An advert for the Japanese hair-tonic brand Kaminomoto featured two boiled eggs, one of them sprouting hair plucked from a hapless assistant’s eyebrow and stuck on with super glue. The poor man’s other eyebrow was sacrificed to repeat the advert with billiard balls. For Air Canada, he made a virtue of breakfasts being cooked in-flight, while with Continental Airlines, he championed its employee ownership model with the line: “The folks who fly the planes own the airline.”
Alas, “Air India has arrived” had to be abandoned when one of its aircraft was involved in a fatal crash as the campaign was about to be launched.
The cigar-chomping French perfected the idea of “copy ads”, short stories rather than images and slogans, which captivated audiences and won countless awards. Colleagues recalled his eviscerating tone as he read their work aloud in his deep baritone voice, providing a masterclass in not only how to sell products but also where to place commas.
In 1993, he created a campaign for XO, a fictitious, high-alcohol beer, for the Straits Times in Singapore. The intention was to get people talking about the beer, demonstrating that major brands need not rely on television to make an impact. The ad was so convincing that drinkers began demanding the non-existent beer in bars, and it won three awards, including Best of the Best at the Asian Advertising Awards.
Flamboyant and fearless to the point of foolishness, French lived and worked dangerously. He recalled the furore over a patisserie advert featuring a young lady holding a pastry with a cherry on the top and the strapline, “Now you can pick up tarts at our front door”, though as he pointed out: “The effectiveness of an ad could be multiplied by thousands of per cent if it was talked about.”
Thus, he was disappointed not to encounter any backlash over an Indonesian cigarillo advert with the line: “Gentlemen have always preferred their companions to be tall, slim, brown and a little spicy. And, ideally horizontal.”
He had a well-deserved reputation for catchy slogans, but “women are crap” was not his finest. In 2005, he was speaking at a conference in Toronto when he was asked to explain the dearth of women in advertising. “Women don’t make it to the top because they don’t deserve to. They’re crap,” he replied.
Doubling down, he added that they inevitably “wimp out and go suckle something”. It was a spectacular way to end his career. “The ‘wimmin’, who apparently control America, were on the warpath and wanted heads to roll,” he wrote. “My head, to be specific.”
Robert Neil Hyde French was born in 1944 on a Warwickshire farm, in a half-timbered Tudor house abutting a graveyard. He was the son of Walter French, a “hulking, rugby union and cricket-playing” Scot, and his wife Mary (née Jones), with a Lady Bracknell-style line in putdowns. Walter, a captain in the Home Guard, cut a heroic figure in his army greatcoat and peaked cap, “but when I found photos after his death I realised that he could have been the model for Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army,” French wrote.
His childhood was “a mixture of Cider with Rosie, Huckleberry Finn and Swallows and Amazons”. When a fortune teller told him that he would not survive beyond 18, he dedicated himself to experiencing life in the fast lane, only later discovering she had mixed up her numbers and his allotted years were 81.
While at a minor public school, he dreamt of becoming a priest. “I didn’t believe in God, but that didn’t seem to be terribly important … Somebody said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘For the power.’ And I do like power.” Being expelled at 16 ended his next ambition, to be an army officer. Instead, he joined a Birmingham estate agent where he was issued with a brown leather satchel and a “great big hairy Alsatian called Bumole”. He was to collect rents from Irish and Jamaican tenants, but was let go after returning to the office empty-handed.
His next stop was cleaning inkwells and paint jars for an advertising agency, though soon he was spending “happy days driving horrible ads to the nastier parts of Birmingham, and dawdling back with them sold”. The agency won the Royal Enfield motorcycle account, which he was asked to handle. Royal Enfield quickly poached him to be their advertising manager, tripling his salary, but ran into financial difficulties a year later, and the 18-year-old French became unemployed.
He cured any gambling inclinations with a stint as a blackjack dealer, spent several nights as a relief disc-jockey, “another occupation for which I was utterly unfitted”, discovered the horrors of working in a restaurant kitchen, learnt to fleece drinkers at a hotel bar in Torquay and sold encyclopaedias and cavity-wall insulation door-to-door. He then became a waiter in Spain, entertaining young female English tourists by putting on a Spanish accent and posing as Pedro, Mario or Manuel.
Later, he tried being an Elvis Presley impersonator and a novillero. “That’s a sort of apprentice bullfighter. And you get to fight smaller bulls, which is good, but faster bulls, which is not quite so good,” he explained. “I was a really shit matador. I learnt all the tricks, but I didn’t learn the grace and all the other things. But I was only in it for performing to the tourists, and they didn’t care, or know.”
Returning to advertising in the late 1960s, French came up with his first memorable line for Newey Goodman, manufacturer of bra buckles and similar accessories. He persuaded an attractive young model to do a “before and after” advert, one of his favourite advertising genres. The “before” picture depicted her natural physique beneath a black, polo-neck sweater; the “after” showed her in the same sweater but with a greatly enhanced bust. Below the second picture was the line: “Little things mean a lot.”
It brought him immediate promotion to copywriter, but he left with a colleague to form their own agency, Blacker Hyde, using their middle names “because it sounded better”. They recruited attractive blonde assistants and soon had a dozen clients, including a tyre company, a hotel group and the satisfied bra buckle maker.
Nevertheless, he had a wandering eye, both professionally and personally, and ended up working for a pornographer in London, the only career in which he claimed not to have been a failure. When a male actor failed to rise to the occasion, he filled in, first ensuring that his face was not in the frame. Thirty years later, his acting debut was spotted by his wife, who recognised his buttocks while on a risqué girls’ film night. Meanwhile, fate took a violent hand. “I was forced out by firebombs in Soho,” he told the Medium blog. “I would’ve liked to have stuck to pornography, because I thought that was fascinating … for the social engineering you do while you’re doing it. Really interesting.”
His next occupation, commercial debt collecting, proved less dangerous. When he tired of that, a friend talked him into managing a heavy metal band from Birmingham who “could be absolutely massive”. For a man in a hurry, fame came too slowly to Judas Priest.
With the police sniffing around his Soho ventures and the taxman demanding a share of the supposed Judas Priest profits, French jumped on a flight to Bangkok, where a young Thai dancer introduced him to the local customs. His next stop was Singapore. On his first day, he met Linda Locke, an art director from the Leo Burnett agency. They were married in Delhi two weeks later and spent their honeymoon in Kashmir. The marriage was dissolved, and he is survived by Daniel, his adopted son.
French was soon engaged on a freelance basis by Ogilvy & Mather’s Asia-Pacific office. Once again, the client was Dyno-Rod, although his “Clean up Singapore” slogan created a furore in a country that prides itself on cleanliness. On another occasion, he won an award at the Cannes advertising festival with a TV campaign for the Singapore tourist authority aimed at tackling the perception that Singaporeans are rude by squeezing a grumpy local’s face into a grin while the voiceover points out that a smile costs nothing.
He took up a permanent post with Ogilvy before continuing to hone his craft as a copywriter with Batey Ads, the Ball Partnership and other agencies in Singapore, Hong Kong and Asia, walking out whenever he felt ignored or undervalued. By 2002, he was worldwide creative director of WPP, a job far removed from the creativity of copywriting that involved countless meetings, lots of award-judging and tedious conference speeches, precipitating his “women are crap” debacle.
In retirement, French continued to be an influential figure in advertising. He also co-founded the World Press Awards in 2006, settled in Majorca and self-published a rollercoaster of a memoir with the obtuse title Sorry for the Lobsters (2011). “I seem to have done a deal with the Devil, and every false step has led to something better,” he noted in its introduction. “Which only goes to show that life is unfair, and there’s no justice in this world.”
