Mad Dogs & Englishmen’s Nick Cohen on the agency’s chaotic hunt for truth in advertising

The New York ad agency Mad Dogs & Englishmen has been closed for almost 20 years, but its creative legacy lives on. In a lengthy tribute post in 2019—which includes loads of examples of the agency’s best work—the British creative director Dave Dye likened Mad Dogs to the Velvet Underground. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here “They didn’t sell as many records as the Bay City Rollers, but their influence to the next generation was huge,” Dye wrote. “At the time, most advertising was glossy and sophisticated … you needed decent production budgets. [But Mad Dogs] could create arresting, funny campaigns with the change you’d find down the back of a sofa.” Cohen founded Mad Dogs in 1991 as basically a rebuke of the entire advertising business. After stints at Mavity Gilmore Jaume in London as well as Chiat/Day and Ogilvy in the U.S., he’d grown sick of how slick, manipulative and deceptive most advertising was. He was, frankly, feeling depressed and angry. So, he resolved to start his own agency, one built on irreverence and truth telling. It would turn out to be a wild 14-year ride, much of which is recounted in Cohen’s new book, “Honest!”, which tells the agency’s story through his eyes and those of his co-conspirators. Cohen recently spoke with Ad Age from his home in the Bay Area about the impetus for the book, some of the agency’s breakthrough work, and what it’s been like reconnecting with old friends to gather memories of the place. The interview has been edited and condensed. What made you want to write the history of Mad Dogs now? Mad Dogs closed in 2005. A few years after that, I had this idea to write a book about the experience. I wanted to write a book about honesty. Then I started having doubts. Imposter syndrome, you know? Is anyone going to be interested in this? So I put it on ice. But then Dave Dye called out of the blue. He had decided to write something about Mad Dogs. He had gathered this archive of work, all on his own, and he said some nice things. So I was sort of empowered by that. I was like, “Oh, OK, I guess there is a legacy here.” So I decided to tell the story, as I remembered it, from the very beginning. It’s an interesting origin story, starting an agency out of disgust for the business. It’s completely true what I wrote [in the book]. I got really depressed working in the business, and quite angry, to the point where I didn’t want to do any work that even looked like an ad because I was so ashamed to be working in the industry. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s do this. It’ll be cool.” I had a genuine distaste for it all. Everything was inside out to me. You’d go into a big agency and all the senior people, the seasoned vets, would have these lovely offices with windows and all the light coming in. And all the youngsters were sequestered in these dark rooms. I was like, “Aren’t we trying to grow these young people? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” It came from me wanting to get a group of people to work together who actually like each other, and stop being so selfish and stop lying to each other. It was like, “Look, none of us know anything. So let’s get off our high horses and figure this thing out.” You ended up taking a very renegade approach to creative. How much of that was fully formed out of the gate, and how much did you figure out along the way? I was an art director, so when I started out, I always thought it was about doing something that looked cool. I thought it was about design—that’s what creativity was. Then I had this realization that, no, advertising is actually just connecting with people. We’re in a relationship business. It’s about getting someone to go, “I like that company” or “I like that person.” It’s no different than making friends. And the people we tend to like most in life are people who are humble or self-deprecating, who don’t take themselves too seriously. They’re the people who are attractive. So those dots joined for me when I realized it had nothing to do with design. If you go back and look at the old VW ads, they were just really stripped down and basic. If you look at the work Tibor Kalman was doing—like M&Co—there wasn’t a lot of art direction, and that was the beauty of it. It was very minimalist. Stick a picture down with a thought. And then the other thing was, who invented this idea that an ad is always five things? You’ve got a picture, a headline, a block of copy, a logo and a slogan. That seems really, really complicated. What if it was just one thing or two things? What if you could reduce it down to the minimum amount of stuff? So it all came out of a slight contempt—that advertising had had its own way for a long time and needed to have a bit of humility. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs It seems like you soon found people as frustrated as you were. It all came from the people working there. Mikal Reich, he was a real provocateur. Shalom Auslander. These kids were so sharp and sort of cynical and definitely had a lot of contempt for advertising. I think I was probably quite sweet. So I would take what they were doing and make sure it wasn’t hateful, you know? That it had a wink to it. I think it was a good combo. As alienated as you were, did you feel you were also part of a certain tradition? Agencies like Ally & Gargano made honesty a big part of their philosophy back in the ’60s. I personally had my influences, but I don’t know if they completely connected with the work. I liked Dave Trott of Gold Greenlees Trott and the work they were doing. It seemed more off the cuff and punk rock. I wrote about David Abbott [of Abbott Mead Vickers, now AMV BBDO] because I liked his whole take on, “Don’t be a dick.” Nobody turns on the TV to watch an ad. So if you’re going to do one, just don’t be a dick. And then [John] Hegarty—I always loved how clever [Bartle Bogle Hegarty] were with what you would visually look at. You’d have to turn the ad sideways to read it in a different way or something. But in terms of the work, I was more influenced by other things. You remember those Guerrilla Girl posters in SoHo? They were these very in-your-face, loud, almost subversive thoughts. I really liked how they disrupted your walk down the street and caught your attention. I fell in love with big, bold, blocky words. Advertising had gotten a bit too slick with lots of kerned type. I didn’t want our stuff to look anything like that, because if we did that, we would be guilty before proven innocent. Looking back, what are some ads you were really happy with? There was the ad for the Dostoevsky play—the warning poster. That was a big breakthrough because it literally came out of the fact that I had been dragged to the theater and stuck in some horrible play I didn’t like. So it was a genuine truth that came to me—we need to warn people not to go to this thing, because if it’s not their thing, they’re going to have the worst time. The surprise to me was how it sold out the show instantly and sold a ton of posters. Also, our first ads for the Village Voice. “No, I don’t want to subscribe.” It was literally slagging off the very thing you’re trying to sell. But the Voice was always about very honest journalism. We had a client—he didn’t change a single word. In fact, he adored the work because he thought it would be fun to see the reaction of the journalists, who were always so high and mighty about their writing. He thought it would be funny to use advertising to bring them down a peg or two. The third one, I’d say, is the Thom McAn work. That really came out of planning. I think it was Susan Tracy who had this idea: “We should apologize for their shoes being so bad.” She was a Wisconsin girl—very Midwestern and polite. When we presented that, the client was like, “I love that. That’s a great way to recalibrate and say we’ve changed by apologizing for our sins, so people could give us another chance.” It takes a really brave client to make that leap. It’s not intuitive. But in life, when people actually stand up and say, “I’m sorry, I did something wrong,” human beings are very forgiving. Who picked up the mantle after Mad Dogs closed? The whole Crispin Porter phase was an incredible phase for advertising. I think Kirshenbaum started that a little bit, then Crispin came in and did it in a really big way, where it was all about every touch point and experience. But it was so crafted. There was so much love and care put into every single thing. I feel like today, that kind of care isn’t really happening. That kind of craft isn’t happening. It’s all fast and loose and at the speed of social media. For agencies, the money is not there, so they’ve had to change. It’s interesting watching brands like Liquid Death or Oatly or Airbnb, where they have amazing in-house groups. Liquid Death is doing what Crispin did for Mini, right? But the agencies can’t afford or are not paid to do that these days. So it’s quite interesting. The mantle’s been taken by in-house places, and the agency world is kind of floundering. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here It must have been fun reconnecting with all the old Mad Dogs folks while putting the book together. Yeah. I started the whole process with a survey. “Tell me about your memories and what you got out of the place.” But I didn’t want it to be like a yearbook, where the only people who can enjoy it are people who worked there. So then I said, I want to talk about honesty. It was lovely getting different people’s takes on it, and building a book around the people who were there and honoring that. I think the testament of good places is that the alumni go on to do their own things and reinvent the industry. It’s so lovely seeing places like Joan [co-founded by Mad Dogs alum Jaime Robinson] come about. I feel like a proud dad.

Mad Dogs & Englishmen’s Nick Cohen on the agency’s chaotic hunt for truth in advertising

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