a danger of celebrating New as the new New and you have to be careful of these apostles of the future – as in, old media is dead, long live new media. We heard that kind of talk from the financial world a few years ago and look where that led us. You don’t want to appear to be a Luddite – but how many of these new technologies will turn out to be the new Betamax?”

He’s sanguine about the much-mooted iPad’s impact: “Of everything out there at the moment, this could be the real game changer – it offers so many possibilities. But the advertising world has to be careful with these new developments. The same with Twitter and Facebook, which is similar, really, to people chatting in a pub – but do you really want someone to sit down beside you and start telling you how wonderful the new Audi car is? You don’t want to be interfering with social conversation – advertising still needs a route map for these new developments.”

Known as “the master of creative rebellion”, Hegarty’s great strength is how he has helped subvert the modes and means of advertising from within. The son of a Cork labourer, he was switched on to the artistic potentials of advertising while at art college in London. As a young man he was a founding shareholder of Saatchi Saatchi before setting up Bartle, Bogle and Hegarty.

Now in his 60s, he’s still as engaged and optimistic about the advertising world as he was when he first started. Financially very successful, he doesn’t need to work but does so because, as he says, “I’m genuinely interested in the area and it keeps me alert and keeps me open-minded. The only thing that ages you in this world is having a fixed point of view.” Subversion in advertising is key for him: “If you look at Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, the film Easy Rider or Picasso’s Cubism, you’re looking at a book, a film and an art movement which changed the way we thought about these subjects. That is the challenge for advertisers – to re-energise and cause waves. You saw that this year with the Old Spice campaign [a witty campaign that proved a hit with a younger generation and revitalised an ageing product] which was very well done – it was different and it got people talking.”

He’s doesn’t mind being constantly asked about his famous Levi’s 501 and Vorsprung campaigns – “I wouldn’t be living in the house I do live in now in Highgate, if it weren’t for them” – and remembers how they were both criticised at the time. “With 501s there were complaints that we were just rehashing old music and not doing anything new, and with Vorsprung we got lots of letters of complaint from German teachers saying how the phrase was pronounced incorrectly in the ad. But that was the very point of it – a very English voice mispronouncing a technical German phrase. I knew we had broken through with that one when I opened a paper one day and there was a headline about Boris Becker losing a tennis game which read “Boris has lost his Vorsprung”.

Whether it’s working on accounts for Xbox, Lynx or Johnnie Walker, Bartle, Bogle and Hegarty’s work is characterised by high production values, lashings of style and eye-catchingly original ideas.

“The best advertising uses the simple power of reduction,” he says. “It’s like what the French philosopher [Blaise] Pascal once said about a work: “If I had more time, this would have been shorter.” It’s not about putting the core idea across through the pages of a newspaper or on a TV advertisement – it’s about the idea opening up in people’s head. And it is about telling the truth – that’s the best ad you can ever have.”

Outside of advertising, Hegarty is making something of a name for himself in the wine world. In 2002 he bought a vineyard in the south of France (Domaine de Chamans near Carcassonne) and a few years ago he was able to add a wine award to his many advertising awards when the world’s most influential wine critic, Robert Parker, gave his Cuvée No 1 a score of 92 points. In Ireland, his wine is stocked by the O’Brien off-licence group.

His thoughts now are all about getting back to Co Cork and rallying the somewhat recession-battered troops. He’s going to be determinedly sunny side up. “The very basis of advertising is optimism,” he says. “Advertising does have a role in lifting us out of recession. After all, in our world, tomorrow is always going to be sunny.”

The Shark Awards takes place next Friday and Saturday in Kinsale, Co Cork. kinsalesharks.com