Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet: the CDP campaign that sold consolation for 25 years

A man with a comb-over sits down in a passport photo booth, and for sixty seconds everything that can go wrong does: the flash fires as he leans in, again as he checks his hair, and a third time as the stool drops him out of frame. Then a match strikes, Bach begins, and a voice says that happiness is a cigar called Hamlet. The cigar itself never appears on screen.

Our take: the most consistent comic idea British television advertising has produced, run for a quarter of a century by Collett Dickenson Pearce until the law switched it off, and marked down here only because nobody ever published the sales figures.

Credits

• Client: Gallaher, for Hamlet, a small cigar launched under the Benson and Hedges name in 1964
• Agency: Collett Dickenson Pearce, London
• Original creatives: Tim Warriner and Roy Carruthers, under creative director Colin Millward
• Music: “Air on the G String” by J. S. Bach, in the jazz arrangement recorded by Jacques Loussier and his trio
• “Photo Booth” (1986): copywriter Rowan Dean, art director Garry Horner, director Graham Rose, starring Gregor Fisher
• Launched: slogan in print by November 1965; on television from 1966 to 1991; in cinemas from 1996 to 1999

The brief: a new small cigar in an agency full of rivals

Hamlet arrived in 1964 as a small cigar from the Benson and Hedges stable, owned by Gallaher, at a moment when the industry’s advertising was about to change shape. Cigarette commercials were banned from British television from August 1965, but cigars and pipe tobacco were not, which meant that a cigar brand with a good television idea could have the medium’s most valuable category almost to itself.

The brief for a television campaign landed with Tim Warriner and Roy Carruthers at CDP, an agency that had opened on 1 April 1960 and was, as Campaign put it in ranking it the second best agency of the last fifty years, adland’s Shangri-La for a brief and brilliant period. The problem was not a lack of talent but a surfeit of it, and the pair struggled to crack the brief.

The idea: consolation, not aspiration

The story CDP told about itself, recorded in Campaign’s archive, is that the answer came on the top deck of a bus late one night as Warriner and Carruthers went home having failed. They lit up, Warriner remarked that happiness was a dry cigarette on a bus, and by the end of the journey they had both the line and the structure of a campaign that would run for 25 years. The Drum adds the detail that the bus had just passed a Charlie Brown poster beginning “Happiness is”.

The premise inverts every rule of the category. Tobacco advertising sold glamour, success and open country; Hamlet sold failure. Each film puts a character into an awkward or humiliating situation, lets it get worse, and then offers the cigar as the small consolation that makes the moment bearable. The product is not a reward for winning but a way of coping with losing.

That inversion gave the campaign an almost infinite supply of scripts. The record of the series includes Christopher Columbus sailing calmly off the edge of the world, a man dying of thirst who finds a can of Heineken and spills it in the sand, a robot built with its head on backwards, and a Dalek defeated by a flight of stairs. Ian Botham, Ronnie Corbett and Russ Abbot all took their turn.

The craft: Bach, Loussier and one unbroken shot

The sound is half the idea. Colin Millward, CDP’s first creative director, suggested Bach’s “Air on the G String”, and the agency used the jazz version by Jacques Loussier’s Play Bach Trio, formed in 1959. As one account of the music notes, the piece builds tension and then releases it, which is exactly the shape of every film: a problem, then the calm of the cigar. It is one of the clearest cases of a brand owning a piece of music, a subject we return to in our guide to music in advertising.

“Photo Booth” is the film that defines the campaign. It began as a sketch on BBC Scotland’s “Naked Video”, developed by Gregor Fisher, Colin Gilbert and Philip Differ, and CDP adapted it within months of the show’s 1986 debut, with Rowan Dean writing and Garry Horner as art director. Shots credits Graham Rose as director, with David Walsh as director of photography and John Hackney producing.

Mick Mahoney, later chief creative officer of Ogilvy UK, chose it as one of the best ads of Campaign’s first fifty years and summarised the technique in six words: “Sixty seconds. One shot. No dialogue.” There are no cuts and no post-production, only Fisher’s physical timing, the stool and the flash. The cigar, its packaging and the brand’s logo never appear on screen, and the film still sells the product harder than any pack shot could.

The casting was the brave part. Mahoney points out that CDP asked a tobacco client to be represented by a middle-aged loser with a comb-over, at a time when the category’s imagery ran to cowboys and gold. Fisher went on to Rab C. Nesbitt and returned for a family portrait sequel, and the Baldy Man became the face of Hamlet for the rest of its television life.

The results: famous, awarded, and unmeasured in public

Here the file thins. Neither Gallaher nor CDP published a sales or share case for the campaign, and no effectiveness paper exists in the public record, so the scoring below reflects fame rather than proven commercial return, as our scoring rules require. What is documented is standing within the industry and with the public.

The Drum records that “Photo Booth” won a Gold Lion at Cannes, and it has been a fixture of every British poll since. Channel 4 placed the Hamlet campaign eighth in its 100 Greatest TV Ads in 2000, ITV ranked it ninth in 2005, and in 2008 Campaign’s vote for the funniest television ads of all time put “Photo Booth” third. John Webster, a rival creative director, is on record calling it probably the greatest television campaign ever made in the British Isles.

Longevity is its own evidence. A campaign structure that ran on television from 1966 to 1991 without a change of line, music or premise was clearly doing something for the brand, or a tobacco company would not have kept paying for it. But a reader should know the difference between an inference and a number, and Hamlet has only the former.

The legacy: switched off by law, twice

The campaign did not end because it stopped working. All tobacco advertising was removed from British television in 1991, closing the loophole that had let cigars stay on air for 26 years after cigarettes were banned, and Hamlet’s television run ended with it. The films moved to cinema in 1996, and in 1999 the brand ran a farewell with an amended line, “Happiness will always be a cigar called Hamlet”.

Even that was not quite the end. The tobacco industry declined to give up advertising voluntarily, and the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002 finished the job for every brand. CDP itself did not survive much longer; Campaign records that an enfeebled agency effectively disappeared in 2001 when its Dentsu parent merged it with a stablemate. The rules that closed the category are set out in our guide to UK advertising rules.

What survives is a technique. Hamlet proved that a brand can be built on sympathy rather than envy, that a piece of classical music can become a logo, and that a single unbroken shot with no dialogue can beat any amount of editing. Those lessons have been borrowed by brands in every category that is still allowed on television.

What to steal

• Sell consolation when everyone else sells aspiration; the audience recognises itself in failure
• Fix the structure and free the scripts: same line, same music, same beat, new predicament every time
• Let the music do the turn from tension to relief, so the product arrives as release rather than as a sales message
• Borrow a routine that already works on stage and give it a better ending
• Keep the product off screen if the feeling is the product
• Shoot it in one take; if the timing is right you do not need an edit

The verdict

Hamlet is a nine for idea and a nine for craft, and “Photo Booth” alone would justify both. It scores a five for bravery, because the casting was daring but the category and the media plan were not, a nine for legs after 25 years on television and three more in cinemas, and a three for effectiveness, because no published number exists and we will not invent one. That gives 70, which is the price of being brilliant in an era that did not write its results down.