Pod Insights ABC Rewind 02 Where the bloody hell were you! The jingle reigns supreme About this episode It’s the 1970s and we're entering Australia's golden age of advertising. The Aussie larrikin makes his TV appearance and liquid lunches get longer. Salaries get bigger and the egos to match them.
Join host Dee Madigan as she digs through the history of advertising in Australia.
Transcript 3,680 words · 16 speakers
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0:08 Speaker 01 ABC Rewind.
0:14 Speaker 01 Hi, I'm Dee Madigan. Welcome to episode two of Where the Bloody Hell Were You? When the Oca arrived on our screens and the jingle reigned supreme.
0:27 Speaker 02 Oils and oil. You know, you're soaking it. If they were any tougher, they'd rush.
0:33 Speaker 02 Those free ladders are gonna be walking all over it this afternoon. Remember the aeroguard.
0:38 Speaker 03 The Milky Bells are on me. I want the caramel inside the chocolate.
0:46 Speaker 01 It's the golden age of the 1970s and 80s. Well, it was for some. Colour TV exploded into our lounge rooms. We couldn't get enough. And Australian advertising found its voice. But did we all like what we heard?
1:07 Speaker 01 Late 1960s Australia. George Patterson is the country's biggest advertising agency. Head honcho Bill Farnsworth has just given top creative Bruce Jarrett a tricky job. An advertisement out of left field is badly needed to save this product.
1:28 Speaker 04 Cult United Brewery had a beer in Brisbane called Goldtop, which was a dog. Forex was the big seller. They thought they'd have a last fling and try and do something with it.
1:44 Speaker 02 You can get it hunting. Get it riding.
1:47 Speaker 04 When I wrote it, I thought, this is John Million with a really good, ballsy Australian voice.
1:54 Speaker 02 The big, big beer is Goldtop. You can get it dancing. Get it romancing. Get it doing nothing.
2:00 Speaker 04 I think it was the first Australian Oca campaign that went to air.
2:10 Speaker 04 Gold Top brewed by Belimba. A lot of bees, you know, real masculine.
2:17 Speaker 05 A brilliant advertising concept had been created by Bruce Jarrett. Wonderful music, wonderful voiceover from John Melion.
2:26 Speaker 04 His voice was just right for it. It was tremendously successful at first. But nobody bought a second bottle because it was just the same old beer.
2:37 Speaker 02 Gold Top brewed by Belimba.
2:41 Speaker 04 You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.
2:49 Speaker 05 The same campaign was then tweaked a bit and was used for Victoria Bitter with huge success.
2:59 Speaker 01 Hugh Mackay was a young social researcher at the time, working with George Pattersons.
3:14 Speaker 01 And also taking a keen interest in the way the industry was changing was future young gun Alan Johnston from Mojo.
3:22 Speaker 06 You can get it when you're going crook. You can get it when you're carving a chook. A big, big thirst. And a big, big thirst needs a big, big beer. And a big, big beer is Gold Top. That was the first of the Australian that I really noticed.
3:41 Speaker 06 At the time, there weren't Australian accents. There just weren't Australian accents around a lot. But they started to creep in after that.
3:48 Speaker 02 When I picked up me new Leyland Lil, it was a big day. I told Harry, "If she's as good as me first Leyland, she'll do me twelve years and all."
3:59 Speaker 05 I think the rise of what we've called ocarism in Australian advertising, particularly through the 70s and 80s, did play quite a significant part in encouraging Australians to feel as though it was all right to be Australian. That we didn't have to be colonials. We didn't have to ape the Americans. The way we talk, our slang, our accent, this is okay, this is who we are.
4:24 Speaker 02 Well, you sure sound like Australia to me. We are! Well, then you better tell me again, because I just might forget.
4:38 Speaker 07 Americans on the whole shied away from that kind of overt emotionalism in ads. And I think that would be a general view, that there was more of an attempt to be Australian.
4:50 Speaker 08 Many of the locals working for smaller agencies realised that idiom was everything. And so you see, well, I suppose in its most infamous form, you see Paul Hogan taking on Marlborough. There was, at the time, within Australia, a desire to have a defined, local, indigenous culture.
5:10 Speaker 09 Then you two can say, "Guess whose mum's got a whirlpool? All the nicest people are saying it."
5:17 Speaker 01 Philip Adams was one of the new successful creatives with his own Melbourne-based agency, Monahan Damon Adams, known as MDA. North of the border, John Singleton was the other new boy on the block, coming up with his brand of the Aussie larrikin and his version of the Aussie ad agency. Whereas Philip Adams was interested in the creative product, John Singleton was interested in the bottom line. He chased the money and he was very good at it. He and Philip Adams didn't always see eye to eye.
5:49 Speaker 09 Oh, darling! Get on with this, Mabel. One for every day of the week.
5:55 Speaker 08 Singleton and I were, and I think to this day remain, mortal enemies. I always found his degree of ultra-oca vulgarity just too much to handle.
6:05 Speaker 02 Where do you get it? Dixie bell margarine. This week only 500 grams for 65 cents. Buy it now. The savings are in.
6:12 Speaker 10 Everybody was trying to do clever advertising, very inventive advertising, and John Singleton was the original disruptor. He just thought, "Well, if everybody's doing that, I'll just do really annoying advertising."
6:25 Speaker 09 Oh darling, there you are. You've caught me in the middle of all my cleaning.
6:29 Speaker 10 I'm John Beavens. I got into advertising straight out of school in 1963. It was that kind of rat-bag sort of mentality, you know, he was... John Singleton sort of said, "Well, let's take that to the nth degree."
6:44 Speaker 09 Are you paying attention, darling? Ring-a-ding! I'd better get some of this fancy fizz for flowers.
6:50 Speaker 02 10 cents for 370 mils. Grab a few and head for the hills. Where do you get it?
7:01 Speaker 06 They were just a very exciting time. There was a lot of... People worked hard, but they played hard too. It was the end of the Mad Men era. And it truly was, you know. And I was kind of a fresh-faced kid out of school. It gave rise to some really interesting people and some very, very exciting advertising TV commercials.
7:26 Speaker 01 And a young musical duo, Mojo, was starting up.
7:37 Speaker 06 We were very Australian. John was doing very well, but I think our work was quite different. And I think the music helped it.
7:59 Speaker 06 I think if people like your ads... And Singer and I have talked about this. And he was saying, you know, he did ads that really did sell. And he said, "But Mojo did ads that people liked and still sold."
8:13 Speaker 01 Alan Johnston, Joe, remembers an encounter with the young John Singleton that persuaded him and Alan Morris, Mo, to make their move and start their own agency.
8:31 Speaker 06 In 1974, Mo and I decided to rent an office together. We both knew Singer. And we asked him around. We had a terrace house in Glenmore Road at that stage. And Singer turned up and he had a chat with us and all that. And he said, "Look, you don't want to be... Why do you want to become an agency?" We said, "Well, we're making a lot of money for other people and we're just getting fees." He said, "No, you're much better off as you are. Don't become an agency." Anyway, off we went. We had a beer or two and off we went. And as we went out, I looked out the window and I said, "Mo, he's just got into a Rolls-Royce. Most of that's it. We're becoming an agency."
9:08 Speaker 05 That move towards the Australian accent, culturally, not just in voice, in Australian advertising was a very important step towards letting Australians off the hook, in a sense, encouraging them to think, "This is who we are. Let's not pretend to be anything else."
9:39 Speaker 05 And that's the sort of thing that advertising does brilliantly. Stay as sweet as you are.
9:51 Speaker 01 Around this time, a lot of young Australian creatives decided to go out on their own.
9:56 Speaker 09 Other countries just don't seem to have the same spot for standards as we do, do they, listeners? Oh, yuck!
10:13 Speaker 11 Monahan Damon Adams was one of the agencies that started to do more Australian things, more local things.
10:23 Speaker 11 You'd have to ask Philip Adams, who was there.
10:26 Speaker 09 Remember the early 60s? Remember how we thought the world would always be as carefree and as easy as it was then?
10:33 Speaker 08 We were sick of, in a sense, being ventriloquial dolls for the United States.
10:46 Speaker 01 And so we see a new generation of Australian agencies propelled into the limelight, each looking for a point of difference. Alan Morris and Alan Johnston of Mojo became experts at their game: the jingle.
11:16 Speaker 06 Well, yeah, I did the vocals on Come on, Aussie, feel like a tourist, middle of the year.
11:26 Speaker 12 I don't believe they were just jingle writers. I believe they very succinctly captured the mood of the country. The very upbeat and prosperous period for a lot of Australians.
11:47 Speaker 10 Mojo's advertising captured the spirit of the times, where there was a true celebration of what it was to be Australian.
12:00 Speaker 06 Writing is fairly easy. All you do is stare at the typewriter until your head splits open. We were using the old manual typewriters in those days. We used to work backwards. In other words, you'd get your slogan right. You'd get that right and then to work backwards from that. Meadow Lee was, polyunsaturated margarine was coming in. Sort of said the fellas at Meadow Lee ought to be congratulated. For making a Meadow Lee not only tastes good, it's poly bloody unsaturated.
12:41 Speaker 07 Mojo was pretty terrific as an agency. I always said how brilliant "You ought to be congratulated" was as a theme because it just, instead of saying, "Eat this, it's fresh", whatever. It says, "If you do this, everybody's gonna love you. Your family's gonna think you're wonderful, you're domestic goddess, whatever." And I remember saying, I thought that was an inspired idea. "You ought to be congratulated." And one of the Mo's or the Jones', I forget, the guy that did the jingles and the guitar, he said to me, "Oh mate", he said, "You know, I only came up with that because I was looking for a word that rhymed with polyunsaturated."
13:17 Speaker 06 Because it rhymed, yeah. Well, that's basically right.
13:26 Speaker 10 How do you feel? We were invited to pitch for the Tuise business against Mojo. And, you know, we presented our campaign. We'd lost to Mojo. And I was driving a few days later across the Spit Bridge. And I looked in my rear vision mirror as this new jingle came on. "I feel like a Tuise." And I was listening to it on the radio. And stuck in the traffic behind me were two tradies, sitting in a ute, obviously listening to the same radio station because they were singing along to the jingle. Now, this was a campaign that had only just been launched. And already, they got into the hearts and the minds of their target market.
14:11 Speaker 10 Mojo were a brilliant advertising agency.
14:15 Speaker 09 (Singing) "I feel like a Tuise. I feel like a Tuise. I feel like a Tuise or two.
14:25 Speaker 09 I feel like a Tuise. I feel like a Tuise. I feel like a Tuise, drop rude."
14:35 Speaker 06 Well, we were very butch, as they say. We did do, it was very blokey, very blokey agency. Although, back in those days, women like Jackie Huey were really big, important figures.
14:47 Speaker 07 Well, I remember there was a photograph taken of the movers and shakers in the advertising creative world. And there's sort of 15 guys in a ring with the sole female, Jackie Huey, standing in the middle of it.
15:00 Speaker 13 Yes, I was the only woman. It was a sexist culture at that time. The whole thing was a club. It was a man's club, I guess. The ideal person was a young bloke, round about 32, who looked groovy. Half the time, they weren't very good. One of the things I loved was getting on top, running the show. Because then you did. Then you went to the client yourself and you spoke to them yourself.
15:32 Speaker 01 After establishing her own agency, Jackie Huey joined forces with Philip Adams at MDA. Then came the Radox Bubble Bath Account, where they pushed the envelope just slightly.
15:44 Speaker 13 It was for Radox, moisturiser in a bath. And the woman got in the bath and she was having a nice time, floating through this tropical divine.
15:56 Speaker 13 And then in the end, her husband plaintively called Dorothy, "Please come back." And they wanted to change the ending so that Dorothy came back to her husband and everything was lovely.
16:12 Speaker 13 Philip and I talked about that and said, agreed it was nonsense.
16:17 Speaker 13 And we ran it as planned. And Dorothy didn't go back to the kitchen. And the women loved it.
16:29 Speaker 01 The 1970s saw a much more permissive Australia. And the ad industry was only too happy to cash in on it.
16:36 Speaker 02 Since Eve tempted Adam, the world has found an infinite variety of ways to go to the devil.
16:41 Speaker 09 Over here, mate.
16:43 Speaker 09 What do you need from Australian barbecue? Well, you need birds. I've got plenty of them.
16:47 Speaker 02 My goodness, really is hot.
16:50 Speaker 14 Now, c'est mes ex.
16:53 Speaker 05 Hello, sexy ex.
16:56 Speaker 15 Goodnight, everybody. Like a lift, Suzy? Anyone?
17:00 Speaker 01 And what is it about women drooling and draped over cars?
17:04 Speaker 15 Good evening, girls. Anyone, Philip? Anyone?
17:10 Speaker 15 Will anyone like a lift?
17:12 Speaker 09 Charger isn't expensive, but that's not the only attraction.
17:16 Speaker 05 I mean, advertising to be successful has to be a slave to the culture. That's why we needed a women's movement. That's why we needed a gender revolution, not just in advertising.
17:30 Speaker 14 At last.
17:31 Speaker 01 Abigail, from the racy TV show number 96, shocked and titillated mid-1970s Australia.
17:38 Speaker 14 Irresistibly orange, just as you can tell a good lover by the aftershave.
17:43 Speaker 01 And did the same in an ad.
17:45 Speaker 14 You can tell a good orange drink by its mmm. Use black label orange as a mixer or drink it naked.
17:58 Speaker 11 I was invited to a client meeting. Creative people very often weren't, but I wasn't. So I asked, "What do I have to do at this meeting?" And the account director said, "All I want from you is your high heel shoes clicking across that floor."
18:17 Speaker 11 The man from Arastock was there stocking. And he told us that pantyhose would never take off because no respectable woman would be seen without that seam down the back of her leg. And so, a meeting went on and then the creative director said, "No, now the creative people get back to work." So I got up, I turned around and walked away with my seamless calves showing because of course I was wearing pantyhose.
18:49 Speaker 01 Pantyhose were embraced.
18:53 Speaker 01 Wind up the skirt, rubber necking tradies, and wolfy soaps.
19:01 Speaker 11 All the rules were changing. The ads were changing to reflect what was happening in society.
19:17 Speaker 01 But the fundamentals of advertising remained hard to shift. Sex still sold.
19:33 Speaker 01 The 1980s brought Bob Hawke, Bondi, Australia's first mobile phone, and the VCR. Mojo's jingles kept coming.
19:44 Speaker 01 And two uncompromising blokes in Melbourne, calling themselves "The Campaign Palace", gained notoriety.
19:57 Speaker 01 Greg Daniel managed the duo.
20:01 Speaker 12 I think everybody did well in the 80s in advertising if you became known for a particular style of advertising. The Campaign Palace had a very distinct style, both in how it was run and in the advertising it produced. It was all about the creative product.
20:34 Speaker 08 There was a golden age in Australia and most of us would give the credit to a company called Campaign Palace.
20:41 Speaker 03 And all you can see through my clothes is... well, all you can see is me.
20:46 Speaker 08 But boy, everything they did was just dazzling.
21:01 Speaker 12 There weren't that many brave clients out there. Hence, the palace didn't grow in its early days to the extent that it should have. I mean, they didn't settle for less than the best.
21:22 Speaker 00 You know, the Campaign Palace, literally, as part of its credo was if they had to design a matchbox for a client, they would try and make it magnificent. And that really was what they believed in. At that time, they were definitely leading the fold.
21:37 Speaker 01 Simon Reynolds, fresh out of school, was seeing firsthand how the ad business worked. And it was a time of plenty: creativity, clients, and long, long lunches.
21:56 Speaker 00 In the 80s, the way they worked was at lunch. They literally went to lunch every single day at the best restaurants. And they'd sit there and they'd kind of pen these things, often brilliant, by the way, at lunch. And that was what I stepped into in 1982.
22:16 Speaker 06 Oh, it was a fantastic time. We used to fly all the gog for free. Everything was tax deductible in those days. Put down as entertainment, as new business, you know. It was a rort and everyone was on it, everyone was on it. Anyone who says they weren't is a liar.
22:32 Speaker 06 And we enjoyed it while we could.
22:40 Speaker 07 Long lunches didn't change. I mean, sometimes on Friday, people didn't even bother going back to work. They'd ring in and tell the secretary to cover up. And our fearless leaders were pretty crazy. They too would just disappear. You'd try to get them and they came back in the office at five o'clock for martinis with clients.
22:59 Speaker 08 You don't get this popular without being this good. There was an era of immense self-indulgence and people wallowing in their preposterously high incomes.
23:10 Speaker 06 Oh, the restaurants loved us, loved us.
23:13 Speaker 01 Until Paul Keating's fringe benefits tax.
23:26 Speaker 01 The 1990s were on their way.
23:30 Speaker 01 Simon Reynolds.
23:32 Speaker 00 I opened my first advertising agency a few days before the 1987 stock market crash.
23:40 Speaker 00 As a creative director, I wrote the Grim Reaper ad. At first, only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS. A brief that wanted to really strike people with the reality. But now we know every one of us could be devastated by it.
23:57 Speaker 01 And the reality of the 1990s was recession and it hit the industry hard. Belt-tightening, bottom lines and internal reorganisation were the order of the day.
24:08 Speaker 01 Now it was suits, creatives and strategic planners.
24:12 Speaker 00 Early 90s really was an era where strategy directors played a huge part.
24:17 Speaker 02 You know Peabody's got a master plan to get rid of all the nasties in the land. They've got a strong range of insecticides to see the end of the cockies.
24:26 Speaker 00 In the old days, they'd just pen something, that Fabula makes your clothes cleaner or something. In the late 80s to 90s, they would do, you know, 80-page documents in order to prepare the 30-second ad.
24:38 Speaker 11 So instead of the top man, the managing director or someone, deciding the strategy and what was going on, briefing the agency and so on. Suddenly, there was a kind of big hierarchy going on. There was a marketing director, and then there was a marketing manager, and then there was a product manager.
24:56 Speaker 02 Cockies, mozzies and flies, and just about all the nasties besides. Just imagine.
25:03 Speaker 06 Planners came in. There were never planners before. There was all sorts of internal politics suddenly going on. You have to increase your profits by 15% every year, so you have to start sacking people.
25:15 Speaker 02 There'd be no more cockies in the kitchen if your Peabody round the fridge. No more flies buzzing past your eyes, no more silverfish.
25:23 Speaker 01 English creatives poured into the Australian advertising industry, and they didn't particularly like our ockers or our jingles. Mergers and buyouts were increasing. George Pat's and the Campaign Palace, MDA and Mojo.
25:38 Speaker 06 And then the advertising had to become subtle because people were becoming advertising savvy and you couldn't be very blatant about what you were selling. We were always, "This is, here it is, here you go." So I didn't like it at all.
25:58 Speaker 00 There was very much a move away from this ockerism of Singleton and Mojo to, you know, what are they doing in Minneapolis and in London?
26:08 Speaker 06 So when Shire Day, an American agency, made an offer to buy both of us out, we jumped at it.
26:17 Speaker 01 John Singleton held out though, forming the John Singleton Agency. And Alan Morris joined him. While the relationship was often volatile, they did create a gem for Qantas.
26:31 Speaker 00 You know, at that point Singleton's advertising, which had of course been typically ockerly, had become much more sophisticated. And Mo from Mojo had joined them. And I'll never forget, you know, he was on a fortunate Singleton's and we were, you know, 20 storeys up in a building in the city. But when you walked into Mo's office, it was a perfect replica of a boat shed. And the reason is because he liked to work in a boat shed.
26:58 Speaker 06 He loved boats, yeah. But he had a boat shed he used to work at, sat the bottom of his house, right on the water at one stage. So he recreated that inside the agency.
27:07 Speaker 00 And that was just one of the last of the rock star touches.
27:13 Speaker 01 It didn't take long before Alan Morris moved on and John moved up. The 1990s was a decade of great change.
27:23 Speaker 01 But great work was still done.
27:26 Speaker 01 Very clever and sometimes a little bit irritating. And then as the millennium dawned, it did look like another golden age might be on its way. Just one that we could not yet imagine.
27:41 Speaker 09 The internet meets the cellular network. Global information meets individual freedom. It's the world at your fingertips.
27:55 Speaker 01 You've been listening to Where the Bloody Hell Were You? Stories from the early days of Australian advertising. To hear others in the series, head to the RN homepage. The sound engineer was Russell Stapleton. Content advisor was Robert Crawford. And Where the Bloody Hell Were You was produced by Roz Blewett. I'm Dee Madigan. Bye for now.
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