Wednesday 19th May
7pm – 8.30pm
Logan Hall
Institute of Education
Bedford Way
London
WC1H 0AL
Tube: Russell Square
Collett Dickenson Pearce. Slow, arrogant and expensive?
Tony Brignull, Sir Frank Lowe, Sir Alan Parker, John Salmon and Alan Waldie answer your questions on one of the most important UK advertising agencies of the twentieth century. Chaired by Anthony Simonds-Gooding, D&AD Chairman and one-time client of CDP.
Launched in April 1960, Collett Dickenson Pearce (CDP) emerged from the ‘Swinging London’ of the time as one of Britain’s most important and influential advertising agencies. Over the proceeding decades it nurtured the careers of many now internationally famous names, including the five members of the panel.
The agency’s output had a distinctive sharp wit and confident font-led graphic style, well suited to the fashionable colour supplements which the Sunday newspapers were launching at the time. By the 1970s, colour television with improved picture definition was rapidly taking root, bringing the need and the opportunity for greater sophistication in the commercials it showed. CDP seized on this and set the tone for what is now viewed as a golden creative period in British advertising. Clients included Harvey’s Bristol Cream, Bird’s Eye, Parker pens, Fiat, Ford, Acrilan, PrettyPolly and Benson & Hedges. Campaign slogans which entered the national consciousness include ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’, ‘Land Rover. The best 4 x 4 x far.’ and ‘Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach’. These, and commercials for Hovis (by Ridley Scott, 1973) and Cinzano (Sir Alan Parker, 1978), are considered by many as some of the best TV ads ever made.
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