HHCL (formally Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury and Partners) was a London based advertising agency prominent in the 1990s. The firm won fame (and notoriety[1]) for its innovative working practices and radical approach to marketing communications, and was voted 'Agency of the Decade' by Campaign magazine[2] in 2000. After mergers and a name change to United London, the agency was closed in early 2007.[3]
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Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury & Partners was founded by Rupert Howell, Steve Henry, Axel Chaldecott, Adam Lury and Robin Price and launched on October 17, 1987.
In 1994 the agency became the first to offer both above and below the line advertising as well as PR, an initiative labelled 3D Marketing. HHCL was bought by Chime PLC in October 1997[4] and merged into the Red Cell Network in January 2002.[5] The HHCL initials were finally dropped and the agency become United London in January 2006 before being closed down by its owner WPP Group in early 2007.[6]
The five founding partners had a vision of a new type of advertising agency and their irreverent, sharply intelligent and often controversial campaigns were a nod to a smarter, more ad savvy consumer. HHCL soon became an advertising 'hot shop', famous for irreverent and iconoclastic work.[7] The agency was more interested in selling products than winning awards and set about finding the most creative, unorthodox ways of doing this.
HHCL believed that the quality of a company’s communications could lead to a real competitive advantage and produced a book written by Adam Lury: Marketing at a Point of Change which expounded this view.[8]
HHCL prided themselves on being professional radicals -- a positioning later applied to the agency as a whole.[9]
During a ten year period HHCL helped launched 3 new UK companies in First Direct, Egg & Go. Their sister company Heresy also launched Ocado.
During this period, HHCL also reenergised The Automobile Association, Tango, Pot Noodle, Martini and Iceland.
The company organised itself around project teams, making teams of account director, strategic planner and creatives collectively responsible for creating work.
Early on in the process, clients were invited to 'tissue meetings' during which a range of early ideas were discussed.
This multiple route approach carried on through to creative development research. These were research groups carried out by the project team’s strategic planner and which were used to develop the work further.
Working this way, very few projects had to go back to the drawing board and resulted in the agency having sector beating margins of over 25% over a number of years.
The agency embraced the idea of hot desking early on so that employees of various disciplines sat with each other.
The offices were designed to be open and vibrant, intended to be more like a newsroom than an ad agency and new work and new policies were showcased in the agency's own in house TV show, The Howell Henry Show.
HHCL was responsible for a number of firsts in the UK advertising industry. As a major ad agency, they were the first to offer above the line, below the line and PR. They were online by 1993 and were the first to give mobile phones to their staff in 1994. They were the first to embrace hot desking and the first to use project teams to create work. They were the first to create an in house TV Show and employ a futurologist and a Shaman.
The agency also created several advertising firsts. They were the first to run two different ads concurrently on different channels, for First Direct in 1989. They were the first to advertise on the back of Tube tickets, for Mercury Communications in 1992. They were the first to create a TV ad that viewers needed to record and play back slowly, for Mazda in 1994. They were the first to place a web address on a commercial, for Tango in 1994 and they revolutionised sponsorship idents by using dialogue and live action for the first time for Tango's sponsorship of The Word in 1994.
In 1989, HHCL launched the banking service, First Direct. Alongside the two commercials that aired simultaneously on ITV and Channel 4, one offering an optimistic and the other a pessimistic view, the agency created a number of short, surreal spots in which the visual had little or nothing to do with the message. It was these ads that gave HHCL its reputation for being avant garde.
The agency also bucked the trend of only showing beautiful people in advertising with a campaign for Fuji. Using the line 'with the right camera and the right film, you can change the way people see the world' the ads showed a man with Down syndrome smiling at the checkout girl in a supermarket and an old couple kissing.
In the early nineties, the agency created some commercials for Maxell cassettes[10] using commonly misheard lyrics shot in the style of the video for Subterranean Homesick Blues by Bob Dylan
HHCL's most celebrated piece of work was a commercial for Tango[11] in 1991 (co-written by Trevor Robinson OBE). The ad took soft drinks advertising away from US lifestyle and planted it firmly on the streets of Britain. When a young man drinks some Tango, a large orange man runs up to him and slaps him on the face - the 'hit of real oranges' - while two astounded commentators report on the action. The commercial was voted the third best commercial of all time by Channel 4 in the UK.[12] After children began copying the orange man's slap, the commercial was banned and reshot with the orange man planting a kiss on the Tango drinker.
In 1994 the agency rebranded the UK's vehicle breakdown service The Automobile Association as The Fourth Emergency Service and was responsible for the endline 'It does exactly what it says on the tin' for Ronseal.[13]
In 1997, HHCL and the brand consultancy, Wolff Olins jointly launched the airline, Go.[14]
Also in 1997, HHCL created the commercial St George for Blackcurrant Tango.[15] The commercial was voted one of the 100 best commercials of all time.[16]
Sometimes, the brand have been known to create adverts which have sparked controversy and become banned. Many early Tango Orange adverts were banned in the original run of the "You Know When You've Been Tango'd" campaign from 1992-1996, including those of the "orange man", "exploding pensioner" and "head" adverts, banned because they were copied by children who injured themselfs, for offending pensioners, and for scaring children respectively. Another Tango Orange advert in 2000 was banned almost instantly as it appeares in the adverts as if some elderly people are bullying a young man (James Corden) for not drinking Tango. In 2004, the Tango advert Pipes was banned for fear of imitation, in the same vein as the "orange man" advert. Though numerous over Tango adverts have been controversial, HHCL's other controversial advertising campaign was that of the "Pot Noodle Horn" in 2005, where the first advert in the campaign was banned for being overtly sexual. Additionally, a 2002 advertising campaign for Pot Noodle saw the brand call itself "the slag of all snacks", which prompted 310 complaints. This advertisement was banned.