Colin Millward; Advertising VIP
Hyfler/Rosner
June 1, 2004, Tuesday
Advertising director whose exacting standards helped his
teams to create some of the most memorable of all campaigns
Colin Millward, advertising director, was born on August 29,
1924. He died on May 12, 2004, aged 79.
Colin Millward was the tyrannical creative director of
Collett Dickenson Pearce, the leading agency of
advertising's golden age. His quest for perfection, high
salaries and enormous fees pushed forward the advertising
revolution of the 1960s in which British output came to be
seen as the best in the world.
Among the advertisements created by CDP were the ones for
Heineken with the claim that it "refreshes the parts other
beers cannot reach", and others for Harvey's Bristol Cream,
Bird's Eye, Parker pens, Fiat, Ford, Acrilan, Pretty Polly
and Ronson. For Benson & Hedges it produced some
masterpieces of surrealism which left the viewer to work out
the product with the health warning as the only clue.
When television offered a whole new market, it produced the
famous Hovis advert that used Dvorak's New World symphony to
such great effect, and the commercials in which Reginald
Perrin causes Joan Collins to tip Cinzano over herself.
Millward himself is said to have matched the moment of
defeat in each Hamlet cigars advert to the consolation of
Bach's Air on a G-String.
But Millward's chief contribution was his ability to
recognise and nurture talent.
Charles Saatchi, who was set on his creative path along with
David Puttnam, Ross Cramer and Alan Parker, once said:
"Without Colin Millward, I would still be delivering
groceries in Willesden."
Although a tyrant, Millward was no dictator. He played the
part of the dour Northerner to a tee, and never allowed
himself to get carried away with enthusiasm. His stolid
refusal to tell his proteges what he wanted from them was a
constant source of frustration. David Puttnam once recalled:
"Years later I said to Colin: 'You were a real bastard. You
never gave us any encouragement or steered us in any
direction.' He said, 'No, I did something much more
important. I taught you to bloody well think for yourself.'
" Rarely has a boss been more fulminated against in private,
nor so revered in retrospect.
Colin Charters Millward was born in 1924, the eldest son of
a master mariner. He attended Hull Grammar School, moving
later to Winteringham. He excelled at art, and enrolled at
Leeds College of Art in 1941. He joined the university air
squadron, and soon his education was interrupted by the war.
He was sent by ship to the US to train in fighter aircrafts,
but an outbreak of disease on the transport meant that he
spent his first few months there quarantined on Ellis
Island. His training was again disrupted by bone disease,
and he was shipped back to Britain, in full body plaster, in
time for VE-Day. Not put off from active service, he
travelled with the RAF to India, where he flew Dakotas
before independence.
He returned to education in 1947, but soon went wandering
again. Having won an art scholarship, he spent a year on the
Left Bank in Paris, studying art and living the bohemian but
impoverished life of a garret-dweller.
It was enough to disillusion him; he decided he would never
make a living as a painter, and returned to London, where he
joined the advertising firm Mather & Crowther as a layout
artist. Replying to an ad for their media department, he
jokingly told them he was well versed in all media: oils,
pastels, tempera, everything. They insisted that he join the
creative department instead.
He later moved on to Coleman Prentis & Varley, where he
began to make a great impression on what was then a very
staid and formulaic medium. More importantly, he met John
Pearce.
Once Pearce had moved on to help to found CDP, he very
quickly summoned Millward, who became the firm's first
creative director in 1960. His stewardship of the creative
department managed to be both hands-off and revolutionary.
For instance, he began the practice of organising creative
teams of art directors and copywriters. Colin Salmon, who
worked at CDP from 1967 to 2000, recalled that this shift
"resulted in an atmosphere where everything was
possible...he didn't provide solutions. He made us think
harder than we'd ever thought before."
Millward had no tolerance for anything that seemed to him
pedestrian, predictable or similar to something that had
gone before. Neither did he accept compromise, either from
his art directors or the accountants.
Shy and gruff but iron-willed, he worked in formidable
partnership with the more eccentric John Pearce who,
although at odds with Millward on many issues, supported his
laissez-faire approach to creative freedom and
uncompromising quality.
Under Millward and Pearce CDP hired the best photographers
available for their campaigns, including David Bailey,
Terence Donovan, Elliott Erwitt and Duffy. Some accounts
were so busy that the teams were turning out an advert each
day.
Millward's demolition of advertising's accepted pay scales
allowed CDP to poach the best talent from its rivals. He
seemed to take a perverse pride, though, in the run-down
state of the firm's cramped, shabbily-furnished offices off
a narrow corridor on the fourth floor of a nondescript West
End edifice. Visiting clients were told that all the money
had gone into the staff's pay packets: "We believe they
should have nice carpets on the floor in their homes, not
the office," he would say.
Adapting to the advent of television was not painless. CDP
had developed its skills in print, and the new medium was
daunting at first. Millward dealt with it by pulling in
talent from America, where the format was better understood.
Meanwhile, he had given Parker the full use of a basement in
which to experiment with film.
Few agencies yet realised that the production of television
commercials would become a separate industry, but Pearce and
Millward, keen to start something new, sent their young
producer off to found a new commercials company. CDP
underwrote a generous bank loan, and Parker -almost entirely
by accident -became a director who would go on to make Angel
Heart, Mississippi Burning and Evita, winning a knighthood
for his work.
In 1962 Millward set out a constitution for designers and
art directors which became the Designers and Art Directors
Association. It all came full circle in 1976 when Parker
presented him with the D&AD President's Award.
Millward left CDP in 1984, believing that the best
advertising was created by youngsters on the make. He never
returned to it, though he did dabble in television projects.
Most of his time was thereafter devoted to his first love,
painting.
His artistic sense, his feel for contrast and composition,
had been crucial to the success of the agency. Sir Frank
Lowe, once a managing director of CDP, said: "People whose
reputation is built on the brilliant campaigns they did at
CDP tend to forget that some of what they did was rubbish.
Colin's achievement was in putting all their rubbish where
it belonged -in the bin."
Millward is survived by his wife, Felicity, and by two
daughters.