Humility and swagger aren’t concepts you normally associate with one another. I certainly didn’t, up until a formative moment in my career. I remember it vividly - it was 2007. I was the most junior of creatives, working at Clemenger BBDO Sydney. Management brought in a new ECD, with all of the attendant fanfare and uncertainty. He came from Colenso BBDO - then, as now, an absolute creative powerhouse. His name was Richard Maddocks, and ahead of his start date, he did a bit of a preso to the agency to introduce himself. In it, he rattled through some of the work he had done at Colenso - and it was cracking stuff. Multiple campaigns that cleaned up at Cannes. Finally, he played an ad for some brand of kiwi bacon, and said that it had been awarded Worst Ad in New Zealand the previous year. He had a good laugh about that, and told us that he doesn’t mind a bit of failure - that it’s sort of an unavoidable byproduct of trying to do something good.
These days that kind of sentiment is quite trendy. I think W+K’s motto is ‘Fail Harder’, and every time I get on LinkedIn people are talking about how great failure it is. But in 2007, succeeding was still very much en vogue. Rich was at the forefront of failure. And it kinda blew my mind. I remember thinking ‘Holy shit. This guy has done so much great stuff, he can just laugh off winning Worst Ad of the Year?! Not just laugh about it - almost boast about it?!’ It was roughly the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
So you might think it was planned when, a mere 12 months later, I bagged myself a Worst Ad Of The Year gong. Sadly, it was unintentional. We were trying to make a Really Good Ad when we made ‘Daniel’s Birthday’ - a TV spot for the Mitsubishi Pajero about a guy trying to avoid a family function with the help of his Compact SUV. I maintain it was half decent, but the B&T Annual of 2008 said it had ‘No depth, no cleverness, and no point’, awarding it the Number 1 position in its Top 10 Worst Ads.
As you can imagine, I was quietly thrilled by this. Granted, my portfolio didn’t have any of the illustrious, Lion-winning Colenso stuff. So there wasn’t that weight of metal that so heavily offset Rich’s bacon ad in that initial preso. But I wasn’t about to let that dampen this epic achievement.
My creative partner and I clipped out the honour and stuck it to the wall of our office. And I made it the last line of my professional bio...where it remains to this day. If you were being generous, you could call it a tribute/homage to Maddocks. But let’s be honest - it’s a blatant rip-off from the best CD I’ve ever worked for. A pose, an imitation...but not without substantiation: I did win that award, fair and square.