The last great showman

By Cathrin Schaer & Vincent Heeringa, April 4, 2006 @ 11 pm

Roy Meares has wowed and wooed consumers for over 30 years. What drives one of the last of the old-school admen to keep the hits coming?

Idealog March/April 2006, page 42. Photography by Philip Peacocke. Digital imaging by Department of Motion Graphics

There’s a story about Roy Meares. Back in the early 1980s, Diners Club, the credit card company, was struggling to hold its place and hired a smart, new marketing manager to revive its brand. He sought out Meares for an idea—something modest and in keeping with the American brand’s rules, he said.

“The result,” recalls Meares’ business partner of the time, David Innes, “cost an absolute fortune! It was a Horatio Alger saga told in a two-minute TV ad campaign. I don’t know anyone who had even made a two-minute ad before then, and it certainly didn’t fit with what the Americans necessarily wanted. But, hey, it worked brilliantly. And in essence that’s Roy—he loves selling the big idea.”

Which is what you’d expect from someone in the ad game. But Meares is different. The showman, the charmer, the man with an elfish grin and Michael Cain looks has inked his name into the pages of New Zealand’s advertising history—and etched his work into our collective memory. Remember ‘They’re drinking our beer here’, the campaign that launched Steinlager into the stratosphere of beer brands? Or Speight’s ‘Pride of the South’, Lion Red’s ‘Red Blooded’, Cuisine magazine’s ‘We Do Amazing Things With …’, the 1980s Anchor family mini-soap opera, Robbie Coltrane pitching Ansett, those visually sumptuous, fairytale-style ads for weight loss medication Xenical and … on goes the list of awardingwinning, sometimes iconic, New Zealand advertising.

His advertising agency, Meares Taine Creative, founded in 1997 with creative collaborator Jeremy Taine, won the 2005 Agency of the Year (with under 25 staff) award. It has just opened a Wellington branch and picked up the Kiwibank account. He’s been on the worldwide creative board of Saatchi and Saatchi. He was a founder and, shortly thereafter, a refugee from M&C Saatchi. He founded the Rialto agency and various others. Meares has probably employed or worked with most of the advertising creative talent in New Zealand.

For a humble, diminutive Scouser, that’s some punch. But then Meares has a theory about short people. “You learned very quickly at school that you had two options with the bigger boys who could beat you up: befriend them or amuse them. I could never afford to give them sweets so I used to be as funny as possible in the hope that they would like me.

“I think short people make up for their lack of height and physical presence by being cunning. You developed your instinct and your brain a lot quicker than some of those clunky thugs you were surrounded by.”

The result is a lengthy showreel with some of our best-loved brand campaigns and a career that’s touched almost all Kiwis in some way. “Roy is the Horatio Algers figure in the Diners Club ad. That’s his life. He’s triumphed,” says Innes.

While many of his counterparts who made their millions settled down on their lifestyle farms, Meares is still in the ad game, still wrestling with clients’ budgets, still struggling with ideas. At the time of writing, MTC lost the entire Lion Breweries business, for reasons that baffle Meares and Taine. It’s the sort of stomach punch the old gentleman of advertising could do without. So what keeps the showman on stage?

The sun bakes the dusty, concrete walls of Parnell’s Axis building, home turf for MTC and a gaggle of funky-looking workplaces. Out the back, the car park bulges with classy European cars. Below, the lunch crowd is gathering in the chic Cibo restaurant. Meares is in the boardroom.

Did he expect to leave such a mark? No, he demurs—nothing as ambitious as that. “I’m an excitable kind of kid,” he confesses, “and I think that’s what’s kept me young—the old adrenaline pumping, always being on a bit of a razor’s edge—you know, will we get this ad through? I still feel like I am still 28, rather than 57.”

He was born in industrialised Birkenhead, across the river from Liverpool: Clatterbridge Hospital to be exact. He likes the sound of ‘Clatterbridge’. His home estate, Woodbridge, was surrounded by farmland but by the time he was a teenager Meares’ neighbourhood had degenerated into what sounds like one of those miserable, grey, ghetto-esque housing estates from a Mike Leigh movie. Not that it mattered. Meares was already at art school, had a girlfriend and was enjoying life with beatniks in suede jackets, hanging out in the Cavern Club in Liverpool at cheap lunchtime gigs.

Which made his father’s decision to move the family to New Zealand all the more shocking. Meares refused to go. “Dad sat me down and said: ‘Look son, I know you’re good at art but one day you’ll want to get married and buy a house.’ To do that, he thought I would need a proper trade. He got me an apprenticeship with an electrician but I didn’t turn up. And I always remember what he said: ‘otherwise you’ll end up in an attic like a beatnik’,” Meares laughs.

“I loved art school. It was wonderful. It was an introduction to culture, to a different side of the world and a different way of thinking. I’d always wanted to break out of the working class, felt like there was something else out there. And art school showed me there was.”

His eyes were set on London. He never made it. Writing persuasive letters from the Antipodes, his mother lured him to Nelson for a holiday, during which he picked apples and painted schools and finally realised he wasn’t heading back for a job that didn’t exist in a town where he knew nobody.

London’s loss was New Zealand’s gain. Meares worked his way through a series of agencies including MacHarman’s, run by Bob Harvey, now the flamboyant mayor of Waitakere City, and found himself by the mid-80s working at Colenso Wellington, a branch of one of the hottest agencies. Until then, Meares had never been particularly ambitious—just a nice Pom with a talent for art. So it’s kind of surprising that a shift to a staid and declining ad agency called GSI changed everything.

Former colleagues describe him as “uncompromising” and “tough but fair”. One says “there’s an ambivalence about Roy in the industry because he’s been a bit of a bastard to a lot of people”. Another calls him “enigmatic and fascinating and a bit of a Svengali who sells visions”. Terry King, an old business partner and now boss of agency Blackwood King, puts it this way: “I don’t think everyone necessarily thinks that he’s a nice guy. But then there’s a lot of jealousy because of Roy’s ability and what he’s created.”

What Meares created really began when he and David Innes began fixing the tired GSI. It was the 1980s and good times for ad men (they were mostly men). Soon Colenso called. “They said, ‘You and David have turned around GSI. How would you like your own agency?’” Colenso offered Meares and Innes a retail agency called Whitaker’s. For $14,000 each they would together own 54 percent of the agency which was not, as Meares puts it, “going anywhere”.

Innes, Meares recalls, had to sell his boat in order to lend Meares the money but the pair pulled it off. They renamed the agency Rialto and “survived nicely for about six or seven years”, despite the disaster of “Benny the cut-price pirate”, a campaign which has become part of industry lore. To promote a liquor retailer, Meares brought UK comedian Benny Hill down under to create an homage to Hill’s infamous dirty old man sketch (replete with slapping heads, bouncing bikinis and so on). The saucy subject was controversial but it was the accidental appearance of a liquor label in the background that officially landed the ad in trouble. Liquor ads were banned back then and the campaign was technically in breach. “The real reason though,” reckons Innes, “was that TVNZ of the time was enraged that we had the audacity to associate one of their TV talents with an advertiser. We lost of a lot of money. Liquorland paid us a pittance.”

Brushes with stars fuelled Meares’ ambitions for himself and for what could be achieved on screen. When he eventually cashed in his share of Rialto, Meares says he got a cheque for about $80,000 and thought, “Hey, I quite like this owning agencies business.” So he went to MacKay King, handed over his newly-found wealth and got a nine percent share. “And we built it [Mackay King] up to be New Zealand’s biggest agency,” says Terry King. “We wanted an agency that made ads that were both topical and in the consumer psyche. And I think that developed Roy’s understanding of what could be done in a short communication. Roy was able to make programmes in 30 seconds,” King says, referring to two campaigns: the ‘Anchor family’ mini-soap operas and the fictitious Schweppesbury village in England where a transvestite barmaid sold consumers the delights of Schweppes beverages (sales increased by about 30 percent). “People really loved it. Basically, we always saw [advertising] as an intrusion into someone’s living room. And if you’re going to intrude in someone’s living room, the first thing you have to do is get people to like you.”

“I’ve always tried to do the best I can—and even better. I get so bored with people who are content with nothingness.â€?

Mike Hutcheson, a former Saatchi CEO, says Meares developed a better understanding of the Kiwi vernacular than any other in advertising. “The first Speight’s ads were sheer brilliance. He could take the Kiwi essence and use it without sneering. It’s just true wit.”

One person Meares has weaved his magic over is Glenda Macdonald, marketing manager at Simpson Grierson and formerly brand manager for Xenical. She’s been working regularly with Meares for almost ten years now. Macdonald says Meares’ secret formula is not that secret: creativity and drive. “He’s determined not to let great ideas become too diluted. And he’s very articulate. He has the ability to paint a big picture. When he stands up in front of a room he is captivating.”

And then of course there was the time Meares split his pants. “It was about 20 years ago and when I bent down to show [clients] some material, my pants split right down the middle,” showing more material than he’d bargained for. “They laughed, I went bright red. I was the village idiot. It can be a bit of a song and dance. You have to be a bit of a comedian.”

MacKay King continued to pile up the awards and was at the height of its commercial success. It was a great time to sell, agreed the partners. So they arranged a meeting in Sydney, “to add gravity to it,” Meares chortles. “We made a list of agencies we would like to sell to, who would be good partners of similar mind. One of them was Saatchi & Saatchi.

“I always remembered them because they had told me ‘Our ambition for New Zealand is to be the biggest and the best’. When I rang Terry Bannister, [the former director of Saatchi & Saatchi], I said ‘Hi, it’s Roy Meares here from New Zealand, remember me?’ There was this pause. It was all very vague and he obviously didn’t. So then I asked him ‘Are you the biggest [in New Zealand]?’, and he said ‘No’. And ‘Are you the best?’ He never answered that one. But the upshot was we negotiated a fantastic sale, we all paid off our mortgages and we became Saatchi & Saatchi.”

Meares then spent the next half decade as creative director for Saatchi & Saatchi in Auckland and was appointed to the worldwide creative board. With more resources and more staff his campaigns have gone down, not just in advertising history, but possibly also New Zealand’s. Lines like “she’s a hard road finding the perfect woman, boy” have entered our popular lexicon.

It was also around this time that he was fired. “Over an internal matter,” is how he explains his sacking. No one Idealog contacted would discuss the circumstances. “There’s the initial panic and drama of course, but at the back of my brain I knew I could get another job, that I had a profile. So yeah, getting fired was exciting. It’s like the first time you do a bungie jump or jump out of a plane. It’s 50 percent fear and 50 percent excitement.

“When I met my second wife I warned her that I have got to look forward to something every ten minutes. Now she believes me. I get restless.”

Contractual obligations after his removal from Saatchi & Saatchi meant Meares wasn’t able to work in New Zealand for a year, so he paid brief visits to the USA and to Sydney, where he helped to set up the then-rebel branch of Saatchi & Saatchi, known as M&C Saatchi. Then when he and Jeremy Taine were approached by two big former clients, Ansett and DB Breweries, to pitch for their business, the pair decided it might be worth setting up a branch of M&C Saatchi in Auckland. “We persuaded them into it really although they wouldn’t put any money into it because [an Auckland branch] wasn’t really part of their plan. Everything was going really well until I spearheaded a plan to convince London we should have more shareholding.”

And at that stage, seen as the rabble-rouser of the piece, he was fired for a second time. “Christmas 1997,” Meares sighs mock-ruefully, “unemployed again!”

Taine, his long-time collaborator, also left in protest. The pair met in 1978 at GSI. Taine says the chemistry was immediately explosive. “It’s almost as close as a marriage.” Back then Meares was already the star creative and Taine just the office clerk but by the time of Rialto, Taine was invited to become a writing partner. “Roy’s real strength is to think big,” says Taine. “For example, the Anchor-family campaign was initially supposed to be a series of ads about dairy products. It turned into a six-year soap opera that enraged and gripped the country. I remember Roy had to defend the series from attacks by people like Leighton Smith. At the end of the savaging, Leighton then asked ‘So, er, will they get back together?’ It was such a great idea.”

“We’re complete opposites,” Meares says of his partnership with Taine. “He’s so intelligent, he reads everything. You mention something like a remote village near Kathmandu and Jeremy will know about it. If you ask him how, he’ll just say he read about it somewhere.”

Back at one of the first agencies Meares worked, he recalls his induction into the company ‘way’. “That sounded so corny and corporate at the time but yes, there probably is a Meares and Taine way. I think it comes from Jeremy and I having worked together since the 80s. When we started it was Jeremy and I together in a room, no suits, no receptionist. It was all about creativity.

“We use creativity as a tool, not just in some arty-farty way. Our job is to be ideas machines for our clients. If I were a client, I’d be looking for an individual that bombards me with ideas—because everything else I can buy or do myself. And coming back with an imaginative answer to a brief is not something everyone can do. Then again, you can’t keep a client just by winning awards. Our idea was ‘creativity with results’, because although we are passionate about the business we’re also passionate about making a living.”

Others have interpreted this infatuation with creativity as a love of the big production number with an equally big bill and celebrity roll call; critics have even said that this attitude is outdated and useless. “He’s an anglophile and he likes to hobnob with the stars,” says one reviewer. But the same person says later, “He’s fascinating; I would have worked with him even if he’d offered me 50 cents an hour.”

Meares doesn’t admit to any extravagances, saying this was simply a reflection of the heady days of champagne lunches and pink and grey outfits. His campaigns are often ambitious but he’s unrepentant. “If I could open in New York, sure as hell I would. I’ve never held back from a big idea and I was lucky that a lot of my clients wanted really big ads.”

Meares has seen the industry and the media upon which it operates change massively. “And the days of those huge juggernauts [agencies] are numbered,” he says, confirming the popular belief that boutique agencies are becoming more popular. To this end, he admits—and not hesitantly either—that he may be getting too old for certain jobs. “I can’t write a soft drink ad or a jeans ad for a 17-year-old. They wouldn’t be as good as something a younger person could do because they’re closer to the market, and we needed to replicate ourselves.” Which is why award-winning young creatives Jamie Hitchcock and Josh Lancaster are now partners in the agency and the name has been changed to Meares Taine Creative, or MTC, to reflect this. “They’re the creative future of the agency,” Meares is happy to acknowledge.

So how would he personally like to be remembered? “You mean what ad campaign would I like to see on my gravestone?” he laughs again. “Well, the Speight’s ads were particular favourites of mine. But no, because I think if you start hanging onto an individual ad, that means you’re not looking into the future anymore.” So no epitaph then? “Maybe ‘He Did His Best’ would be nice,” Meares quips. Why? “Someone once told me I could be a hard taskmaster. And I get angry at vagueness because I’ve always tried to do the best I can—and even better. I get so bored with people who are content with nothingness. Then again,” he starts chuckling so charmingly again. “I quite like Spike Milligan’s [epitaph]—‘I Told You I Was Ill’.”