One Giant Leap

A long-since dissolved European football competition devised to promote international trade fairs might seem an odd point of reference given 1969’s arguably more significant historical event, man’s first steps on the moon, but it is typical of the pair’s down to earth demeanour. They met in the creative department of the Thomson newspaper group in Newcastle, a place everyone wanted to work, according to Robson, because they were paying at least 25 percent more than anyone else in the city. “We only wanted in for the money of course, not the satisfaction,” he chuckles.

At Thomson they received management training and were sped through the ranks to work in marketing. “It was a great place to learn,” Brown acknowledges, “but we eventually arrived at the point where you either had to leave Newcastle to go to one of the other centres, do something else or stagnate.” Eventually, that ‘something else’ would become their own venture.

After a spell apart working for other advertising agencies in the north east and Leeds, Robson and Brown started their own business in Newcastle in 1983 and have had their names above the door ever since. On day one, they put an ad in the paper to announce their arrival – and to conquer the legal challenge of not being able to poach any clients from their previous agencies. Brown remembers a chap calling up claiming to be Brendan Foster, the north-east born former athlete, later TV personality and at the time UK marketing honcho at Nike. “I was thinking, nah, it doesn’t sound like you; piss off, it can’t be Brendan Foster.” But sure enough, it was Brendan Foster. “He’d spotted our ad in the paper and gave us just about our first project – and it was a big project, with Nike.”

Whippersnappers

Shortly after, the emerging agency was added to the Greggs roster after Brown went on a fishing trip with Ian Gregg, the man who inherited the bakery chain from his father.

“We were lucky that we weren’t without business at the start; we were the young whippersnappers,” Robson recalls fondly. “We were quite bullish. We weren’t putting the other agencies down but we were only in our thirties and thought we were offering something wildly different to what else was on the scene. Even today people like using the new kids on the block.”

The way they approached clients in the early days was always based on a simple, practical premise, according to Robson. “In those days you always knew what your income would be – it was always based on 17.5 percent. So we’d talk to our clients in quite simple terms: we’d say, we can only be 17 and a half percent as successful as you, and if you’re successful and you grow, we’ll grow accordingly – that’s the conversation we had with every client from day one. I think they understood that and it was slightly different to what they’d been hearing.”

The approach wasn’t about disregarding creativity, they say, but creativity was based around getting a result. “We worked with a lot of retail-based businesses who knew on a Monday morning exactly what kind of week they’d had,” Robson explains. “That’s what we were interested in. So, to have two guys come along and ask, ‘can we see your till receipts?’, ‘what was business like last week?’ I don’t think they were used to that. We wanted to hear it good and bad, we didn’t just want to be fobbed off. We wanted to hear that sales had gone up by x percent or they’d dropped, so we could actually look at what we’d done, what we’d prepared, in case we needed to adjust.”

Inspired

Inspired by what Robson had watched Graham Poulter’s agency doing in Leeds – bringing elements like photography in-house – combined with their marketing grounding, the pair claim they were among the first to start talking about integration.

“We had ‘creative marketing’ underneath our first letterhead,” Robson says, “it was the only thing we could think of that described us at the time.”

Given that Robson Brown’s approach had a nod to Poulters in the early days, I ask how it feels to see their own firm survive an old sparring partner that was, like their own agency now, a behemoth of its time. “The big difference between what happened at Poulters and what has happened at Robson Brown is that we have a really good long-serving team behind us,” Brown reasons. “What happened to Poulters is new people – not the original Poulters people – were trying to run it. We have a strong management chain so that if anything happened to us, it would carry on in a very, very similar business-like way. The philosophy that we started 25 years ago would still be there and I hope it still will be in 25 years.”

Despite talking proudly about the way the business is run, the agency seemed to have its fingers burnt in recent years trying to expand out of its Newcastle base with ill-fated offices in Manchester and London.

Brown says the problem is that clients want the top team on their business all the time, something they don’t necessarily feel they’re getting if they’re not always in contact with headquarters.

Robson takes up the story of the agency’s move to Manchester, “We got a nice office in Salford Quays with a PR presence, account handling, a creative production department, around 20 people in total. What we found was that when they were presenting, it seemed to be regarded as a branch of Robson Brown.

“It would then be quite easy for rivals to say, it’s only a little office, it’s nothing compared to us – which it was – but in terms of the billings that would have gone through that office, it was certainly a reasonable size.”

He adds that after stripping the creative side back out of Manchester, the agency actually became more successful in the city. “Because then we were Robson Brown, the biggest agency in the north east, not a little branch in Manchester.

“It sounds a bit crazy, but we found we had more success being Robson Brown from Newcastle than being Robson Brown in Manchester. It’s very easy for the big lads in Manchester to put us down in Manchester. It’s less easy for them to put us down in Newcastle.”

Tempered by their experience, they have no plans to open any new offices any time soon – although they admit to seeing the benefits of opening abroad if you have an international client some distance away to service. For now though, “Manchester is foreign enough,” they joke.

Future Plans

While both men talk excitedly about future plans for the agency, including the potential growth for its digital offering, not all the developments they’ve seen in the industry have been for the better, they say. Robson talks about how the pitch process has changed from ‘three hour presentations to half an hour plus ten minutes for questions’.

“How anyone makes their mind up in that time is beyond me,” he sighs. “It takes me longer to decide on a magazine or a pair of shoes – let alone how to spend a couple of million quid.”

Brown, on the other hand, laments the lack of talent coming into the industry: “It’s very difficult getting the right people in; the universities aren’t turning them out now.”

But what about a new starter deemed up to scratch by the agency – what could they expect to find at Robson Brown? “I give them a Paul Arden book, a James Webb Young book, and a DVD of Dudley Moore’s Crazy People [a film about a copywriter who has a breakdown because he wants to put the truth in advertising] – I always say it’s a coaching DVD,” Robson laughs. “Read those books and watch that DVD and you’ll get an idea as to what this agency is all about.

“It’s not a complicated business,” he adds. “We’re not that great bloody big machine underneath the Alps. There’s a very simple logic behind what we do and what we’ve always done. But for young people who come in, I say, if you’ve got nothing else from Robson Brown, at least you’ve got two free books and a DVD.”