“I’m 64. I’ve taken my pension. I should be at home, covered in chicken soup, shouting 'Nurse, come change me...'” Tony Cullingham tells ±±¾©Èü³µpk10, sharing some home truths about his decision to give ad school another go at the ripe old age The Beatles sang about back in 1967.
“I’ve still got enough passion, enough energy, enough drive and enough commitment to give to the industry,” insists Cullingham, sitting in his fancier new surroundings, off Carnaby Street. “It’s good for me and the agency to try this out and see where it goes.”
For more than 30 years, Cullingham elevated some of adland’s brightest creative sparks, by bringing them firmly down to the ground, just off the A411 in West Herts College. Offering Mr Miyagi-levels of intensive training, his unusual method involved periodically destroying the confidence of young disenchanted graduates, to build them back again into employable creatives.
Likened to getting the golden ticket, what was once a coveted pathway into adland became a school that received too few applications to remain viable.
“I’ve been struggling to recruit for the Watford Course for some years,” Cullingham admits, detailing how he went from around 300 applications to around 12. “There are so many different routes into ad agencies now. I made the decision that if I couldn't get 12 students by September, I would resign.
“Before, I could cherry-pick 20, which means I could build a course from different backgrounds, different skills, different experiences and cultures. When you get 15, you’re almost at a point where you’ve got to accept whoever turns up at your door,” he said.
September came around and regretfully Cullingham had to stick to his guns and resign, telling his social following: “It's clear I'm in the wrong place. I need to be where the students are.”
Well, it turns out that the students are at BBH. As of November, he is swapping Watford for the West End, joining the side that ultimately caused Watford's demise. But this route to ad agency wasn't done on a whim.
“I’ve been talking to ad agencies about the notion of having my course in their offices for quite a few years now,” Cullingham explains. “Last year we worked at Havas, which was a great boon to the course. We did phenomenal work there and the students left well equipped for the industry.”
The issue that Cullingham came up against, time and time again, however, was space. Seven years ago, he recalls how he put together a model with Creative Circle for a free ad school in London, approaching ad agencies for room to teach. But there was no room at the inn. You could say there's something almost biblical about the path that ultimately led to BBH's Barn.
A former Cullingham student, BBH London executive creative director Helen Rhodes has always remembered her Watford roots. In her previous role at BBC Creative, she was involved in setting up BBC Creative U, an in-house incubator.
Wanting it to imitate something close to Watford, Rhodes stayed in touch with Cullingham for advice. “We didn't have the money to get someone in externally,” she says. “And because we were doing it ourselves, you could only designate like Wednesday between four and six. It wasn't as intense and focused as I would have liked, which made me realise that if you want to do something like that, it has to be something closer to Watford.”
BBH's Barn has run for 11 years, training three creative teams, three times a year. After it shut its doors during Covid, Rhodes, who joined the agency in June, says it was a perfect opportunity to refresh how it worked, applying some of her learnings from BBC Creative U.
“The Barn had been on hold since the pandemic. It made me think that it was a great opportunity to start it up again, but to do it differently,” she says. “This time, it's a more focused, 10-month apprenticeship creative incubator, where we get people that are creatively minded but don't have advertising experience as a way of bringing more diverse people into the industry.”
For the coming month, Rhodes and Cullingham are on the lookout for the next generation of black sheep keen to break into the industry, using Cullingham's network to look far and wide.
A selection process based on interviews and creative tasks will be devised to choose candidates, with a focus on ethnic, gender and socio-economic diversity, with plans to open the Barn doors come November.
“The creative lambs at BBH Barn will have the oldest shepherd in town,” jokes Cullingham, who makes it very clear that he will not, and has never been, a teacher. “My daughter said, Dad you need to get a crook”.
“I don’t want to be a teacher. I see myself as a passionate guy about ideas that wants to creative direct a bunch of young people to a point where they’ve got a good body of work to get a job. I’m academically naïve. But I think that’s good,” he explains.
With a policy to make it fun, the next time you're at BBH and walk past a room where a shepherd is tearing work from the wall, don't bat an eyelid. Yes, his teaching is a bit like a cult, but this is where the magic happens.