Andy Law
Look who just showed up in my mailbox: Andy Law. Andy ran C/D's London office (along with David Abraham), and then the two of them went on to found St. Luke's, which I wrote about in Fast Company magazine in 1996. [I got email from readers for years after I wrote that article. No other piece I've ever written generated so much response.]
Andy, along with Praveen Kenneth, has started a new ad agency called Law & Kenneth. (Although that ampersand is actually a flame, but more on that when you visit their website.)
Andy has a book out in the UK called "Experiment at Work: Explosions and Experiences at the Most Frightening Company on Earth." The title alone should make you want to buy it, which you can do from Amazon's UK website by clicking here.
Now, what makes Law & Kenneth interesting to me is that one of the people on their advisory council is Dame Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop.
One of my favorite C/D stories, and one I dine out on whenever I feel like dropping names, is the time I went to Anita and Gordon Roddick’s estate near Aberdeen, Scotland, with Andy and David and Marty Cooke and Merry Cutler, I believe. (Anita: "Paul and Lynda live just over there." As in McCartney.)
This was in the early ‘90s, and the Internet was just rearing its head, and I was brought to Scotland to talk to Anita about the importance of this new technology called the World Wide Web. (This was when Netscape was still called "Mosaic.") I brought my Mac laptop and dialed into the Internet using Compuserve and started my demo by showing her what chat rooms were like.
She was instantly fascinated, and asked me to take her into a gay men’s chat room! I did so, and she adopted the persona of a 35-year-old man somewhere in New Jersey and started to chat online (with me doing the typing) with some guy in Florida, who had no bloody idea who he was really chatting with! Finally, she had me type “Have you ever used ‘Mango Body Butter’ during sex?” And with that, I said “Anita! You cannot entice this poor man as an excuse to buy your products!”
Later, at the dinner table, I mentioned how much I respected Laurence Oliver as an actor. She then proceeded to do a mercilessly wicked imitation of a hunchback Laurence Olivier doing “Richard III." I’ve never been able to watch Olivier with a straight face again!