Creative Connections: Rob Potts and Andy Jex

Intuition is paramount when it comes to creativity, according to Saatchi & Saatchi ECDs Rob Potts and Andy Jex, whose best ideas often come into being in the pub. That willingness to go with first instincts, along with a seemingly unassailable optimism and a deep respect for each other’s work, makes them a formidable team.

David Knight finds out how this talented, very down-to-earth pair manage to make the creative process look so effortless and what they did to turn Pot Noodle into a health food

It’s what you would expect from two guys who come from no-nonsense neighbourhoods in north-east London, but Rob Potts and Andy Jex have a way of demystifying the process of making good advertising.

They can also make it look ridiculously easy. Take their work for EE. In 2012, Potts and Jex created the TV campaign for the new mobile company formed by the merger of T-Mobile and Orange in which Hollywood star Kevin Bacon demonstrates his astonishing knowledge of mainstream British popular culture.

“I would say we wrote the first year’s work in about an hour,” reveals Potts. “We wrote, presented, sold, researched and made it, and I don’t think we changed anything. It was pretty much an afternoon’s work – but we got it right.”

Potts and Jex reasoned that the Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon parlour game – which sets out to prove that every actor or actress is six or less connections away from Bacon – meant that he was the most connected man in the world, and therefore perfect for a mobile company with the largest 4G network.

And that meant he would know about Coronation Street, Neighbours, Louis Walsh and Danny Dyer. Potts says: “If you look at the first year’s work on EE, a lot of people know that’s clearly me and Andy in the pub on a Friday.”

These moments of brainstorming brilliance do happen occasionally of course. But Potts and Jex, now executive creative directors at Saatchi & Saatchi in London, seem to have made a habit of them down the years. When inspiration struck, it was often their first, purely instinctive take on the brief.

Like when they were creatives at Mother, and were asked to promote Pot Noodle as a health food, despite the fact it was made in a factory in Crumlin, South Wales. “We decided that if it comes out of the ground it’s considered healthy, and as it’s made in Wales, maybe we should pretend it’s mined,” Jex recalls .

With director Stacy Wall they shot the advert documentary-style, using the actual factory staff as their cast – most of whom happened to be former coal miners. “So, 20 years later, we were taking them down the mine again,” adds Jex. What seemed like a daft idea ended up being rather emotional. But how did they sell this idea of Pot Noodle as fuel from ‘beef and tomato mines’? “I think we’re naturally blokes who don’t give up,” says Potts, with characteristic directness. “We know how to push something through. We won’t let a good idea die.”

“People see the energy, excitement and love in the way we do it,” Jex adds. “There’s certainly no flash, smooth sell going on. So long as your enthusiasm and passion for it comes across.”

Potts and Jex have been responsible for some of the most memorable British advertising of the past 15 or so years, much of it for TV. At Fallon, as junior creatives, they created groundbreaking promos for BBC’s radio output, particularly Radio One and 1Xtra.

Then, during five years at Mother, they made award-winners for Stella Artois and Zoo magazine, as well as Pot Noodle. They moved to Saatchi & Saatchi as creative directors in 2009, and devised campaigns for a range of clients, including HSBC, Mattesons, Walls – and the EE launch.

In 2014 the pair became joint heads of the creative department at Saatchi & Saatchi, responsible for the output of the whole agency. As such, with several teams working under them, their role has notably changed . “We don’t sit down and write ads together like we used to,” Jex confirms. “But we spend hours and hours each week in rooms with all of our teams, helping and directing them.”

And the partnership that began almost 20 years ago still thrives. If the ad creative team is, by definition, a special kind of relationship, Potts and Jex’s is very special indeed. They met on the famous Watford Creative Advertising course at West Herts College, started working together, and have simply never stopped. The fact they come from the same part of London could also be said to contribute to their remarkable partnership, though, as Jex says, it’s not the whole story: “People see us as joined at the hip and essentially the same person. If that was true, I don’t think we’d have done what we’ve done.”

It’s you and me against the world

It all started in 1996, when Watford course head Tony Cullingham told his students to pair off into creative teams. “I’d forgotten to put my name down to get a partner, so I went to register on my own,” Potts remembers. “As I arrived, Andy was coming out.” He says not only had he already decided that Jex was “the smartest guy on the course”, but also “he was the only one who talked like me.”

Potts, 46, is from Romford in Essex, just outside London where, “if you had half an education you went into the City.” He had spent two years in stockbroking, before quitting. “I was rubbish. When the Stock Exchange was blown up by the IRA, I took that as a sign.” He was always good at writing, and advertising appealed to him.

Jex, 42, comes from neighbouring Enfield and was doing a generic arts degree in Cheltenham when he discovered the Watford course and decided to apply. It took him over a year to get on it, and when he did it was a culture shock. “It’s properly intense. Tony trains you, gets you ready for working in the industry. It’s tough.” He adds that when he and Potts started working together, they gelled immediately, and what marked them out straight away was their attitude. “We’d only been doing it for two months, so obviously our work was shit. But when everyone else did work that was crap, they always split up to look for another partner. But we just said: ‘We’ll carry on until we do something great.’”

Potts says what their similar backgrounds also gave them was “a bit of a gang mentality. Instead of doubting ourselves, we’d just say the other people weren’t good enough to judge our work. We were belligerent like that.” According to them, they were creating the type of work that hadn’t been done before – and speaking to people like themselves. The first indication they were on the right track came when they went on one of their first ad agency placements, at McCann Erickson, while still at West Herts.

They asked to work on a real brief, on a Durex ad. “I remember going to the creative director and asking if we could pitch an idea,” says Potts. “He said: ‘Yeah yeah…’ and I said: ‘Ok, so it’s sensitive. One twin is having sex, and the other one’s at work and she gets the orgasm’.”

That script was made into a commercial, directed by Chris Palmer (now head of Gorgeous), before Potts and Jex had a job. Then another ad for Super Noodles, starring the then-unknown Martin Freeman, came out of a placement at Mother. When they landed their first proper agency job it would be in the legendary creative department at BMP DDB, led by Richard Flintham and Andy McLeod, but only after Mother co-founder Robert Saville had tried to sign them to his own agency. 

Ultimately they were only at BMP DDB a few months, as Flintham and McLeod departed to set up the London office of Fallon in 1998, and Potts and Jex were the first creative team to join them. The pair were to contribute to Fallon’s almost instant success, and learn from Flintham and McLeod at close quarters. “We’d not even been in a job a year, and suddenly we’re working next to our heroes,” says Jex. Potts says it was the best education they could have had. “We learned to be really fast. But we’ve always been quick. Never had more than three ideas. Not because we can’t have them, but because we’re at a level where we edit in our heads.”

Jex puts a slightly different spin on Potts’ assertion. “Often, what we ended up presenting were the things we did in the first hour. We’d then try to do something else, because people told us to do more. But we’d end up going back to the first idea.” And it seems that the partnership has worked, perhaps in the classic fashion, because Potts instinctively throws out ideas, and Jex responds to the good ones. Potts sums it up. “I spout out a load of old shit that sometimes has a nugget of gold in there. Andy’s the brains. He can go: ‘That’s the bit, that’s what you mean.’”

Jex agrees that he is less instinctive: “I want to make sense of it and make it work.” He adds that this process may happen anywhere – and quite often, not surprisingly perhaps, in the pub. “That’s where people talk freely and openly. You’re not sitting there with the brief in front of you, you’re not trying to think logically,” he says. “Pub conversations generally lead to great advertising ideas.” They also broadly stand by the traditional distinctions of copywriter and art director. Jex says, “It gives you ultimate responsibility over one thing. Sometimes a decision needs to be made immediately on a word or a colour. One person has to make that decision and be responsible for it.”

At Fallon, they worked mainly in print, notably for two new high street brands called Starbucks and Nando’s, before getting their TV break with the promos they made for BBC radio. In fact, their breakthrough ad for BBC Radio 1 was down to last-minute inspiration, born out of desperation. After weeks of trying to get to grips with the DJ talent they were promoting, Potts recalls escaping to a friend’s PR agency an hour before they were due to present their ideas. “He just asked us: ‘What do you want to say?’ and then it just came to me – they’re ‘music missionaries’.”

The resulting ad saw DJ Gilles Peterson handing out white label vinyl to passers-by in London, like a Jehovah’s Witness in a hoodie. It was shot around London in a documentary style that has since become commonplace.

That was the start of their run of TV ads, including a clutch of award winners. “We learned that what we’re best at is coming up with a high concept that sums up what the thing’s about, then giving it away to a director,” says Potts, of their BBC work at Fallon, where they won their first Pencil, for Nick Gordon’s ad for 1Xtra. “Be smart enough to stand back and let people do their jobs.”

Learning from the best

In 2004, they finally accepted one of Robert Saville’s regular invitations to join Mother, working within the agency’s then-revolutionary horizontal structure. They encountered clients for the first time, and they prospered, due, in no small part, to the way they would back up their ideas with passionate self-belief.

Once again, they felt they were learning from a master ad man in Saville. “Robert is an amazing person – a great planner, creative, businessman – he can wear all the different hats,” says Potts. “And like Richard and Andy, he was a boss who could crack it if you couldn’t. It was a good kind of pressure.” The ‘entrepreneurial’ spirit at Mother, where different creatives teams worked on the same business, also suited them. “There was so much to learn, particularly for the job we do now,” says Jex. 

In joining Saatchi & Saatchi in 2009 they gained their first creative director positions, arriving as deputies to department heads Kate Stanners and Paul Silburn. And although they joined primarily to work on Cadburys, which left the agency within six months of their arrival, the pair went on to create many further successes, with Mattessons Hank Marvin and Walls Kitchen – both directed by their old boss Andy McLeod – as well as the launch of EE prominent among them.

But what happens when they get a brief and can’t agree on a way forward? “I don’t think it’s ever happened,” says Potts. “We ain’t got that ego thing.” Jex explains further: “In a team of two you haven’t got the fear of saying something stupid, which you would in a room of 20 people. You can say: ‘Yeah, that’s a bit shit, isn’t it?’ And I think if one of us has clearly got a passion, or seen something that the other one can’t, the other one is more likely to go: ‘All right, I’ll back you on it’.”

Now as department heads, part of the job is to apply the principles they have learned over the years to the teams they work with. The department is housed in an open-plan office, so their teams have access to them all the time.

They don’t want clones of themselves, but they do want to see similar self-belief. “Sometimes you’ll say: ‘I can’t see why you love that so much, but if you believe it, we ain’t going to stand in your way’,” says Potts, once again cutting to the chase. “It takes just as long and it’s just as hard to make a shit ad as a good ad. So the secret is, only show something that you really want to make.”