Barclaycard “Put it away, Bough!”: Rowan Atkinson, six years and an IPA Gold

A secret agent sets fire to a Bedouin tent, drives a dinghy into a wall and gets bitten by a snake in the Australian outback. Behind him, a long-suffering assistant called Bough quietly explains what a credit card does. Barclaycard ran that arrangement for six years and 17 films, and turned it into one of the very few British campaigns with an IPA Gold paper to prove it worked. Our take: the smartest structural trick in British advertising, because the funny man is never the one selling you anything.

Credits

• Client: Barclaycard
• Agency: BMP DDB Needham, later BMP DDB
• Cast: Rowan Atkinson as Richard Latham, Henry Naylor as Bough
• Writer, “Moscow” (1991): Jon Mathews, with Fraser Adamson
• Writer and art director, “Teapot” (1994): Jon Matthews and Peter Gatley
• Directors: John Lloyd on the early films, Mark Chapman from 1994
• Music: Howard Goodall
• Final film (1997): written and art directed by Paul Burke, directed by Mark Chapman through Tiger Aspect
• Launched: 1991. Final film broke on 1 November 1997

The problem: a card that had started charging for itself

Barclaycard made a loss for the first time in 1990. Its response was to introduce an annual fee and bolt on a package of added benefits, which is a difficult thing to explain to customers who had previously paid nothing. Barclaycard’s later head of brand marketing, Mark Duckworth, set out that sequence to Marketing Week, and it is the whole brief in one move: the card now cost money, and the reasons why were dull.

Share was drifting downwards in a market filling up with competitors. BMP DDB Needham won the account in June 1990, and the Barclays Group Archive records the agency as responsible for the spy films that followed. The task was not awareness. It was to make eight separate product benefits, the kind of small print nobody reads, into something a nation would watch on purpose.

The idea: put the joke on the man who is not selling

Rowan Atkinson refused to appear as himself. As Paul Feldwick recounts in his account of how the campaign was born, Atkinson arrived with a character he was already turning over: Richard Latham, a bumbling secret agent, Blackadder crossed with James Bond. That refusal is the reason the campaign works, because a celebrity endorsement puts the famous person in charge of the argument, and this format does the exact opposite.

Latham is a disaster. He is vain, incompetent and permanently certain he is in control, and every film ends with him proved wrong. The product information is delivered by Bough, played by Henry Naylor, in the flat voice of a man explaining something for the fourth time.

“Birthing Blanket”, a British Arrows Silver winner in 1992, is the template. Latham holds forth about local custom while the sacred object he is standing on goes up in flames behind him, and Bough uses the pause to mention the free travel accident insurance. The viewer laughs at Latham and, in the same three seconds, absorbs the benefit. Nobody feels sold to, because the person being humiliated is the brand’s own spokesman.

That is a structural solution, not a comedic one. Most humour in advertising decorates the message. Here the humour and the message occupy different mouths, which is why the campaign could carry eight distinct product claims without any of them feeling like a claim.

The craft: a sitcom shot like a Bond title sequence

The films are expensive and they look it. The Barclays archive lists Cairo, Spain and the Australian outback among the locations, and Feldwick adds Marrakesh and Moscow. Shooting a two-hander in a genuine desert rather than a studio backlot is what stops the format collapsing into a sketch show, because the production values give Latham something real to fail against.

The credits are unusually good for the period. “Teapot”, the 1994 British Arrows Gold winner, was written by Jon Matthews and art directed by Peter Gatley, directed by Mark Chapman and lit by Tony Pierce-Roberts, who two years earlier had shot Howards End. Hiring a feature cinematographer for a credit card advert tells you what the budget was for.

Howard Goodall wrote the music, and his six-note sting became the campaign’s real signature. It does the job a slogan usually does, sitting under 17 films across six years and carrying continuity that no amount of consistent copy could.

The writing discipline is in the double act’s timing. Latham gets the long speeches and Bough gets the short ones, so the product line always lands as an interruption. Interruptions are memorable. Monologues are not.

The results

This is one of the best-evidenced campaigns in the British canon. “Barclaycard: Put it away, Bough!” won Gold in Category Three at the 1996 IPA Effectiveness Awards, plus the Charles Channon Award, written by Paul Feldwick, Sarah Carter and Louise Cook with client Shaun Powell.

The paper covers 14 films and eight product benefits between 1991 and 1995, against a media spend of £41.8m. It credits the advertising with stimulating additional turnover averaging three per cent a year, in a UK credit card market then turning over more than £30bn, which makes the arithmetic on payback straightforward. It also records the reversal of a declining share trend, the achievement of brand leadership and an improvement in profitability.

Total spend across the full run reached £60m, and by 1997 Barclaycard had nine million customers and was Europe’s largest credit card brand. The fame outlasted the campaign: in 2003, ICM research for Marketing Week put the Barclaycard character second in a poll of Britain’s best-loved advertising characters on 11 per cent, behind the PG Tips chimps on 19 per cent.

It’s possible that the only honest case-study in the history of marketing is the Barclaycard case written by Paul Feldwick.

Jeremy Bullmore

The creative record is comparable. Nine British Arrows wins between 1992 and 1995, including Golds for “Snakebite” and “Dinghy” in 1993 and “Teapot” in 1994. Very few campaigns collect that much metal and an IPA Gold for the same work.

The ending, and the film it turned into

Barclaycard closed the campaign on 1 November 1997 with a 90-second finale written and art directed by Paul Burke. Latham’s last assignment is to capture Eduardo “the Eel” Valasquez, he fails, bleaches his hair, goes into hiding, then proves he is not the wanted man by producing his Barclaycard, and kisses it. Atkinson’s verdict was that all good things come to an end and that this was a fitting one.

Duckworth’s line on the timing is the one worth keeping: the ads had not become tired, and the brand went out on top rather than suffering a slow lingering death. Almost nobody does this. Most long-running campaigns are put down years after they stop working.

The character did not stop. Latham became Johnny English in the 2003 Working Title film, directed by Peter Howitt and written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and William Davies, and Barclaycard held no rights to him because the man in the adverts had a different name. Edward Shearmur’s score even works Goodall’s Barclaycard sting into the main theme. An advertising character generating a three-film cinema franchise is a level of cultural escape almost nothing else in this archive has managed, including the work in our best advertising campaigns ranking.

What followed at Barclaycard was thinner. BMP DDB held the account and launched “Don’t put it off, put it on Barclaycard”, Angus Deayton took over as frontman, and the business moved to BBH in October 2003 after 13 years. Share had already slipped from 32 per cent in 1998 to 28 per cent by early 2000, on more than £40m of annual spend.

What to steal

• Split the funny from the selling. Give the joke to one character and the product line to another, and the claim stops sounding like a claim
• Hire the comedian for a character, not for their face. A celebrity playing themselves takes the brand’s authority; a celebrity playing an idiot hands it back
• Build a format that can carry a list. Eight benefits needed eight films, and a repeatable structure is cheaper than eight ideas
• Buy a sound, not a slogan. Six notes ran the continuity for six years
• Spend the money on location. The gag needs a real world to go wrong in
• Stop while it still works, and write the ending as a film rather than a memo
• If you create a character, own the character. Barclaycard built Johnny English and got none of the film

The verdict

An IPA Gold, the Charles Channon Award, nine British Arrows and a cinema franchise from a campaign whose entire job was to explain the small print on an annual fee: this is what happens when a structural idea, rather than a funny script, sits underneath the work. It loses marks only for bravery, because a bank hiring the country’s most bankable comedian was the safe answer as well as the right one. The method behind the marks is set out in how we score.