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Alan Waldie's boss once said of the mercurial art director: "Give him the brief and let him go off in all directions and scatter his ideas everywhere because one of them will be of use. The knack is to spot which one."
The boss in question was John Pearce, one of the founders of Collett Dickenson Pearce. And surely none of Waldie's ideas can have had a more lasting impact than a commercial that picked up so many honours - including a black Pencil - at a D&AD Awards night that the audience began chanting Waldie's name over and over again like a football crowd.
The commercial in question was "iguana" for Gallaher's Benson & Hedges Gold cigarettes. It was so astonishing that it's easy to forget that,for a long time, it had a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the most expensive commercial ever made.
In fact, the Gold campaign in general and "iguana" in particular - all Waldie's work - marked an important new chapter in the history of British advertising.
While "iguana" helped usher in a new era of stylish commercials with movie-like production values, the Gold campaign as a whole showed that increased ad restrictions did not always curb creativity but could actually stimulate it.
Such was the case with tobacco advertising. Although it was only in January 2003 that tobacco ads were banned in the UK once...