Description

I was a lowly copywriter at Saatchis. I happened to pass MD Adam Crozier’s office one friday evening just as Random House called asking for ideas over the weekend to launch a book by an unknown author. Adam – who had never even spoken to me before – shoved the brief at me. I got together with another creative prepared to work the weekend, Michael Campbell.

The budget was titchy so the cleverness of the idea was the way we used graffiti to spraypaint across other posters for our own purposes. So, with a few spraypaints and the employment of a few out of work actors, we made a huge ad campaign.

The book got to number 4 in the list of UK best-sellers and James Patterson is now hugely famous. The graffiti campaign got loads of PR and won a Cannes bronze and a Campaign Press and Poster silver nomination.

It amused me that graffiti artists, who didn’t know that Brett Allen was a character in a book, started scrawling that Brett Allen was innocent all on their own.