Watch This Space

Andrew Rutherford was a creative director at Saatchi and Saatchi and partner at Wight Collins Rutherford Scott.

As an advertising man (ex) I’ve been asked to jot down a few thoughts about the art of creating posters, to coincide with a series of lectures at the Gallery on Poster design.

OK, stop right there!
Look at that first sentence. Is it factually correct? Yes. But is it eye-catching? Challenging? Thought-provoking, moving, witty? No, no, no, no and no.

All good communication must be instantly appealing.
Every poster must engage and persuade the man or woman who sees it. And do it immediately. There are no second chances in an age clogged up with a million messages in a thousand media.

For a poster to work it must have four key features. To illustrate these features I’ve shamelessly used three posters that I created some time ago, but I think, still make the point.

1. A poster must have impact.

It must be the one you notice in a crowd of others.

The Conservative poster LABOUR ISN’T WORKING, (1978) uses the brutality of the heavy black type (the letters were 2ft 6ins high) on a white background, and a simple snaking dole queue to rivet the attention. Nothing fancy here.

The anti-smoking poster uses a naked pregnant woman to get attention. It caused a furore at the time (giving the campaign a massive amount of free publicity). Was it necessary to have a naked woman? Wouldn’t a dressed pregnant smoker have made the point just as well? We thought the model’s nakedness emphasised her and her baby’s vulnerability to the cigarette in her hand.
What do you think?

The Bergasol poster below catches the eye because girls are looking away from us, presenting just two beautiful backs, one white one brown. And they are topless, not for any prurient reason, of course, but better to reveal their tans.

2. A poster must grab your attention.

The poster has caught your eye, now it must engage your brain.

There’s not much to think about in LABOUR ISN’T WORKING. There is, of course, the double attack on rising unemployment (the dole queue) and on the government’s record. But it makes no pretence to suck the viewer in with subtlety.

The anti-smoking poster is more tangential. The poster was mostly displayed in hospitals, doctors’ surgeries and maternity clinics. (Though there was a short TV and press campaign to upset the nation). So there was time to read the headline ‘Is it fair to force your baby to smoke cigarettes?’ and let the implications sink in.

Once the girls in the Bergasol poster have caught your eye they have to hammer home the proposition – that this is an expensive suntan cream, but look how it works. (Generally speaking if a product is more costly than its competitors it’s better to prepare the buyers before they’re in the shop.)
First, pale, girl. “I wouldn’t dream of paying £4 for a suntan cream”
Second, brown, girl “I can see that!”
And of course we can all see that, as well.

3. A poster must provoke a positive reaction.

Thirty years ago The LABOUR ISN’T WORKING poster clearly struck a nerve with millions of voters who were alarmed by the endless union strikes, the closures of factories the de-cline of traditional industries like car manufacture, steel and shipbuilding. The poster panicked the Callaghan Government, and especially Denis Healey, into attacking it bitterly in Parliament.

This attack aroused a storm of publicity around the poster – and Saatchi and Saatchi – which merely drew attention to the poster’s message that Labour wasn’t working.  In 1999 the poster was voted ‘Poster of the Century’ by a panel of respected journalists and advertising experts.

The anti-smoking poster, as I indicated, also attracted a storm of publicity – thus multiplying its message many fold – because of the model’s nudity. But there was no doubt about its effectiveness. Six weeks after the campaign finished a survey showed that awareness of the dangers to the baby of smoking when pregnant had risen dramatically.  This was helped by the detailed copy in the poster, which could spell out the dangers to an audience, in a clinic say, that had plenty of time to read it.

There were no particular dramas surrounding the Bergasol poster. It produced the desired effect with a very healthy increase in sales – but there was a rather less healthy outcome as well. Two years later the sun cream had to be withdrawn. It appeared that the Bergamot oil which was so effective in giving a lovely tan, had one or two less attractive side effects.

4. A poster has got to work.

Well, the Conservative party, and Margaret Thatcher, were elected in 1979. Whether you think the LABOUR ISN’T WORKING poster was effective probably depends on your politics.

As for the anti-smoking poster, one day I was slapped hard across the face when I mentioned to a woman at a party that I had written it. Her pregnant sister, who smoked, had been distraught when she realised she might have been harming her unborn baby.
So I suppose that worked, too.

Bergasol. Well. the poster did its job, but in the end the product didn’t.

The next lecture, Mass Appeal: Propaganda Posters of the First and Second World Wars is on Wednesday 8 October