My friend and former colleague Alan Page, who has died aged 71 of lung cancer, was a prolific advertising copywriter. He would churn out headlines all morning only to rubbish them after lunch, but in 1984 his long-term creative partner, Jeremy Pemberton, rescued a scrap of paper that made their names. The resulting poster – for the “Dumb Animals” anti-fur campaign for Greenpeace – established their stripling agency, Yellowhammer, as a pretender in the age in which British competitors such as Collett Dickenson Pearce, Boase Massimi Pollitt and Saatchi & Saatchi led the world.
Of a Barclays Bank commercial the duo later created, loosely in the style of Blade Runner and set in a dystopian near-future of bureaucratic banking, the Sunday Times gushed: “We may finally have reached the time when the commercials between the programmes are more exciting than the programmes.”
