Until about a month ago, I hadn’t ever heard of Sir John Hegarty. He caught my attention recently in an interview on Radio 4’s Start the Week, talking about his career in advertising.
The first question that Andrew Marr put to him was: ‘What is the greatest brand in the world?’ His answer, which surprised me, was ‘The Church’. Although he was referring to the Catholic Church, he was keen to identify the cross of Christ as the most successful logo in history.
Cross logo?
‘It is a logo so simple that a child can reproduce it’, he said, ‘They could easily have adopted the sign of a fish... or a carpenter’s plane. But no, they adopted a symbol of pain and sacrifice.’ Hegarty went on to talk about the ‘real through-the-line, 360-degree thinking’ that led to churches being built in the shape of a cross. Then the churches themselves behaved in the way that all advertisers should, ‘taking their founder’s beliefs with them, they went out to convert the world’.
I hadn’t realised it until then, but I was familiar with a large proportion of Hegarty’s work and I’m sure you will be too. If you were watching TV back in the early 80s, you would have seen those Levi 501s adverts where Nick Kamen visits the launderette and the other one where a man gets into the bath with his jeans on. Then there are those black and yellow print adverts for Boddingtons, ‘The Cream of Manchester’. More recently, in the past month, you might have seen Suggs of Madness sing a mellowed-down version of ‘Baggy Trousers’ in a pub as part of Kronenbourg’s new campaign; ‘Slow the pace’ or angels falling as they smell the men’s deodorant, ‘Lynx’.
Jesus speaks to all
That radio interview made me curious to read Sir John’s recent book, On Advertising: Turning Intelligence into Magic. In it he goes on to praise Jesus for addressing the masses, rather than picking a narrow band of ideal consumers with the right profiles. ‘He didn’t get up on that rock and say, “I’d like to talk to 18-25-year-olds with a predisposition to change and a disposable income of X”. No, he got up and preached to as many people as possible.’ Although Hegarty wouldn’t call himself a Christian, he is recognising and drawing on a 2,000-year-old success story of communication which had none of the advantages of modern communication.
Hegarty is a celebrated master of the straight TV advert, with many Cannes Festival awards to his name over the years. But now he is realising that TV and print advertising is not the only way. Today, a client doesn’t need to spend millions to promote a campaign, he says. Now, anyone can communicate with the masses through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and hardly spend a penny. But they still need to know what to say and how to say it, which is why agencies like Hegarty’s still have a future.
No target audience
In Sunday School recently, my son has been learning about the amazing expansion of the gospel in the book of Acts. It’s unstoppable and it keeps on going, despite the opposition that it faces. The gospel message is accepted by a range of people so broad that no advertising agency would dare to identify it as a target audience profile. But the reason that the gospel message continues to grip and convict so many from so many different backgrounds is because it is God himself working through the Holy Spirit as he points people to Jesus Christ. God asks Christians to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth but he doesn’t leave it up to us as if he was a client hiring an advertising agency. Instead, he gives his followers the Holy Spirit, who ensures that it will be done.
