A renowned maverick, he was in at the start of Saatchi & Saatchi and in 1982 he co-founded the Bartle Bogle Hegarty agency (whose clients now include British Airways). He was knighted for his services to advertising in 2007 and his spare time is devoted to his vineyard in the south of France. He is also the author of Hegarty on Advertising, published this month.
My parents taught me the power of education. I come from a working-class background in north London but I was very lucky in that they felt education was fundamentally important and it was always encouraged. Opportunity is what it's all about and being exposed to all the things that you can do. I go to talk at certain schools and I realise these kids have never been told that there is this thing called creativity that you can do all kinds of things with.
I remember someone once saying to me, "What the world needs today is more national service." And I said, "You're absolutely right. Bring back national service, but make everyone go to art school for a year." They thought I was absolutely mad. But what a brilliant thing that would be. What I loved about art school was that it was a place where anything was possible, it was not a place that was trying to reduce your ideas, it was trying to expand your horizons. So much education just channels you in one direction.
I got into advertising because I was mad about ideas. I studied printing and graphic design at the London College of Printing and was very lucky that I met a man called John Gillard, who then showed me the work of Bill Bernbach, who was doing brilliant campaigns in New York in the 60s. It was like a light being turned on in a darkened room. I saw all this stuff and thought that was what I wanted to do. It was intelligent, it was witty, but it was also involving. I think the brilliance of great writing and creativity is to have depth but also be able to include people.
Mad Men is a fabulous series but somebody said to me recently, "It's a shame the ads in it are so bad." It's true, they're not very good.
Creativity isn't an occupation, it's a preoccupation. You don't get up in the morning and say, "Right, now it's time to start having ideas." You're obsessed about it all the time. You're constantly thinking of ideas. I always try and say to people that the more interesting things you do, the more you observe, the more you look at things, the more you think about things, the more you'll feed your creative spirit.
I think it's important to be a maverick. Irreverence is a very, very powerful force.
Is advertising art? I think it's where art meets commerce. It's not pure art, because it's commissioned, but then again so was the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo had a bit more freedom in the sense that there wasn't a client saying, "Make God bigger" but we know he did have great rows about his work and the Church didn't like all the nudity. So even poor old Michelangelo had a client in a way.
The most important thing about dealing with clients is to understand their problems and to be able to talk to them in language that they understand. If I can convince them that the way I'm thinking is going to solve their problems, then they'll come on board. That's the art of salesmanship, I suppose.
Am I an artist or a salesman? I think I'm both. And you need to be both. There's no point in being good at something if nobody knows you're good at it. Picasso was a genius but people knew he was a genius because he told them — through his art.
I learnt quite a few things from Charles Saatchi but the most important thing was that he had an ability to bring out the best in people: he gave people permission to be as good as they could be. And that's why people stayed very loyal to him, because they felt they were really able to be the person they could be.
He had no ego in terms of where an idea came from and you'd be surprised how many people aren't like that, even with their name above the door. Their ego gets in the way of allowing other people to shine. I think if you're a leader of any organisation, especially a creative one, then that's fundamental.
The number of times I've had to say to clients when they're having problems, "Why don't you make the product better? Have we considered that as an option?" You sit in meetings and you hear people talk about their distribution or their sales strategy or their pricing policy or whatever it is, and they never actually talk about the quality of the product. We've become so sophisticated in our marketing and our ability to analyse figures that we almost forget what it is we're about: it's about making stuff, and if you make it better than the person standing next to you it might stand a better chance of succeeding.
There's never been a better time to work in advertising. Technology has always been a spur to creativity and here we are in this fantastic world where we can talk to people in a hundred different ways and if we're not engaging with them, they'll just switch us off. So we have to be more creative, more involving, more interesting. That's why I think it's a really exciting time to be around.
What have I learnt from owning a vineyard? Don't be a farmer! Don't have God as one of your partners — he's hugely unreliable! What I love about it is that it's a completely different world and it answers to a different rhythm, the rhythm of nature.
One thing I've learnt over the years is the complete failure of British business to employ the creative talent that was available to it and I think it's a disgrace. You look at brilliant products that we had such as the Mini, now owned by a German company and finally redesigned so it could carry on. What did British management do with it? Did they evolve it? Did they change it? No. Did they make a hatchback with it? No. It took a German company to do that. It's typical of the failure of British companies to exploit the creative skills that the country has invested in with its art schools and design schools.
Hegarty on Advertising is published this month by Thames & Hudson, £16.95
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