The Amber Moment
The podcast that tells stories of remarkable careers.
The Amber Moment
Jonathan Trimble - Part 1
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Jonathan is the founder of And Rising, a creative studio and investor in new consumer brands. In this first part of our conversation, he talks about the entrepreneurial influence of his mum's nail salon; his foray into the music industry as a teenager; getting the advertising bug and knowing from day one that he wanted his own agency; a carefully plotted career; and the creation of a new company.
Hello, and welcome to the An the Moment, a podcast that tells stories of remarkable careers. My name's Paul Howard. Joining me today is Jonathan Trimble. Jonathan co-founded And Rising, a creative studio and investor in new consumer brands. Prior to that, he spent 15 years or so at some of the world's most creative advertising agencies before setting up 18 Feet and Rising, a creatively led independent that was acquired by what became Accenture Song. He's won a ton of industry awards in his time, and although his background is in brands and advertising, says he's a born entrepreneur. Jonathan, thank you for being here. How are you today?
SPEAKER_02Very good, thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00Well, no, it's my pleasure, and uh no, thanks again for for your time and for answering my searching questions which are upcoming. I think you you broadly know what I'm trying to do here on the Amber moment, which is to tell some great stories about some fascinating and remarkable careers, and to my mind yours has definitely been a remarkable one. But look, every career, every story starts somewhere, and every leading character, and for the purposes of today, that is you, has his origin story. So I'd love it if you could start by telling me a bit about your background, your childhood, your upbringing, education, and any sort of early influences.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was born in Northwick, near Northwick Park, Wembley, which actually says it actually says Kenton Harrow, I think, in my passport, but I always think of as North London.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And grew up in Surrey and and and yeah, all the way through till I began work then and then ended up back in London. So my formative years are sort of near born in North London and then in the surrounding sort of home counties area. And my mother was a beautician, she was a nail technician.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So if you know about false nail extensions and plastic nail tips and acrylic nail tips, I know quite a lot about it.
SPEAKER_00So I I know I know very little, you'd be surprised to learn.
SPEAKER_02That was relatively new technology then. Okay. And nail salons were sort of cropping up and they were a new thing. And she was having her nails done one day and she'd spent quite a lot of money on it. And she thought she could do a better job. So she taught herself how to do that and had a nail salon. It started in, it was actually like a suitcase shop. So she was in a corner of that doing nails, and then eventually had her own salon, and then went in, she sort of diversified into um making some of the glues and powders and things, and and so on and so forth. What you would now, what MBA is called vertically integrated, so from sort of source products all the way through to then an actual nail salon where you can get your nails done, and that's what she did. Uh, my dad was originally a drummer, and he's was I I found out after he died, he was either from County Mayor, possibly outside Belfast, Kilkeel, not quite sure if it was north or south, and was the drummer for Van Morrison's first band, which was called the International Monarchs, which came out of Kilkeel at sort of near Belfast and brought through Europe. It was sort of like a jazz covers and big band, and then they became they sort of mutated into what was called them, which was Van Morrison's early pop group, and he did like a stint with that. They moved through different musicians and different drummers sort of fairly rapidly. So he moved on from that and he ended up playing on cruise ships and he was struggling, he was struggling with being an alcoholic, and just his sort of career just slipped further and further down the kind of the biddings until he was in. I think it was my mum said he was in this uh gig one time in Scotland where they were, you know, it was they were actually in a cage, and the whole thing was they play for a bit, and then people get really drunk, start to start lusting chairs at the cage. So he kind of was a bit of a fall from grace from Ready Steady Go.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02On TV. And then he ended up when I was then born, and my sort of memories of him were as a he was a sign writer. So originally he was doing brush scripts and other types of script on you know, shop facies, and and then as time went on, banners and plastic signs and other technologies became the thing, and it was all printed on final and kind of and scrubbed off. So my mum was really an entrepreneur, and my dad was a signwriter. And then when you kind of say those things out loud, the journey into advertising and agency sort of completely common sense, and and other weird things. Like I do have a kind of I don't know anything about it, and I'm not technical at it, but I do have an absolute fascination and love for fonts, for example, and things so there's there's so definitely interesting sign sign writing. I found a picture the other day, we're kind of going through some old memory boxes. It was a picture of me and my dad uh at his science studio, and I had completely forgotten this. Yeah, but actually behind him was this sign that he'd painted for his own studio, if you like, and it just said the greatest little creative team in town. I looked at it and just kind of went, Oh my gosh, that I I'd completely I've I remembered it then when I saw it, but yeah, I couldn't believe the parallel then with starting an agency. I mean, that's something we could have, you know, I could have ended up hanging in the a in the agency. So it was quite like a ohme, this has been in the quite a long time.
SPEAKER_00And what about your mum's entrepreneurialism then? How much of that do you think you took from her?
SPEAKER_02Quite a lot. I mean, my mum's whole my mum, very, very loud, energetic, take the world into your own hands character, and sort of despite my dad's shortcomings, managed to lift us into a really good place as we were growing up. The first few years were definitely a bit rocky. I think sort of my first memory is there was a big fight going on, and like it was definitely the first five years-ish, three till I was about 10 or 11, were definitely a bit unstable. But there on, we lived this really quite nice life in Surrey with her as a male technician, and she was that entrepreneur that sort of just grabbed the universe and shaped it around what her needs were, and then yeah, actually just used her own instinct. She was never school, she left school quite early, but she used her instinct, she was very, very savvy at business. You know, she was an incredible plain speaker, it just buy for one. She'd say to me, Look, this is not complicated. You buy for one and you sell for two.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_02And actually, ad agencies more or less don't understand that math. And we certainly sort of struggled with that. Oh, it comes in at one and it's got to go out at two to cover all the stuff that goes in between.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And she, yeah, that journey into then making the she then you know looked at the tips that she was buying. Plastic tips were quite a new technology. She brought the first plastic mold over to the UK. And she was like, she was always like, well, I can make that better myself. So she'll she would then go and manufacture those tips or the acetones and glues. And then she wanted to go into retail and retail nail tips, which never, even to this day, they haven't really taken off. It's quite a difficult thing to do yourself.
SPEAKER_00So she would she would not only was she running that business and being an entrepreneur, she was almost inventing things along the way or improving existing bits and bobs that that that were there in the industry.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, she was doing things, she was doing things that corporations do, which is she would look at the things she was buying and then go, is there a way I could make these myself and save some cost and maybe even then sell those same things to other people?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So eventually she sold the products company to an American products manufacturer called Star Nails. And then at that point, she went through a five or six year period where on the ground floor there was just a salon as usual, and she would go in on Saturday and do nails like she always had. And then on the first floor, there was a distributor. She said she had a distributorship also selling nails and glues to the local, yeah, you know, to other other nail salons in the area. And then she was working for the company that was manufacturing it all as their sales and international rep. So that is basically what MBAs call vertically integrated. She was totally vertically integrated in this one little shop in Weybridge. So and that was all just done out of in you know, out of instinct. And I suppose the bit where she reached the edges of her limits was the products company. She took it in, she tried to the next step was to try and go into retail. That was the big one, and boots gave her a shot. But the money you needed, the capital you needed to do that was really serious.
SPEAKER_00Just to be present in boots.
SPEAKER_02It's so expensive. And so she got in over her skis basically, and the and the the sort of acquisition to the American company then was the the thing that kind of then like didn't bail it out because I think it was on a sort of zero, a zero position, but took something that otherwise was going to start running into the red.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_02And gave and sort of gave her a you know, gave her the safety. So there was a sort of she always said there was a sort of limit to her natural ability. And she always saw the corporation then as where all the rest of the knowledge lay. And her sort of job with me was to put me through the requisite schooling and university and things so that I could go enjoy in this mysterious thing called the corporation that apparently had all the money and all the answers.
SPEAKER_00Was that just the corporation, the general big companies, the world? Yeah. Okay. So big companies. So tell tell us about that education, then your schooling and and how that sort of developed.
SPEAKER_02Uh so because my parents got divorced when I was five, there was my mum, me, and my sister. And my mum was, I think, a bit well, she was concerned about lack of male influence in my life. So she sent me to boarding school age seven, which was private, and it was really nice, really nice school in Surrey. And the school was almost a bit like slightly beyond where we were at as a family, but it was like I was getting this tremendous gift to get to go to this school, and it was an amazing school. And I, after a couple of years struggling a bit with boarding as young, it was very when I think back, I think Blime was quite a young age to be sort of shipped off. But I I thrived, you know, I really thrived there and enjoyed my time. And then I got a scholarship to the senior school, which was up the road, and continued boarding all the way through until 18. And then and then actually I got more slightly more confused at that point. I'd I also had this huge musical influence and ability. Yeah. Uh so I had these academics that were really good, and I had this music side, and the drummer in me, and all the things my dad was were really surfacing as I got to 17 and 18, and I was writing music with a colleague, and it was just generally I couldn't play any form of sports or anything like that. So I lived off my musical talents. It's hard for me to remember now that this was the case because so much has changed since. But at the time, I didn't know if I was going to go to university or whether I was going to try and go to music school andor do music. So at that point, there was quite a big battle with my mum, who obviously went, Are you out of your mind if you see your dad? Yeah. And my dad provided nothing. He was, I mean, he went from he went missing for a year, he was living in the street, so it was a complete disaster. So in her head, she was like, Look, I um I have the path I the ramp I've given you is the is the alternate reality to the one your dad has chosen. But I, you know, as you are, when you're young, you don't care about any of that stuff. And I was very excited by music and what have you. So I um did take a year out and I did music professionally for six months with a writer friend of mine. That writer friend of mine from school has gone on to write for Kylie Minogue and a bunch of others and sold 50 million records. So I sort of drop dropped out of the wrong path there. But actually, after doing it with Week, we're kind of like semi-signed for a bit, and I was working in London writing these songs with him. And and the real my reality then of the music interview was actually I did kind of fall out of love with it. The right, the whole boy band thing, this is like '94, and take that. And you know, we we grew up through the sort of late 80s when music and you could go and make these big expensive albums and be in studios and do really meticulous, thoughtful, kind of grown-up stuff. And that's what I wanted to do. And what the market wanted was quite a bit more kind of like, can you just have a radio mic and backing tracks and stuff? And yeah, I struggled with the packaging up of all of that, yeah, and was quite didn't really like it. And I thought the record company people were pretty awful as well. But and the opposite happened to the songwriter I was working with, Tom. He got he got more, he got more excited by it, and I I really didn't like it. So I then went back to much to my mum's relief, then went went to uni through clearing actually, because I hadn't even organized it. But I had three I had three A to A levels, so it's no problem.
SPEAKER_00That's a whole separate podcast, by the way. Your alternative career, sliding doors and well, we're friends, we're friends now.
SPEAKER_02Like we we rekindled a friendship later, and he's helped with a lot of sync work at the ad agency. I'm seeing him tomorrow actually. He's a really, really close pal of mine, and and he he invites me quite a lot. He works out of Abbey Road and Metropolis in these nice studios, and he'll invite me up to go and play and do bits of session work. And so, in a funny sort of way, I come full circle doing a lot of things that we ended up doing, but in a kind of very different and much more for me, much more agreeable format because the pressures that were coming with the irony was is that all the pressures that came with the bits I didn't like about the record company stuff was sort of lack of creative integrity and all the packaging. And the irony was that I sort of joined advertising, which arguably is all the packaging, but somehow you know, I don't know, because I wasn't the creative person, I didn't have to feel the pressure of that integrity, and I was this sort of account person. So, in a funny sort of way, what ended up happening was I always had like quite strong instincts for what it was like to be in the hot chair of creating and the need to do things that were personal and had a high degree of integrity, but I was the you know, ultimately not the salesperson and for that rather than being the person. So I ended up being the bridge in a funny sort of way, sort of closer to who I really am, which is uh I I can sort of see a bit of both. Because the reality was I wasn't really good enough at music to to go down that path, and I had, but I had the sort of instincts for it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, we might return to those themes of integrity and authenticity, which is a really overused word these days, but as as they apply, I suppose, particularly to creative industries and advertising. But we'll park it for now if you know. So I want you to tell us how you then went off to university and how how that took you to where you went with your career. How like how did you start in your career and how did that work from the education background that you'd had?
SPEAKER_02So it began in back in the nail salon, and this is where you know, all the the sort of when you when I look back and I think of the the sort of the gifts that were put in front of me from quite an early age, they just it just kept coming, really. So my mum was doing the nails for someone who was head of account management at Satch and Sachi, or then maybe they weren't head of account management, but they were like a pretty senior board level account person and cut would come in on a Saturday, apparently remarkably flaky client, never quite sure if they were going to come for their appointment on a Saturday or not. Very good tipper. I mean, sort of in a way, I could sort of imagine what it was like. So the ad person maybe woke up with a hungover, maybe you could do it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So my mum would get talking to these people and chat on, of course, my son this, my son that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02I've got my what what age were you at this time? It was the same around the same time I was doing music. So it was that year after A level. Yes, yep. So around 1819. And I remember I I can remember meeting her in the salon. She was like, you know, I think she was showing us some of the work I'd been doing at school or something, and I was invited in to meet her in the salon, and she started telling me about advertising. And advertising was very interesting to me. I grew up with all these amazing adverts, you know, 80s television.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So it was a very exciting concept. I was like, wow, that I'm very, very interested in that. But I totally assumed that that you had to be the person writing the adverts.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, these sort of magical. And she went, no, no, no, no. It's not, there's that's just one aspect of it. It's what I do, and I'm an accountant person, and there's other things. Why don't you come up? And and once I knew that, it was like, oh, okay, well, that's really interesting. And I went up and did a couple of weeks unpaid work experience at Saarchi and Saarchi before Morris and Charles left. So this is yeah, like the pure days. And I read I I by then I'd read The Rise and Rise of Saarchi and Saarchi, or maybe I read that later. I can't remember when that book came. But that story and them buying a bank and all this kind of all these heroics had really by now captured my imagination. And it was a couple of weeks cleaning people's offices of polyboard.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And I didn't feel that comfortable. I was a bit shy. But Miriam Jordan Keene, who was the lady that whose nails were being done, was kind of like a sponsor. And I don't really know why. She slightly took me under her wing and was just very kind. So I, you know, I did the two weeks sort of as you do, you bob about and try to make yourself sort of vague and useful. And then I went back the following summer, I was a little bit more successful on that one. I got to do some competitive reviews and a few simple tasks, and they were pretty impressed. The account people were pretty impressed by the work, and I got a letter saying, you know, thanks for this work. We actually shared it with the client. And so by the time I then got to the final year of my uni, I wanted to go into the grad one of the grad programs in advertising, and I had already done a couple of summers, and I applied for as many as I could. I had uh Albert Mead, such and such, of course, YR, which is where I got in. I think McCann might have been there. There was another one. I think it was four I did in the end, and I got first round interviews at all of them. Because I'd done this work experience, I sort of had a little bit of a nose for it. And I think I had a natural a natural love for it. And what I didn't have, which wouldn't come till a bit later, was really any skills at interpreting or understanding advertising. But I had a bit of chat and I was quite good at putting together packages that looked pretty and were well formatted. And in the way that advertising is like, yeah, the stuff we produce here and the way we do things looks good and it's presented well, and we're not boring or interesting the way we go back to it. And a lot of the first round tasks are like that. There would be like, can you sell us something you're interested in? And so I could I could tackle that kind of task quite well, certainly not to get through first round. When we when it got to second round, it was a whole other game, and I was sort of more 50-50 successful because the second round of those interview, the first one's like more of a sanity check. As you then get get through to the second round, the real task. Not not all I didn't get through all of the first one. So Abbott me, they they the ones that asked the ones that were better at asking more strategic questions around what the businesses were trying to do, I would just fall over. I mean, I had no clue. It's still pretty cuts and nonsense and pretty good strike rate though, Jonathan.
SPEAKER_00I would say like to get that many first-hand interviews and like maybe a 50% hit rate on the second is yeah, it's pretty good. When you talk to loads of people that have been through that process, you know, we know and we know lots of them. It's kind of usually you write to 20, you might get an interview at one. You know, that's a more common story.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, I mean, I had a few things in my favour. I had I had a really I had really good A-level results. I had, and I was sort of on track for a first. So I although I wasn't Oxbridge or one of the names, I went to Royal Holloway, which is kind of uni of London. Although it wasn't like Premier Milk Round, kind of whatever you call that. I had the grades looked quite premiership. And this two, these two summers at Saarchi and Sarchi, it just they immediately look at that differently. You know, it's that made quite a big difference. And also I had this letter from this competitive review I'd done, and I kind of attached that. And so I had this little bit proof of push, it definitely that definitely pushed me up, but then not enough to get me through the some of the first rounds where the questions really went on, and and the yeah, the better agencies asked more taxing questions. Then the Saarchis and Y and R, they were more into if you're blunt, if you can blunderbus a bit, you know, they weren't taking the craft seriously. Anyway, that I Y and R was my first second round. I was on track for a second round at Saarchy and Saarchis. Yeah, Avat actually rejected me by now, but I hadn't received it. And the third one I got through, but they they were too late to date. And I did the second round. There's a quite funny story about how that happened, and then I got selected that evening. Then we did an overnight. It was one of these overnights where you went, it was pretty there was a dinner, yeah. It was pretty heavy.
SPEAKER_00Basically, there was a there was a dinner, and because you just said there's a funny story, and then I'm going, go on then.
SPEAKER_02What is the funny story? Yeah, well, I so yeah, it was it was an overnight one. You got to this hotel at four or five o'clock. I think we were I was thinking this is gonna be quite swanky, this is gonna be advertising. I mean, it was a really bad hotel, yeah. Yeah, the gag at the dinner was on the quality price axis. We probably veered a bit towards price, ha ha ha.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02So that was the beginning of realizing budgets were getting squeezed in advertising. And I think also as a graduate, you are expecting this slight red carpet to come out in these not to realize that it's quite the opposite.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So anyway, we got this dinner. It was very difficult for everyone to know how to be at this dinner. Obviously, these people the ad people were were they weren't going nuts, but they were they were on it. They were on it, and it was after Wednesday night or something. It was good fun, and then at 10:30, as the dessert came out and some wine had been poured and some beers had been had, they gave everybody an envelope, an A4 envelope, and inside it was a was an ad. And there was like surprise, you're all gonna be presenting an ad in the morning. Now, your option, your options are you can go back and work on your presentation for the morning, or you can do it like we do, which is you'll stay out and you'll do it on the hoof when you wake up.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_02So there was this little surprise. Yeah. So I sort of split the difference and stayed on for a tiny bit. And actually, there was some drunk, there was some kind of like a couple of the account people there were drunk and were getting weird and saying some strange things. And one of them turned to me, and I don't think that I think they would ever remember this, but said something along the lines of look, guys, tomorrow, whatever you've got in the locker, you need to really bring it. Like just don't leave. Anything on the field and kind of looked at me and said, I'm gonna pick on you, but you just seem like you're too pious. You're too, I can't remember what the word was now. It was like I think actually, I think the word was Spartan, which I didn't really understand what they meant anyway. I was like, not sure I even know what the reference means. And they were like, You'll you see, just seem like, and I was, I was a very disciplined academic, you know, I'd really get my head down. So it was like work hard. I kind of in writing and other things could sort of play for last, what have you, but I was quite, you know, to me, it had to be thoughtful and and and well and proper and all this sort of stuff. So they were definitely on the look, you just got to bring your jokes, you've got to bring the energy, and I'm not really getting it from you. So, and this was just drunk conversation. Anyway, I went home, I called my mum, I was like, Oh god, I'm not, I'm I can't do, I can't do this. You know, I'm I'm not what they're looking for, yeah. And I've already sort of been told that. So I I was remember just thinking, I'm I'm fucked. Anyway, I didn't know then what to do. I I got the Ford Puma ad. It was a very good ad. It was the Steve McQueen when he came back and they brought him back to life in the for the Ford Puma, and I had the print of that, and I didn't really know who Steve McQueen was. I definitely didn't know anything about cars. Yeah, I'm not really a car guy, so it was I was stuck and I was my confidence was really broken, and I thought, shit, I think I'm in trouble here. Anyway, I went to sleep, I sort of didn't really sleep that night. I don't think anyone did. And I woke up in the morning quite early and kind of had this revelation. I'd been at a first round interview the the previous week, and it'd been a Toyota commercial thing, and the guy next to me had asked me to act out doing a driving car sequence with him. And so I thought, you know what? I'm I think that's what I've got to do. I've got to get someone in the room to pretend they're driving, and then I'll do this whole thing about you're not thinking rationally, are you? It's okay, I'll tell you it's got like a V6 engine, all this good stuff. I feel bored. Okay, now I'll tell you you're gonna be Steve McQueen, preserved eternity stands a coolness. How do you feel now? I feel amazing. That's that was my trick.
SPEAKER_03Pretty good.
SPEAKER_02So I sort of had something. I was like, right, I've got something. There was this really nice guy I shared a cab with, and we ended up in the same group, and he just seemed like someone I could bob along with. And so when the moment came to present my ad, I sort of turned to him and said, Look, would you, you know, would you help me out? Would you come and be my stage guest? And he said, sure. If he'd have gone, ah, I was on a knife edge here. I was like, oh no, this is quite a high risk thing. But anyway, he said, yeah, no problem. He did it, it great, great. And basically that set me up. After that, I could tell I'd done a good job. They asked me some questions, they challenged it a bit. I kind of gave way as a good account I would on certain things, but not others, which came up later. And I kind of sailed through the rest. And I got a phone call later that night going, You're in. And it was just like, I couldn't believe it was dream country. So I didn't bother going to any more interviews when I took that job at Y and R. Yep. And Ben, who was the guy who said yes, he didn't get the job. Oh, and I remember we all went to Edwards, but Y and R was in the back Black Cat building at that point, really. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There was Edwards, was it's called it's a nice pub now, it was called Edwards at the time. And all of us at the end of the day went across there for a kind of pat. And I remember just looking around the room, going, everyone in this room is good, is really, really good. And I remember then just kind of thinking, well, what if we just started? What if this bunch of people just started an agency?
SPEAKER_00You were thinking day one of your agency career. You were thinking that. I love it.
SPEAKER_02I was looking at everyone, going, These guys are really, these are all really capable people. Why, why, what if we all just us gave them a run for their money? Anyway, I said bye to Ben, who was a friendly, you know, I got on well with him anyway in the cab, and obviously he really helped me out in the presentation. And there was a sort of like, good luck, you know, good luck, man, good luck. I got the phone call. He didn't get in, and I thought that was hard because he'd done a super job, and I thought him, I sort of wanted him to get in. Yeah, he sort of got me in, yeah, in a way. And anyway, we're still very, very close friends. He did a summer internship, but he did get taken. There's a nice end of the story.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_02And we also became best friends. So um, a lot of like moments that could have gone quite wrong and then came really, really quite right. But no, you know, in no in no short measure, thanks to Ben, who just kind of took the bait and teed me up, and then I took the shot and we were off, you know.
SPEAKER_00Amazing. So give so so you're in, you're in the world of advertising. Can you give us a little potted synopsis of your career then as it developed? Like, you know, what happened and how did you ultimately get to where you got?
SPEAKER_02So, pretty much I I knew that night, I don't know exactly when or at what point or where it sort of came from. Maybe it had occurred to me earlier, I was very inspired by the Saarchi and Saatchi story. In the time that I'd got the job, Saarchis had left and they had restarted as what was then called the new Saarchi agency. So I was watching this, it's about forming these agencies. And I pretty much knew when I started, I'm gonna start an ad agency. Um and that's why I say it it's entrepreneurs are sort of born, not made, because yeah, there was never that was before I even started. I thought I want to be like these guys starting the agencies. This seems like the energy to me. And I think that just comes from you know, your mum, and in a funny sort of way, she was the opposite, like the gods don't, and much, much later when I did start an agency. I almost remember a phone call to her that sort of went along the lines of I'm really sorry to tell you, right? Not gonna be with the corporation anymore. Because that was the thing. It was I get into these big companies, they know what they're doing, they've got the training, they've got the resources kind of thing. That's freedom. But I knew from the I knew from that night, you know, Edwards, let's start. I remember even saying to Ben, if we don't get in, let's just start one, you know. And yeah, I definitely had that before I started. And then when I joined, I mean, I I loved it. I just thought the invite and the it was such good fun. I mean, it was very, very, very hard work. We're doing really daft things, everything from you know, going and getting the drinks. I mean, you were kind of like a bus boy in some ways in the beginning. I was everything from getting the drinks to I don't know, going to some meeting in France with a yogurt company and having to speak. You're a bit everything, wasn't it? You're trying to sort of soak up this, yeah, and the cat and the different characters and the way you get treated, like some people seriously know what they're doing, they've been doing it a long time, haven't got that much time for you. How do you befriend them? There was all of that kind of stuff, and it was just so intoxicating. And I remained intoxicated for over 20 years. It was, you know, it it just swept me up. It was just the most wonderful kind of thing. It wasn't, we did have some training, which was pretty good. It was the training was not too bad. The training I received later was much, much better, but it you know got me off the mark. And then a year in, it was acquired by um a reverse acquisition. Why in our was private still at that point, would you believe? They were kind of like 20th or I don't know, 18th in the league table. I'd gone in at kind of a top of division one type agency, which suited me because I wasn't the smartest on the strategic stuff, as we know from first round, but I had the kind of energy and will and passion to fit a young on Rubicon. And they got taken over by Rani Kelly. They bought Rony Kelly and all the management, all the people that kind of hired me with were promptly removed. And so you got this first taste of real life business where it's ever changing, management is changing, things are moving on. And I just I just didn't really like that. I just sort of thought, no, I don't, I didn't choose you guys. Most people were pretty excited about it because they were fresh, they were cool, Rony Kelly were doing great. I somehow, I was just having got a problem with authority and not, you know, taking decisions like that. So I actually jumped ship at that point and went and followed a board account director of mine who I really adored working with and for. He'd gone to a PR agency into their design unit, again, about 25 people. And he was like, we're gonna turn this thing around. And I again I think I was just very attracted to that, slightly more independent, smaller. And then they were talking as the dot-com thing was massive at this point. They were talking about turning it into like a second-tier ad agency to run alongside the the mothership. And I that attracted my eye. Anyway, I got there, I did six months, it wasn't what I thought it was gonna be. I realized I'd moved into like a basic PR company. I now was eight to two years into my career, therefore fairly untrained for a 24 month, or a 24 month old who so I sort of didn't stick the path. I sort of popped out, didn't you know? Yeah, but I went to a headhunter and said, Look, this is not, I need to get back into the back into the prem. And she said, Yeah, you're you've come off track here. You need to go to the very, very best agency you can find and you need to get your head down. And that was BMP DDB. And that to, you know, we I we didn't even know what BMP DDB was when we joined the business. And then when we did, you've got to, you guys were grads in there, it's a different thing. Like when you're the outside of that thing, BMP DDB is like the mech, it's like the university of advertising, it's like all the the work that we're coming out of that place was just on some other kind of level that we were like, we don't even understand how stuff like that is meant. Like, how do you get there? You know, and so I desperately, if I could get in there, that's where I wanted to go. And I interviewed at BBH and a few other places and Fallon and where which are where I ended up, and I I took the the crappest job at my level at BMP DDB, which was working on some international accounts. And they took me because I was basically overqualified for that, but really, really willing to do it to get into the agency. And I took it, I even took a pay cut, and then I was in, and then I was into BMP DDB.
SPEAKER_00Incredibly determined and single-minded to get there.
SPEAKER_02I loved advertising a lot, I thought it was a brilliant, and I just would look at these ads coming out of these places and just think the people that are doing this are amazing. Yeah, and I'd heard so much about BM, and obviously I by now we knew that BMP was where planning had been invented and so on and so on. And so, yeah, I was working on cat food. I had to do cat food. We're a very famous case study for a BMP as it turned out, Felix Cat food. Felix, yeah, um, very, very famous back in its day, and I did some Johnson Johnson stuff just to get in. And yeah, I think I remember uh Philippa Roberts was head of a cat manager, and I was saying, look, I just love advertising, just you know, basically, just give me a chance. I just need to get into this. And she knew I was taking a pay cut. And I think they were a bit like, okay, if you want, these are pretty, you know, this is not this is not the BMP end of BMP, but uh yeah, good for you. You got in. And then I can't remember what happened after that. I think I basically annoyed quite a lot of people at BMP because I had uh the BMP had a very tone to it. They did tell me about this before I joined. They said, look, it's got there's a tone in there that you need to be you that you need to like, which I did. I I really liked it. I, you know, it wasn't very me at first blush, but I liked it, you know, I wanted to be more like that. And you know, I was very loud and cocky to make up for sort of a lack of confidence and knowledge, which rub would rub BMP people up the wrong way because they really knew what they were doing, very, very thoughtful. I mean, in the end, funny enough, lots of things that in the end many people also viewed as a negative, and and so on and so forth. Anyway, I managed eventually over a couple of years to settle in and and then I got a break, someone was leaving, and I got put on I got put on Marmite, and then someone else was leaving. And by now, somehow I must have become creative's the creative's friend. And I then got onto the guardian, and that was so then I was looking after the guardian and marmite, which were basically basically in BMP at that point. You had VW, which was the top of the tree. They were just Grand Slam awards, most famous out. Everybody loved VW advertising, and then there were the the others, and we were the others, it was the Guardian and Marmite didn't have quite the same budget, but could creatively the only accounts that could give VW a run for their money. And that and I did five years, five or six years on both of those, and that's just top of the tree advertising creation of really. I mean, when I did music, what what I wanted to do was to do something top of the what you know, whatever the very, very best you can find in the world was. And I think you know, the sort of psychoanalysis of it lying on the couch much later was that I kind of knew we the beginning of my life was a little bit unstable. And then being given this, like, right, you can get into boarding school, you can go to this stuff, and being given these ramps, my thing was I'm just not going to waste these chances I've been given, you know, whatever the highest, highest thing. And I there's just no getting around it. Like that work coming out of those agencies in that particular era goes into the whatever the you know, the top of the shelf of advertising that was ever made as it and then especially because it would it would then kind of get harder and harder to make work like that. And that was that was the peak, you know, that was the the sort of peak. I'd reached the peak of advertising. And in in what I didn't like about music was we were so compromised.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_02And the work we were doing was like, it was like, God, they and they wanted us to make like worse stuff. And what was amazing about BMPT is it was totally uncompromised. You know, we were we, of course, there was a conversation around it, but it was shoot for this very, very, very high standard of creative output, and it would also drive the business, and the agency itself was regarded and the training that you got given there. I mean, I was sent on so many courses by, as it turned out, now people that were kind of like Peter Doyle, IPA3, 445, yeah, Patrick Ma presentation skills. I mean, people who really, really knew what they were doing, they knew what they're doing about marketing. It wasn't just advertising. That was a thing that BMP had, it was extraordinary advertising, and that was the second floor of the creative department, which was sort of the engine of it. But all the people around it were basically marketing. They knew what marketing was. They knew product, they knew price, they had lesbine, they knew effectiveness. It was all, it wasn't like Saarchis and the other things were all just like if the ad's great, we've won.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And ad great means we all think it's great. BMP had this BMP had this integrity to the whole solution. And I remember Philippa Roberts, who is head of account management, there, saying to me one time, it's like a really hard puzzle.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And we like to solve the whole puzzle. Like the ads part, well done. That doesn't bring you home here. What brings you home here is you know, campaign work and investment in marketing and shaping and developing these businesses that we can put down to effective, you know, it's it had this kind of integrity and depth to it that was that really transformed everything. And I learned so much there and got so uh, you know, even though some people were difficult, a lot of difficult people there, and it was uncomfortable for a lot of it because I, you know, was not the strong, you know, was not the strongest character there in terms of my skills. But by the as we got to year six, seven, and eight, I had really so I was taught by so many good people. I had account directors who were all the graduates from there, and they'd had five years of doing stuff. And they would just pull me into a corner and have a word and just say, look, think about that again. You know, I'd come down from the second floor thinking I had some answer, and they'd be like, have another think about that if I were you, and stuff like that. And they sort of slowed me down because I'd have this like incredible energy to like, let's get this done, right? You know, I had that kind of BMP would put the brakes on and make it sort of forced me to think a lot more in ways that are quite unnatural again for us. But that was more my practitioner side, entrepreneur side. That was the only time I thought, I'm not gonna start an agency, I want to run this one. Okay, and that was it was about a year where I just thought, you know what, it's so good here. I'm so well looked after, and the the values of this place fit me so well. And then, of course, as ever it changed, it changed its name, it brought new management in. There's sort of a lot of the BMPness as we understood it then, yeah, was starting to get pushed out. And uh a couple of years later, it was no longer the agency I wanted to be a part of. And certainly, and it was it was beginning to compromise quite badly. Then got it back actually after it acquired Adam and Eve. Actually, I sort of thought that I think that fit restored, created a modern, a somewhat modern version of the experiences that I had when I brought new leadership in, but it sort of went wayward for a couple of years there. And then I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I am gonna leave here. And if I'm leaving here, it's for any one reason I'm gonna start an agency, yeah, obviously. And then I very cynically went to the most creative advertising shop I could find, knowing that I would leave there to start an agency, and that was Fallon. And I I had already interviewed at Fallon back when I was interviewing at BMP, they were quite small then, and I thought they were very cool. I really actually wanted to go to Fallon because they were sort of in a way of what I wanted in the end. The story was no, go and complete it, your training at the University of Advertising. So I already liked Fallon, and I thought they were all the things I wanted to be as a all the things I wanted to start as a as an ad agency. They were at the peak of their powers at that point, and I caught the tail end of it. So I saw on the inside of some of that period of sort of remarkable work and how they did things, which was very, very different from BMP, and I nearly didn't get in. They knew I had the caliber and the training and stuff, but they were like, look, attitudinally, here we are not, we don't work like BMP or DDB as it was then. And so you are you are you capable of the way we roll?
SPEAKER_00And how how how did they describe that? What what was their just sort of job description of the sort of person that they wanted, or the attitude, as you put it, that they wanted people to have?
SPEAKER_02They believed that an argument was necessary for something to get better, and by argument I mean a stand-up coming to blows, thrashing it out aggressively. It is how they viewed progress. That's true. Um it was a particular style, and uh of course uh BNP was very thoughtful and it it was very generous in the way it would uh arrive at solutions. Actually, it wasn't.
SPEAKER_01No, it was that wasn't my memory of it either.
SPEAKER_02It was deceptively deceptively steely. Yeah, deceptively steely. And the set in a way, there was the same thing, which is we've got to get to a really amazing place here, and we don't get there by being that nice to each other necessarily, or it's not gonna be comfortable. We don't just get to the first thing, we might have to push a little more and be a little bit more challenging to one another. But I suppose Fallon needed to see visible argumentative evidence of that process. It wasn't willing, you know, soft conversations politely had, you know, steel hand in velvet glove kind of stuff didn't really they needed to see more than that. And they were aware as BMP DDB was a bit more long-term and generous, and it's like, look, these things play out over certain arcs. Fallon was very short term. You need to score goals right now. You are not scoring your value and sort of personal stock is plummeting. It would almost be like because people could end up holding a ball like scoring an amazing ad, but it kind of you know was or wasn't them, and their stock would shoot up. Yeah. Whereas BMP was a bit more, they could sort of see past, they would look more to form and than they would kind of luck of who was going on the snakes and ladders board and stuff. So yeah, it was a pretty it was a pretty brutal environment. They also came from Simons Palmer, yeah. And Simons Palmer, you know, these were very capable agencies that would would challenge people pretty openly. And I think by the time you got to fourth strain of that, it had just turned into a form of bullying, really. They didn't have the same finesse in the how you clash, yeah, uh and the generosity of how you clash properly when you're trying to, you know, make something decent. It just turned into sort of arguments for arguments' sake. There was a sort of a weird culture of bullying, uh, Fallon, that worked for it actually for a bit, and then it really didn't work. When the amazing work stopped, everyone just went, This is awful. We don't like it, it's awful.
SPEAKER_00It doesn't sound a particularly sustainable model of a culture.
SPEAKER_02If I I you know, again, it nearly broke my confidence. I had year in a whole year there where I was didn't really fit that well. They really knock your confidence, you know, how well are you getting on? Not sure about that. You know, they were could be pretty against you. Anyway, I kind of like held my nerve and yeah and pulled pulled through it, but I caught, I of course knew that I would, you know, in some ways I was there to learn, I was there to pick up from the best that that agency had at the time with a view to then starting my own. And I wanted to start Fallon. I thought the origin story of Fallon was perfect of Michael, Rob, but Lawrence, these guys were exceptional. A lot of them had gone by then. Robert was up with Sarchis, but I really I thought Robert was kind of an exceptional character. Michael Wool had actually gone by then, he was my one of my favorite inspirations there. Uh Rich was still there, and Lawrence Green was just kind of epic. He was really incredibly kind of very cool characters. And I thought they were great, they were the model. And I actually, um, in starting an agency, went to see Dave Droger with the two other people that left Fallon with me in the end to try and copy the Fallon idea, which was to take an American agency and bring it over.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And that's those talks began, and Dave Droger was very excited about that. And the Droger London thing, it's like a 60-40, you get 40, 80% each of the minority ownership and go from there. Fallon was amazing at that time, but America had really got on top of the future in a way that the British agencies were now really starting to slip and look really old-fashioned. Yeah, you know, Crispin Porter, to some extent, Droga was still quite new then, but it was starting to really look like it was going to do. You know, but then it was like, what do we do post-television? And the idea and 360 and these kind of things were, they were digital and viral and things like that. They the the East Coast, West Coast, Boulder Agencies, Florida, New York, there was a lot of quite exciting things happening there. I thought the idea of bringing that over and copying the Fallon concept was a really good one. Now, what happened in the end was that we started to gain momentum behind the scene, sort of in a way. Once Drogo had said I could be interested in this, I had all the confidence I needed to sort of run off. I was like, We're on.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02This is happening, and we'd set a date. So it had a momentum of its own by then, and clients were starting to go, look, you mentioned you might be starting this agency, is it happening or not? And Dave Droger wasn't ready, they weren't ready yet, they were too early. David also had people he wanted to work with, as it turned out, much later. And so we we ended up going it alone. But I suppose all that to say that I thought. Fallon at that point, what they had was that DDB BMP had lost at this point was they were the best creative work, and we don't care what has to happen to get there. If if people break, we don't care. If the client is miserable, we don't, we do not care what the consequences are, what the externalities are. The job here is the world's greatest advertising. And if it isn't that, you're failing. And I don't really, we're not interested. They were uncompromising, you know, and and also the work that was coming out was proving that that approach could work. Of course, in sustainably speaking, it it doesn't work.
SPEAKER_00And I want I want to hear a bit about um you, Jonathan, and your and your kind of intentionality, if I can use that word. But right from the start, when you walked into why I know day one and thought, I want to start my own agency, and even if it was this people in this room, we'd make a great agency. To then as you've called it, be MP, the university of advertising and and being so single-minded about getting there, and then identifying Fallon as the kind of model of the thing that you wanted ultimately to set up and making sure you got in the door there to get that last bit of your I don't know, grounding or training. Can you talk a bit about that? Because that's that's quite I mean, lots of people when you talk to them and you say, What was your what was your kind of plan at the start of your career? I didn't really have one. It seemed like you really did.
SPEAKER_02I mean, a hundred percent, because I even had like ages in mind because the guys had started Fallon at 34.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02And I was before I'm 35, I'm starting. I mean, by the time I this is the thing, I I love BMP and I thought I I I could be here forever. This is it. Once that then stopped being that, yeah. I wouldn't I was back to starting an agency. That was that it was I joined so when I my last interview at Fallon was with Robert, and he they interviewed you to death over there. I mean, they were really like, you know, and they were a bit like he's too gentlemanly, he's too nice. That was the thing, you're not allowed to be nice, he's too nice, this guy. He's not gonna last here. And they were also watching people come out of other good agencies, they'd go in there, skim the surface and get spat out. Anyway, I met Robert for like the final test, and Robert sat down and and said to me, All right, nice to meet you. So I think you know, he talked about a few of the good ads that BMP done other day, whatever. And then he just went, Oh, this is really boring. He's why don't you just tell me what you really want to do? And I said, Well, Robert, you you know what? I would really like to be you one day. I'd like to start Fallon, I'd like to start a Fallon. And he went, You're hired immediately. We then chatted on. He then told me all about that summer that they got started. He told me you start in the summer because it's warm, you uh uh you know, don't worry about the money. You know, he just broke it all down for me. And I there was an offer waiting for me when I when I got back to Fallon. So yeah, I knew Reggie going in, and then when it came time to leave, they you know, it was a bit like, well, we did have to sort of have this. It wasn't really that massive a surprise, but the intentionality was so great that I'd already been through a couple of makeups of that, well, not one makeup of that agency in particular that involved ex-friends from BMP. There was five of us, and after a year of like weekend meetups and what have you, it sort of fell apart. People pulled out and they weren't interested. And at that point, I I thought, okay, we'll just keep it really simple. It's a planner and a creative person, is all I need. And there were a couple of people at Fallon and I, you know, in in a bit of pub chat, sort of floated the idea. And one in particular had a friend who ended up backing us in John Clayton, who had done Clayton Healy and exited and living in Tina Turner's house and nothing done very well for himself. And he was a cool guy. He introduced me to John, and John and his uh number two, Martin Brooks, who was the first guy I met, they they had a track record of doing, they sort of knew what they were doing with this stuff, and they began kind of going if an agency is going to come out of Fallon, we would we we'd love a piece of that and start coaching me. That got that guy kind of half interested, and then I talked to I sort of talked to Creative Into it. Now, when it came time to when the you know clients were circling it and it was starting to like we've got a it's now time to go, or this, you know, it's and campaign were then starting to get wind. Fallon was in contention to be agency of the decade, Sony was up for pitch, which was Fallon's like iconic lion, you know. So they didn't need a startup coming out of Fallon at that point. It would, it would have, you know, in their head, they were so run and controlled by the campaign narrative. This was very bad. So we had to kind of lock it down. But it got it just got to a point where we either have to, there's a very painful bit here where we either have to go or this isn't this isn't going to happen. And we had been to New York and seen Dave, we had had all the affirmation we want, and then we were asked to repitch Sony and me and Matt and Tim, the guys I started it with. We were all on that Sony pitch. And so we were like, they were like, let's get these guys doing some work and test their resolve. And the campaign in the end, it got to the point where they were a bit like, look, come forward, or or we you can't count on our support if this does start next year. It's just an old journalist trick, right? But it did sort of force it, you're gonna do it or not, and that morning got to the last Thursday of the year. So I've already broken the first rule, which is to start in summer, we started. And Matt Keon and I were got in a cab at 11am to deliver for the last edition of campaign for that year, and we were fucking shitting ourselves, yeah, absolutely shitting ourselves because we were about to sort of go against put ourselves in a direct conflict of interest with at the time the world's most creative agency, yeah, whose influence and kind of stature was unprecedented, I think, even by some, you know, it didn't last much longer after that, actually. But at the time it was on another kind of level, and we really had to look at that moment. We there was I think that was like a hug and like fuck it, with you know, there was like a jump off, a definite sort of jump off a thing moment. Now, after that, Tim the planner, he wasn't sure. He suddenly was it was like, oh no, you know, and actually, I'm not even sure Matt was that sure. I think I'd sort of talk these two guys into it, uh-huh, and I think they were thinking, yeah, this makes sense. This guy's obviously done a lot of work on it because I'd done a whole year on numbers and talking about I'd gone to meet Paul Simons, yeah. And again, he just turned out to be one of the people that completely gave me the keys to how to get it going. And me and uh our mutual friend Pat went to see him in a pub in Ladbrook Grove and started to say, Look, we're you know, this is what we're thinking about. And and Paul just said, Look, okay, I've sort of given this speech a few times, I'll give you the the four answers. You know, one, you've got to be match fit, yeah, like you've got to be ready for this. This is like climbing Everest. Two, understand the numbers. And by now, I I had a VC friend who'd been running these different financial models, and so I kind of it's like, okay, good, yeah, good one. I'll dig into that more. And then the third one was the unlock. He just went, do not spend any time worrying about why you'll be different, you won't be different, and it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_00Brilliant.
SPEAKER_02And that was the that was the liberation ticket because of course when you're starting an agency, all anyone is interested in, oh, what's the proposition? Or what's the proposition? How are you going to be different? What are you bringing? It's like, it's not different, you're just new.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And that was like it was like freedom. And even when once we started, people go, Oh, so what's the what's the thing? And we used to be like, there isn't a thing, it's just an agency. People be like, Oh, I really like that.
SPEAKER_00And all of a sudden, that was the thing that made you different.
SPEAKER_02It's a really important entrepreneurial thing, that which is I I'm approached by people all the time about start sometimes starting an agency, not as much these days, sadly, but you know, recently, social media agencies they want to start and what have you. And you know, they'll spend all their time on the on the presentation. And it's got nothing to do with that. It's you've got to sort of get going beyond that. That was Paul Simon. So without Robert and without Paul, and to some extent without Dave Droger, they were the ones that were like, this is how it really works.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And you don't need these things you do and don't need to worry about. And that freed us from, in a way, what we were like corporately trained, which is well, if I've got sort of 15 really logical slides that make sense of this, we have done one thing. We drew this thing that I drew this thing that was like creatively led, corporately led, time. And you could just plot this very obvious when you start, you'll write, you're you know, very, very creatively led, and you haven't been around. And then as you go on, you will drift and become around for a long time corporately led. And of course, there were one or two that bent that curve. Yep. BMP was one, Fallon was big maturing, it was reaching a decade. BBH had kind of modeled around the middle. And then we, you know, Adam and Eva just started, which were then gonna go on and become the success of the of the day. And we put them in the middle.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02We were like, look what's happening now. They're brand new, and they are already what we call a grown-up startup.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_02And so we were like, our thing is we are gonna be top right. We are gonna be out there creatively. We're gonna do what all the great creative agencies have done since the beginning of time, which we're gonna live over the horizon of creative tastes and whatever's happening and do really, really progressive, strange, unusual things. And then we're gonna mature into something that is one of these great creatively led independent ages. So I had that kind of in mind, but that you couldn't kind of pitch it on, well, we're gonna be more creative. That no one was buying that. There was all this, oh don't forget as well, we are in the peak of like digital, yep, major digital confusion. I mean, if Facebook ads hasn't started yet, that's gonna buy. And actually, there was a bit of like, it's been a decade of debate. We've got to stop debating, get back to advertising. And that's what Adam and Eve did very well. And we were certainly like, guys, it's back to advertising, we've got to stop all this chitter-chatter. And that return to the basic ingredients of was sort of it's was the the furthest it it kind of had. But I suppose all that to say that that they call it, I think the exec coaches call it an unstoppable intention. Yeah, I mean, I had unstoppable intention from the second I left DDB. And in a way, when you look back, the other two guys were were kind of caught up in my unstoppable intention. And the Fallon, I think, at the time when they were, I think they kind of went, he's gonna do it anyway. These other these other two aren't as sure. And let him run off the cliff and we'll see how he gets on. And I just managed to sort of shuffle the other two out the door.
SPEAKER_00Tell people about the name 18 feet and rising, because I think people who don't know uh would might be interested in the story.
SPEAKER_02So Matt Keon was a creative guy. We the previous team had come up with this name weekend, which I thought was a brilliant name for an agency. We had a very, very talented art director who was part of that, and he had the idea of putting the N and the D in red, like a callow, and it was it was ready to go. So I was looking for a really, really good name. Putting your names above the door in our head was just not that was old-fashioned. So Fallon, mother, it wasn't gonna be a Christmas porter, plus my name doesn't a trimble. I mean, it sounds like an accountant. It was like, no, it's not gonna be our names, it's gonna be one of these up. We're gonna be new school, we're gonna have our own kind of cool name. And we went and sat in the sewing hotel, and Matt brought, we were like, it's obviously Matt's problem to come up with the what's what are we gonna be called? He didn't, he was kind of smarter than that. He was like, it doesn't really matter what we're called, it matters much more what we get going. Matt also had very strong entrepreneurial instincts and could really see where you were getting caught up in industry nonsense and corporate nonsense, worrying about peers over like how you get things done in the real world. And then I think he thought this naming exercise was a bit for our peers than it was for success. Anyway, he came along like as Matt would have done, he had too many ideas. That's Matt said, he was like, I don't commit to anything, I've just got loads of stuff. And we just were going through all these things, and it was just I can't remember what it was like. I can't remember now. I mean, I did I did keep the pile for a while, printed out like really big, and then somehow through that it got to well, not our names, but maybe our combined height. I can't, it one of those like live in live in the conversation things, and we calculated at 17 feet, it did turn out to be 18 feet. I was a humble 5'10 of that. Matt was 6'4, so he really packed on the height.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02He was quite a commanding presence. So we were 18 feet, and then the De La Sole album, though I was quite a big fan with three feet high and rising, so it was an 18 feet and rising.
SPEAKER_00So all-time classic. Wow, okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Which was which yeah, well, yeah, I mean, yeah, amazing album. So it just kind of oh, 18 feet and rising. I always loved the name 72 and Sunny. Yes, they were quite new then. I just loved that positive, yeah, yeah. The pop band I was in was called Sundance. I like these kind of sunny, yeah, uplifting kind of, and I thought that was really cool. Then when we started to go around and talk about it, and as we were close to launch, there was some feeling it should just be 18 feet and keep it simple. That morning we got in the cab, Martin Brooks and John in the background. Who that he was we phoned him. We're like, there's only two of us. Are we actually going down? He was like, if you don't get down there now and release this story, this agency will be still born. So he was on the other end of the phone and he went, go with 18 feet and rising, it sounds weirder, and that'll command that'll command more interest. And so that's kind of how that that part of it ended up happening.
SPEAKER_00To find out how Jonathan's new agency, 18 feet and rising, got on, and to hear more about his time investing in new consumer brands. Join us next time on the Amber moment. Until then, stay amber.