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The real significance of HHCL was as a laboratory for advertising techniques that would become familiar after the turn of the millennium. Its aim was to offer ‘3D marketing' – now more often referred to as ‘integrated' or ‘360 degree' marketing. It considered design and public relations central to its remit. It acquired a sales promotion company and merged it with the main agency. It was home to a host of dotcom advertisers, and in 1994 it was the first agency to include a website address in a TV spot. It also pioneered the branding of ‘idents', sponsoring the brief flashes that identify programmes at the beginning and end of ad breaks. HHCL no longer exists, but it remains a shining moment in British advertising.

Among its many fans were the founders of another London agency that set out to transform the business: Mother. It remains highly influential at the time of writing, although it seems slightly more establishment these days.

Mother was founded in December 1996 to handle the launch of Channel 5, the UK's fifth terrestrial television channel. It broke with the traditions of the eighties in many ways, starting with its location. It was one of the first creative concerns to set up shop in the east of London, in Clerkenwell, rather than in Soho or Covent Garden. Its headquarters resembled an artist's atelier, with staff ranged along workbenches in the same open-plan room. Once again, the ‘suits' were ditched: instead of account planners and handlers, figures called ‘strategists' were a combination of the two. Overseeing all this were the ‘mothers', who played the coordination role normally handled by the traffic department. Meanwhile, staff had pictures of their actual mothers on the backs of their business cards. The ground floor was ‘dominated by a giant kitsch caravan… the lighting is by chandelier' (‘Mother loves you',
Creativity
,
1 March 2002). The agency has since moved to sleek, shiny offices up the road in Shoreditch, but the collaborative look of its space remains intact.

The agency's name is said to have been chosen because your mother is someone you can rely on. Coincidentally, it was also the codename of the male government official who gave the orders in the cult TV series
The Avengers
, which rather chimes in with the kitsch quality of some of Mother's work. Many of the agency's early spots were drenched with references to the look of 1970s television. As might have been expected in fad-prone London, the style was aped by other agencies, with the result that Mother moved away from it.

Mother believes that the key to effective advertising is simply to tell the truth. The most obvious example was a campaign for a brand of instant noodles, Super Noodles. The TV spots portrayed consumers as lazy, inept slobs – although with a modicum of oafish charm. In its Mother Bible – an insight into its philosophy – the agency explained that, let's be honest, a pot of Super Noodles was unlikely to become ‘the reason Mum's kids love her'. ‘So a pack of Super Noodles becomes a packet of nosh for when you are too lazy, rushed or, more likely, drunk to prepare proper food. In this instance, the customer recognizes themselves and gives the advertiser the benefit of the doubt.'

As this book went to press, Mother had stubbornly resisted selling even a tiny sliver to one of the international giants, insisting that it wanted to stay ‘pure'. Small, flexible, honest and determinedly independent – how much more radical can you get?

Far from the Madison crowd

Lest I be accused of giving the Brits too much coverage, I had better turn my attention to the United States. The world's largest advertising market is by no means bereft of fleet-footed agencies offering an alternative approach (although many of them have forged alliances with the giants).

It's difficult to pick a favourite. How about Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco? Headed by Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, the agency was founded in 1983 and has successfully retooled itself for the digital age. It has been described by
Creativity
magazine as ‘a creative hothouse' that helped to ‘define modern advertising' (‘The
Creativity 50', 1 March 2006). In the same article, creative director Gerry Graf – who worked there before moving on to TBWA in New York – summarized the role of an alternative agency when he said: ‘They were simply smarter and funnier than everyone else; they made the big New York agencies look old and stupid.'

Don't know their work? Got to be kidding… this is the agency behind ‘Got milk?' It all began in 1993 when Jeff Manning, then executive director of the California Milk Processor Board, hired Goodby, Silverstein to turn a drink with a dull image into something resembling Coke or Sprite. The agency's research revealed that milk was so closely associated with certain granular snacks – like cookies or brownies – that consumers could barely imagine swallowing them without the appropriate liquid accompaniment.

This was the trigger for the first TV spot, ‘Aaron Burr'. It featured a history buff called at random by a radio quiz show host. Suddenly finding himself live on air, he was unable to answer the $10,000 trivia question – to which he clearly knew the answer – because he'd just taken an enormous bite of peanut butter sandwich. His eyes goggled as he realized that the carton of milk at his elbow was empty, preventing him from washing down the cloying ball of food. Unable to understand his mouth-stuffed mumbling, the DJ hung up on him. The ad's offbeat humour made milk seem fun; and the slogan was stickier than peanut butter.

Since that award-winning spot, the ‘Got milk?' campaigns have taken on myriad forms, including that of a milk-starved planet in a distant galaxy. For the latter, the agency literally created an entire world – faintly inspired by old episodes of
Star Trek
– with interactive web experiences that blended seamlessly with the print and TV work.

Our tour of creative outposts would not be complete without a visit to Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, which single-handedly turned Miami into a creative advertising capital. The agency was founded in 1965 by Sam Crispin, but it remained stubbornly out of the limelight until 1987, when Chuck Porter was brought in to transform its creative fortunes. Two years later, he recruited Alex Bogusky as creative director. Around the same time that, in faraway Amsterdam, 180 and StrawberryFrog were insisting that they didn't need a worldwide network to do international business, the Miami-based duo realized that they could stay put and still make a global impact. To an extent, they created the agency of the future before others were even aware that the future was happening.

Porter told
Adweek
: ‘We always had virtually the exact vision of what the agency would be – we wanted to build a world-class agency in Miami. And we made all of our decisions based on that… If you did terrific, interesting work, everything else would work itself out. We always thought that way, and we still do' (‘How the little creative shop in Miami grew up, but refuses to grow old', 9 January 2006).

The agency first got itself noticed with the ‘Truth' campaign – an antismoking drive. Using non-preachy tactics to reach a youth audience, it hilariously exposed the tactics used by big tobacco companies to hook youngsters on cigarettes. One of the ads depicted a mock awards show in hell, with awards handed out to tobacco executives for the Greatest Number of Deaths in a Single Year.

Having unsold cigarettes, Crispin Porter went on to successfully re-launch the Mini Cooper – a dinky little car with a British heritage that had attracted little interest in the United States in its earlier incarnations. The agency captured the car's plucky Brit appeal with the slogan ‘Let's motor' and some equally nifty stunts – like parking one atop a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.

For my money, however, the most extraordinary ‘off Madison Avenue' agency is based in Minneapolis, and its name is Fallon.

Driving branded content

The agency had a long gestation period. It started out as an informal out-of-hours partnership between Pat Fallon, who worked at an agency called Martin/Williams, and Thomas McElligott, then creative director at Bozell & Jacobs. The pair had worked together on private projects for seven years before deciding to open their own agency in 1981. They were joined by Fred Senn, Irv Fish and Nancy Rice.

Right from the start, Fallon McElligott Rice – to give it its original name – wanted to offer an alternative to Madison Avenue. In their book about the agency's work,
Juicing the Orange
(2006), Pat Fallon and Fred Senn evoke the ghost of Bill Bernbach when they write: ‘Even though research showed that people develop a psychological resistance to repeated exposure to a single ad, Madison Avenue was bombarding consumers and calling it success.' They imagined ‘a new kind of agency that would communicate with consumers in fresh, intelligent and engaging ways'. Above all, it would be about creativity: not ‘self-indulgent…
art for art's sake ads that win awards but don't affect the client's bottom line', but the kind of hardworking creativity that people like Bernbach and David Ogilvy produced.

It had been said before and it could easily have been dismissed with a yawn – but Fallon actually delivered. Its very first client was a tiny local barbershop with no budget. Fallon's posters featured ‘famous people with bad haircuts'. An image of the wild-haired Albert Einstein was headlined: ‘A bad haircut can make anyone look dumb.' Other eccentrically coiffed individuals, from Betty Boop to Moe Howard, followed. ‘The barbershop's target market loved the campaign so much that people were stealing the posters from bus stops,' Fallon and Senn report.

Although it started out with small, local clients, Fallon eventually attracted national advertisers such as
Rolling Stone
magazine,
The Wall Street Journal
and Lee Jeans. After a series of mergers and takeovers it found itself in the midst of the WPP group. But the agency entered a creative depression and in 1992 Pat Fallon bought it back from WPP for US $14 million (WARC profile in association with AdBrands, December 2005) and began to turn it around. A return to form was confirmed with the win of the BMW account in 1995.

It was for BMW that Fallon created what is undoubtedly its most influential campaign: ‘The Hire', a series of short action movies, shot by top Hollywood directors, and run exclusively on the internet. In 2001, this was an extremely risky option for a mainstream brand. But BMW had been inspired by its product placement deal with the Bond movie
GoldenEye
, and research showed that luxury car customers were using the internet to research vehicles that interested them. In addition, it was known that young men aged 25 to 35 were already online in a big way.

In their book, Fallon and Senn explain: ‘We believed that the best way to signal that these short movies were legitimate was to get famous directors. With the help of Hollywood screenwriters, we created about 15 scripts and asked A-list directors to pick one.'

Intrigued by the possibilities of the web and keen to experiment, a clutch of top directors came on board, including John Frankenheimer (
Ronin
), Ang Lee (
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
), Wong Kar-wai (
In The Mood For Love
) and Guy Ritchie (
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
). Clive Owen, a newly hot actor after his performance in the film
Croupier
, was signed up to play the films' protagonist, an unnamed
driver who is hired by various individuals and inevitably steered into danger, with only his nerve and his BMW to get him out.

The movies were promoted like genuine blockbusters, with giant posters in the streets and TV spots that looked like trailers. The agency even ran ads in industry trade magazines like
Variety
and the
Hollywood
Reporter
. The first film went online on 25 April 2001. Nine months later,
bmwfilms.com
had logged more than 10 million film views by 2.13 million people. It was hardly surprising: with their heavyweight directors, starry casts (Madonna, Mickey Rourke, Forest Whitaker) and Hollywood production values, the films signalled the future of advertising – provided you had the budget.

According to BMW's corporate website (
bmwusa.com
), the eight films garnered almost 100 million views before the site was finally closed down in October 2005. (They can still be found on YouTube.) It was a triumph for Fallon and BMW – but it was much more significant than that. The internet had finally been established as a legitimate medium for mainstream brands – and ‘branded content' had arrived.

In the meantime, Fallon had been acquired again – this time by Publicis Groupe. Although it had been forced to close its New York office, which was effectively competing with the Minneapolis agency, Fallon had opened a London branch in 1998 and was keen to develop a small international network. Backing from the French group gave it the clout to do so. Soon, additional offices had opened in Singapore, São Paulo, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

The London office was behind another groundbreaking campaign, this time for the Sony Bravia LCD TV. To get across its idea of ‘colour, like no other', the agency released 250,000 brightly coloured rubber balls into the hilly streets of San Francisco and stood back to film the results. Bouncing and tumbling down the sharp inclines, the balls resembled multicoloured hail. An anecdote from creative director Juan Cabral illustrated the direction the media – and advertising – were heading in. ‘During the shoot I got an email from someone who said they'd already seen our idea online. It turned out to be a film that someone had shot from their window on their mobile phone while we were making the ad. It had gone all the way round the world and come back to me' (
Shots
conference, London, 21 March 2006).

This was not the last time the film was appropriated by enthusiastic amateurs. Reliant on a neat idea rather than special effects, the charming
spot was appreciated by viewers for its ‘authenticity'. The ad took on a life of its own, generating a hit song and numerous spoofs. More interestingly, unofficial new versions began cropping up on the web, edited to different music. Juan Cabral pointed out: ‘Media is global now. It's not just me any more – it's me plus everyone.'