The founders of the Leith Agency in their 1980s heyday. L–R: Pete Mill; John Denholm; Roger Stanier
THE LEITH AGENCY T he Leith Agency sprang to life on the docks of promoting Scotland at the Shanghai Expo, award- winning direct marketing for SEAT and creating new venture Leith Records to help promote local Scottish music. Some of their best IRN-BRU adverts are shown below.
the capital in 1984. Leaders of the pack, they became best known for creating much-loved advertising for brands such as Carling, Honda, IRN- BRU and Tennent’s. Recent achievements include
25TH BIRTHDAY I WAS THERE!
Johnny Vegas spins out on stage at The Stand, February 2000. By Tommy Sheppard, owner of The Stand comedy clubs
Johnny came up to do this solo show; it was a very bleak and miserable Wednesday night, and the place was rammed with people expecting to see the master at work – this was when he was pretty much at the height of his stand-up powers. He comes back after his
interval, having been in our little backstage area, which quite often doubled up as a cleaning cupboard, trailing this big buffing machine behind him. He gets a member of the audience to find a nearby socket and plug it in, then proceeds to put it on a table – we’ve got tiny, circular tripod tables, which just about hold this thing. So he gets the people in the front row to clear their glasses off, puts the buffing machine on the table, stands up on the table, stands on the machine, and then switches it on. It’s got quite a powerful motor, so the thing starts to rotate at 60 revolutions a minute or whatever, and it spins him round like a top until he’s propelled off into the audience.
It was typical of the improvisational and just plain mental nature of his act, really. (As told to Niki Boyle)
‘The thing starts to
rotate at 60 revolutions a minute and spins him round like a top until he’s
propelled off.’
24 THE LIST 23 Sep–7 Oct 2010
GERRY FARRELL
The creative director of the Leith Agency on making a marketing success out of IRN-BRU
Step out the house and walk down any street in Scotland. If you get as far as the nearest bus stop without seeing somebody carrying or drinking IRN- BRU, I’ll eat my own pants. At Leith we can hardly believe our luck that we actually get to make ads for the most famous brand in Scotland.
Although we never deliberately set out to offend anybody, we have had a few complaints over the years. One poster got in The Guinness Book Of
Records for the Most Complaints For A Poster (I’m not saying which one it was in case it all kicks off again). Crucially though, only one complaint was ever upheld: the second time we ran the telly campaign with the lady who sings ‘ . . . even though I used to be a man, even though I used to be a man!’. It was felt to be offensive to transvestites and, with the benefit of hindsight, it was the right decision to take it off air.