“70s CDP and Millward deserve all the praise that’s heaped on them.”

Joann Mackenzie in Campaign’s Letters page

This goes out to all you young London creatives from someone in New York who was, once upon a time, a young American girl writing copy at CDP.

Now I imagine you all may be sick to death of hearing about the glory days of CDP. And I imagine you all wonder if its halls were really so hallowed.

Well, no, its halls felt anything but hallowed at the time. But, yes, there really were days of glory between the blood, sweat and tears that went into going for the gold back then at Colin Millward’s Collett Dickenson Pearce.

Colin’s gone now, I’ve just learned from Campaign, 14 May issue. Joined the dear and darling departed likes of Vernon Howe, Phil Mason, Rick Cook, Rita Dempsey and Carol Nelson.

How weird those words look on the screen in front of me. How impossible that these people are no longer laughing and living and loving among us. How telling that the first word I typed to describe them was “laughing”.

We should all be so lucky to have had our lives graced – for even (like me) a little while – by the likes of Colin Millward. He did not approve of me at first because I was American. And when he did decide I made the cut, he told me so by saying: “What I like about you, Jo,is you’re so… un… American.” (It took me decades and George W Bush finally to figure out that maybe he was right.)

Colin was a gentleman who, when I had to leave CDP for several months to be with my sister who was dying of cancer, simply said: “Go, Jo. We’ll take care of everything.” By which he meant an unlimited leave of absence with full pay and more love and good will than I perhaps deserved and have certainly not experienced in all the years I have lived since.

Colin was a prototype for what American economists later coined as the “trickle-down effect”. John … ‘so lucky to have had our lives graced by such a fellow’ Salmon was, in style, very much like him. Frank Lowe was a more volatile version. Everybody at CDP was, or became, through osmosis, very much like Colin – the rule of thumb was: God help you if your work did not come up to scratch. But God bless you big time if it did.

Which certainly beats the prevailing mood in advertising today, which pretty much comes down to, as my Irish grandmother used to say: “Six cents-worth of God help us.”

As a New Yorker who had cut her baby copy teeth back at Bill Bernbach’s DDB, I thought I’d seen it all. But as an American advertising person in love with living in London, when Lowe hired me into his group at CDP, I came to feel as if London itself had taken my hand in a marriage that would never end in memory.

CDP remains for me like Never-Never Land. If you had to choose who Peter Pan was, there would be a lot of contenders. But I guess, in the end, it would have to be Colin. Thank you, Colin, and all of you who let us do what we could only do at CDP.

Just the other day I ran across my Pretty Polly poster in the current issue of Archive magazine. Seems like yesterday that I was sitting on my bed on a Sunday afternoon, tracing those legs (because I can’t draw) from a page in a fashion magazine and writing the words “When was the last time a man said you had a great pair of jeans?” (I’d just come back from the south of France and was tan and skinny and had chucked my omni-wear jeans for a short sundress).

There was no strategy behind that poster. There was no anything except a requisition for a one-off ad in a fashion glossy. What made it make advertising history was one thing that saw to it that it was plastered on 48-sheet posters all over England, and that one thing was CDP.

I am still a copywriter and I still love doing outdoor and I still have posters running on bus sides and plastered on kiosks all over New York and I still get a kick out of every one of them and every time I see one I think: “This one’s for everyone at CDP.”

Was CDP all it was cracked up to be? Ah,young London creatives, you should be so lucky.

Joann (Mond) Mackenzie