Entering the Region

When offered the creative director post at Ogilvy & Mather (O&M) in Singapore in the mid-1980s, Neil Lawrence was concerned: “My first thought was, ‘Has my reputation slipped that much that they think I want to go and do that?’ The second thing was, ‘Now, where is Singapore?’” Reflecting on his initial response, he concedes: “I’m not proud of those two thoughts at all, but that’s what I honestly thought.”^{Footnote 7} Lawrence’s reactions and subsequent shame reveal Western attitudes toward Asia and Asian advertising. Others expressed similar sentiments. Another interviewee described the commonly held view that the region’s agencies were the preserve of “dipsomaniacs and homosexuals.”^{Footnote 8} Senior people at O&M’s New York headquarters dismissed the region as “Mickey Mouse countries,” which was a comment on its presumed economic insignificance as much as its “foreignness.”^{Footnote 9}

Although individual Australians had helped develop advertising agencies across Asia during the interwar period,^{Footnote 10} Australian advertising agencies largely ignored their neighboring region. This changed in 1959, when McCann-Erickson commenced operations in Australia. The general manager of McCann-Erickson (International), Arthur Grimes, revealed that the move was part of a broader strategy: “We are very interested in Australia, not only as a market but as a regional centre of the economic life of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.”^{Footnote 11} The move was also motivated by one of its largest accounts, Coca-Cola, which was developing a uniform marketing strategy worldwide. However, Coke’s strategy of exporting commercials was stymied by Australian local content laws, and it consequently looked to McCann-Erickson to ensure consistency in the Australian market.

Global advertisers increasingly encouraged Australian agencies to lead their push into Southeast Asia. Ian Dawson recalls that J. Walter Thompson (JWT) was “under pressure from Unilever.” Additionally, JWT in Australia “had international alignment from … various brands.”^{Footnote 12} Colgate-Palmolive’s decision to open a plant in Malaysia in the early 1960s led George Patterson to enter the region by acquiring a local agency network.^{Footnote 13} Air travel led other Australian agencies to Southeast Asia. The acquisition of the Cathay Pacific account in 1960 led Fortune to establish its own local network. Australia’s national carrier, Qantas, similarly enticed Jackson Wain and Monahan Dayman Adams (MDA) to the region. Malcolm Spry, who oversaw MDA’s international expansion, outlined the agency’s expectations in Singapore: “Our primary role there was to service Qantas, and so long as the office paid its way, we weren’t that fussed about growing.”^{Footnote 14}

While global clients propelled Australian agencies to Southeast Asia, interviews suggest that agencies were as ambitious, and indeed as strategic, as their clients. George Patterson’s Asian network, for example, was not simply a response to pressure from Colgate-Palmolive. An Asian network also enhanced its prospects of being acquired by the American giant Ted Bates.^{Footnote 15} In contrast to its Singapore venture, MDA’s approach to Hong Kong was driven by strategic aims. Spry recounts: “I felt that Hong Kong was a bigger market than Singapore [and] that if the right opportunity came about, then maybe we should look at that—that’s purely from an expansion point of view, nothing to do with Qantas.”^{Footnote 16}

While geographic proximity facilitated Australian involvement in Southeast Asia, interviewees claimed that Australians also possessed the necessary outlook and attributes for working in the region. Rob Palmer, an account service director at JWT’s Sydney office, outlined this skill set:

Ian Alwill, who was dispatched from Sydney JWT to head the agency’s Manila office, similarly cited adaptability as a key attribute:

Such comments reveal the nature of Australian offices as well as those in Southeast Asia. Working in smaller offices than their British or American counterparts, Australians were often multiskilled, which was an ability that transferred well. However, Russell McLay, George Patterson’s chief financial officer, explained that this skill set was not necessarily innate to all Australians; staff sent abroad needed to meet specific requirements. McLay noted, “They were nearly all client account directors [with] what we considered to be a reasonable business nous. … They would be running a business in a different environment, getting on with authorities.”^{Footnote 19}

The narrative of the adaptable, multiskilled Australian was informed by other stereotypes. Office acquisitions created new staffing challenges. For George Patterson, the acquisition of offices across Asia meant that it had to deal with “new” staff with unconventional skills and outlooks. Its new Singapore operation had been headed by Alan Green. Described as a “classic colonial,” Green was a heavy drinker who entertained clients at Singapore’s colonial clubs and “proudly never came back from lunch in three years.”^{Footnote 20} Americans in the region were criticized for their arrogance and inflexibility. As the global account director for Malaysian Airlines and the deputy managing director of Leo Burnett’s Kuala Lumpur office, Graeme Kinsella reported to Sydney. However, American staff passing through the office were intent on giving directives:

Noting that the Americans would “tell you what to do and then disappear, so that you could follow your own way of doing things,” Kinsella was wryly contrasting American dogma with his Australian pragmatism.^{Footnote 22}

Working in the Region

In his study of advertising agencies in Asia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Michael Anderson argues: “Advertising-strong nations exercise power over advertising-weak nations, and the Periphery’s advertising industry is conditioned by the needs of the Center rather than the needs of the Periphery’s majority.”^{Footnote 23} While my interviews certainly highlighted uneven relationships between offices, they also revealed complexities that Anderson overlooked.

Profit was fundamental to the relationships between Southeast Asian agencies and their global networks. This partially accounts for Australia’s involvement in the region. Southeast Asia was still a developing market, so multinationals seemed content to leave the meager profits to be had to their Australian operations. In contrast, Australian agencies were sidelined when it came to the booming Japanese market.^{Footnote 24} The path to profit varied from agency to agency. Agency managers considered the needs of their clients against those of the agency, weighing short-term and long-term interests. Spry’s separate approaches for MDA in Singapore and Hong Kong, for example, reveal that such strategies could vary within a single agency.

The modest profitability of Southeast Asian agencies led Australian agencies to adopt a broader perspective of how to capitalize on their Asian investments. As JWT’s Ian Dawson notes, one solution was to treat Asian networks as “as a training ground for young Australians … that’s why I was up there.”^{Footnote 25} Dispatching staff to oversee foreign offices was, of course, a well-established practice among international businesses.^{Footnote 26} For agencies, such up-skilling was a useful by-product of their principal task: to exercise control over expanding operations. However, interviewees focused on the training aspect of the overseas secondment. “At Patterson’s we did have a very good system of moving senior people through Southeast Asia, much more than we did within Australia actually,” explains Geoff Cousins, who went from managing the agency’s modest-sized Brisbane office to running its large Hong Kong operation.^{Footnote 27} Clemenger BBDO emulated the Patterson model, while other agencies adopted an ad hoc approach to dispatching staff abroad.^{Footnote 28}

In a 1982 interview, Michael Ball, the head of O&M in Singapore, explained that the flow of staff between Australia and Southeast Asia was not one-way: “You have to train nationals year in, year out, both in the market and by bringing them to work for extended periods in Australia or other developed markets.”^{Footnote 29} George Patterson was equally interested in training local staff in its Asian offices.^{Footnote 30} Talented locals were given an opportunity to work in Australia for up to a year. Preference was given to account service, notably those working on the Colgate account. However, McLay’s discussion of this scheme reveals its underlying interests. The prioritization of account service staff working on key accounts, coupled with the fact that visitors signed contracts that effectively tied them to George Patterson upon their return home, indicate that improving the local industry’s skill sets during these visits ran second to safeguarding the Australian agency’s network and its capacity to service clients.

International secondments were vividly recollected by the interviewees. Many recounted tales of agencies that were small and chaotic, where skills and equipment were usually in short supply. Unique local conditions posed a significant challenge. Malaysia’s bumiputera (affirmative opportunity) policy, for example, compelled agencies to hire unskilled staff. Dawson recounts the situation he faced in Kuala Lumpur: “Some of the best creative talent I had at that time, circa 1974, were Chinese … but being a bumiputera company, they wanted a racial balance … [and] you had to have a racial balance at all levels of management, which is an imposition. … I had to somehow try to grow a Malay creative director … so it was very tricky.^{Footnote 31}

Kinsella explains that Leo Burnett’s efforts to circumvent the Malaysian government’s requirement saw it “import creative people from the Sydney office on a regular basis for about a month to two months’ time, [to] do all the work and send them back out again.”^{Footnote 32} At Clemenger BBDO’s Indonesian joint venture, the challenges lay in the accountancy department, where three sets of books were kept: one for the Indonesian government, one for Clemenger BBDO, and one for the accountant himself with the actual figures.^{Footnote 33}

Although agency exchange programs worked to the Australian office’s advantage, interviewees nevertheless expressed a desire to improve their local colleagues’ skill sets. This meant addressing the emphasis on expatriates in key positions. In Hong Kong, Cousins directly challenged this convention:

Reflecting on their time in Southeast Asia, interviewees universally identified their time abroad as a broadening experience. During his time in Bangkok, Hugh Spencer gained an understanding of marketing and advertising’s role within it, while Neil Lawrence learned that communication with his team was the key to being an effective creative director.^{Footnote 35} Lessons and insights gained abroad would be put into practice back in Australia. “If you did well, then the expectation was when you came back to Sydney or Melbourne, you would get a better job than the one you had when you left … and I benefitted from that,” mused Cousins, who became CEO of George Patterson.^{Footnote 36} The importance that George Patterson placed on its network as a training ground was illustrated by Graham Cox, who declined the role of managing director in Kuala Lumpur. In placing his family before his career, Cox concedes, “I probably set myself back, permanently, because I declined it. It was … considered to be something of a plum [position].”^{Footnote 37}

Interrogating the Source

The interviewees’ discussions of the challenges and opportunities encountered when working in Southeast Asia present an opportunity to explore the nature of oral history testimony and the role of memory in its production. Alistair Thomson writes, “We construct our identities by telling stories about our lives, either to ourselves … or to other people in social situations,” which underscores the connection between memory and narrative.^{Footnote 38} Michael Frisch expands on this link by urging oral historians to consider the narratives being constructed through the interview process: “By studying how experience, memory, and history become combined in and digested by people … oral history opens up a powerful perspective; it encourages us to stand somewhat outside of cultural forms in order to observe their workings.”^{Footnote 39} As noted in the introduction to this collection, narrative and memory studies offer new insights to business historians using oral sources.

A key narrative in my interviews was the “Australian hero.” By underscoring their adaptability, flexibility, and open-mindedness, interviewees actively contrasted themselves to perceived American imperialism and British colonialism with a view to establishing their own unique space in advertising’s global history. Some, however, did undermine this narrative. Singapore in the 1970s left creative director John Newton underwhelmed: “It was a pretty racist environment. … We were white. We were the Raj, and it wasn’t much different in the agency.”^{Footnote 40} The head of Lintas’s Asia-Pacific operations expressed similar concerns in 1976, when he warned: “You have to be very careful, when it comes to Asia, not to replace one former colonialist with another, not to replace the bloody English or the bloody French with bloody Australians.” He added that “some second-rate Australians” had a very bad reputation in the region.^{Footnote 41}

The very homogeneity of Australian agency staff presented a further challenge to the Australian hero narrative. Despite the gradual dismantling of the so-called white Australia policy over the 1960s and 1970s, Australian agencies, like so many other white-collar professions, remained overwhelmingly white. While the accounts of upskilling of non-white staff may have been consistent with Australian “egalitarian” ethos of giving everyone a “fair go,” the Australians’ lack of exposure to diversity at home suggests that interviewees may have missed the more nuanced or challenging aspects of working in a non-white context or simply omitted them. To this end, interviews with local staff about the Australian expatriates may well have echoed Australians’ own criticisms of their American and British counterparts.

Interviews with female Australian advertising employees offer insights into some of the cultural norms that male interviewees did not note. Despite the assumption that “women don’t do well in Asia,” a handful of Australian women were dispatched to Southeast Asia.^{Footnote 42} De Brierley-Newton worked on the Cathay Pacific account in Sydney and was sent to Hong Kong to assist with creative work: “I was in a position of authority there as far as the agency was concerned. But, they would socialize, and it would be men socialising because it was a male-dominated country and agency.” Women were expected to do little more than watch as the men socialized and conducted business over drinks, which explains Brierley-Newton’s observation that she did not “fit.”^{Footnote 43} This, coupled with the brevity of her stay, meant that she was unable to develop a professional relationship with the client. Kaye Schirmann’s experience was different. Working as an art director for O&M in Singapore, she could not recall encountering any sexism at work, although she notes that life outside of work contrasted strongly. “I was very naïve and probably oblivious,” and concedes that her workplace experiences did not mean that sexism was entirely absent from the agency.^{Footnote 44}

The Australian hero narrative also reflects the nature of the interview process and the project underpinning it. Perks and Thomson, in observing that “oral history has always been created in relationships, between interviewer and interviewee, and between memory sources and history makers,” underscore the interview’s dynamism.^{Footnote 45} Such intersubjectivity still occurs in interviews. The fact that the much-maligned advertising agency was deemed to be a topic worthy of academic investigation affected the narratives being proffered. Involvement in the project meant that participants’ advertising careers had not simply been exercises in producing ephemera but that their careers (albeit lucrative) also mattered; and the interview process provided an opportunity to articulate how. The Australian hero narrative enabled interviewees to demonstrate they were not mere cogs in the global advertising machine but rather were proactive and progressive contributors. Such accounts likewise illustrate how interviews are influenced by composure, whereby “commonly understood and recognised frameworks or scripts” are used by interviewees “to give shape to their stories and to aid others’ understanding.”^{Footnote 46}

Interview procedures enhanced the level of intersubjectivity in this project. Prior to each interview, introductory materials on the project’s scope were shared with participants. Among other things, these stated the project’s interest in identifying Australia’s involvement in the global advertising industry. Interviewees were therefore keen to insert and detail their roles—along with that of their compatriots—in this international story. As the interviewer, I am also mindful of my active contribution to this process. Not every interviewee in the broader project spent time working abroad, so those who did inevitably piqued my interest and prompted me to pursue additional details and encourage participants to build and develop narratives around their memories.