Twenty years ago this week, the founding partners of Abbott Mead
Vickers set out their stall in a double-page ad in Campaign. ’Watch out
Colletts,’ the headline said above a cheery picture of the founders,
’we’re only pounds 34 million behind you’ - Collett Dickenson Pearce,
for those whose history doesn’t go back that far, was then the
undisputed number one agency.
How the industry must have laughed. Indeed, the smiles worn by David
Abbott, Peter Mead and Adrian Vickers suggest they agreed it was a
preposterous claim.
Little, one suspects, did anybody realise this fledgling agency would
today be not only the UK’s biggest, but also its most respected and
admired - by both rivals and clients. The irony, of course, is that
throughout its history, Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO (as it now is) has
never pursued size for its own sake, but focused only on achieving
excellence. Yet, by concentrating on the latter, it has achieved the
former.
How has it got there? Well, one could list the conventional reasons:
outstanding and consistent creative excellence; leadership; brilliant
strategic understanding of marketing and the role of advertising; an
account management style that means client and agency always have the
same agenda; a vision of where the agency is going, and an openness - as
evidenced by a canny group acquisitions policy - to other disciplines;
and a refusal to be diverted from its game-plan by short-term
exigencies. These are the attributes which distinguish all top agencies.
The difficult bit is getting it all to work at the same time, all the
time. In achieving this, AMV is unique.
Still, that doesn’t explain how it has achieved this, to which there can
only be one answer: the people, the culture they have created - and the
symbiotic relationship between the two. By hiring the best people and
treating them with respect and decency, AMV has created a cycle in which
virtue brings success. It is hard to see how that virtuous circle could
be broken.
