they wanted to give us their account,
but in advertising, you don’t handle
competing products, so they wanted
us to resign the Macallan. Well, I said to
my colleagues, we’re not going to resign
the Macallan account, we’re proud of it,
they’re incredible and the client lets us run
ads without even seeing them. Anyway,
so we said sorry to Glenmorangie, despite
their huge budget of about five million
quid, which in those days would be about
30 million quid today. Macallan was
about two million, it had grown, but it was
nowhere near as big. What happened
was Glenmorangie contacted me and
the marketing director “Dick, I hope you
don’t mind, but we’ve actu ally been
talking to your client. We’ve persuaded
them that would be quite happy for you
to handle our account as well…” They
knew the competition would be good for
both companies. So we got two big malt
whiskies as clients. Eva Herzigova, er, that
was probably the most outstanding work,
if I may say.
LE: Now you’ve mentioned it, you’re
going to have to elaborate.
DK: It was the most outstanding work
that we did because it was the most
visible …
LE: This is the ‘Hello, boys’ campaign for
the, for Wonderbra?
DK: Yes. That broke new ground
because it did not treat women as a sex
object in the advertising. It presented
them as being very attractive, but the
woman was in charge of the ads. She
was talking to the audience and she was
controlling the situation. That was initially
what people felt - we launched it in 1994
in LA, New York and Boston. And within
three weeks, mothers in America were up
in arms about it, because they thought it
was being sexist. At the time we had an
account director, a lady called Susannah
Hailstone, who became a daytime
television star. She went around the world
going round on daytime television in
America, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and
Australia and various countries where
they thought that women were being
wrongly presented. When Susannah
explained it to them they realised the
ads weren’t sexist, and they became
very supportive of it. It was the most
incredibly powerful campaign through
word of mouth; women loved it in the end
because they loved the lines.
LE: Didn’t you deliberately place the
adverts around locations where there was
going to be fender-benders?
DK: We called the campaign a fenderbender campaign because again, the
budget was very small and so we decided
to take posters, big posters on high
traffic density roadside signs in key cities,
knowing that these ads would catch
people’s eyes. They were aimed at both
men and women but they were mainly
aimed at women because women are the
ones who buy their own bras, they don’t
get their boyfriend to do it.
It was very high-profile, because it got
so much media coverage. There’s a
lovely story about how we chose Eva. We
had offices in Eastern Europe and we’d
decided that we had to have a model in
the ads – it was to be same girl in every
ad – but someone who’d never been
photographed or wasn’t a well-known
model. So we had this competition
around our offices in Budapest, Prague,
Moscow, Vienna and Munich. The
entrants came to London for the final and
for us to choose the winner. And what
was incredible these photo shoots were
taking place in the main boardroom of the
office, which is all glass, and the office
was all open-plan. In the end of course,
you know, Eva won the thing, because
she had the most devilish smile - she
was so completely, kind of innocent.
Her boyfriend was a teacher and I think
she was a trainee teacher or something,
and he’d put her up for it. She won the
competition and of course, featured in
that campaign for several years and
became a world-famous supermodel as a
result of it.
LE: Fast forward a few years to your
life in the world of football. It’s been well
documented about the struggles that
Brighton and Hove Albion had prior to
the Goldstone Ground being sold and
what happened after that for the next
14 years. For those people that don’t
know, in essence, back in the 90s, the
club was on the brink of disaster, on
the pitch relegation from the Football
League was a distinct possibility, off the
pitch the owners of Brighton and Hove
Albion were selling the ground off in
order to build a retail park and without
the ground, the Albion was on the verge
of becoming extinct. The fans were up in
arms about the way the club was being
run by Bill Archer and David Belotti. So
you formed a consortium that eventually
led to a successful takeover in 1997. You
saved the club. 14 years later, the club
moved into its new home at the American
Express Community Stadium.
In essence, you went from being a fan to
being a Chairman of the club and having
the fans’ interest at heart, what did that
mean to you to make that change?
DK: I never expected to become the
Chairman of the Albion. You know, I
never intended to do that. I’d been very
successful in business but going to see
the Albion was an escape valve. I loved
coming to the Goldstone to see my
pals on the East Terrace on a Saturday
afternoon and my brother-in-law kept
saying to me, “Dick, you’ve got to try and
sort the Albion out, because it’s going to
go under. This guy Archer’s getting away
with it…”
LE: There was phone call from Liam
Brady, wasn’t there?
DK: Liam knew my brother-in-law well
and he’d obviously been talking to him.
He’d approached me about 18 months
earlier and I wasn’t able to do anything
at that time, but about six months after
my first wife Margaret died he contacted
me again. He’d long since resigned as
Albion manager but he still wanted to try
and save the club and he said, “You’re
the one that can do it, you’ve got a bit of
cash, but more than that, you’ve got the
knowhow, the commitment and the love
of the club...” And I knew that I had that
in abundance. I wanted to do something
to help save the club and Margaret,
unknown to me, before she died, had
said to my children, “Dad should take
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