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THIS STORY (AND IT IS A YARN, NOT AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE) BEGINS WITH MY EXPERIENCE of working with Amnesty International's UK Section in the nineties. I was a copywriter at the London ad agency Collett Dickenson Pearce-"Colletts" to its friends-which was probably best known for its work on alcohol (Heineken refreshes the parts other beers can't reach), tobacco (Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet), and the surrealist Benson & Hedges posters of the 1980s. We recruited officers for the British Army and bobbies for the Metropolitan Police. In the summer of 1990 we were invited to pitch for the account of Amnesty UK.
Our prospective client was a chain-smoking Frenchwoman in a fur coat. She gave us a verbal brief. It went like this: "Let me tell you what I don 't want. I don't want any of your clever advertising shit. I want you to get across that at this very moment people out there are being tortured and dying and it's your fucking duty to do something to stop it."
We worked in teams. Copywriter and art director. I worked with Neil Godfrey, the agency's art guru. We liked to spend a lot of time on research, so we visited Amnesty's archives. They were full of stories so brutal as to be almost beyond telling and pictures that could never be shown in a family newspaper.
The pitch fell during a planned holiday to Portugal, so Neil did it on his own. On our way back from Gatwick, we heard on the radio that Iraq had invaded Kuwait. This was August 2, 1990.1 was wondering how the pitch had gone and went back to office on the Monday to learn that Neil had given Amnesty a lecture on the shortcomings of their approach to advertising.
"The tiny ads you run are a waste of money. You have a very important job to do. Your files are full of stories that will appeal and move people. If we can tell these stories, people will respond. But to tell them properly we need big spaces. Full pages. Maybe bigger."
"Oh yes, very good, pull the other one," said our smoke-wreathed client. "Big ads. You just think of winning awards."
So Neil said that Colletts would...