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“curated” by Malcolm McLaren, who,
after assembling the Sex Pistols to bring
us punk in the mid-1970s, went on to
become a sort of arts-fusion world citizen;
the voiceover was the delicious sound of
the Scottish-Italian actor Tom Conti;
and the advertising agency was Saatchi
& Saatchi, at that point the best-known
agency in the world. Its wonderfully
slippery claim for BA was that it was “The
world’s favourite airline”. It was 1980s
Britain and they had all united to praise
the joys of long-haul air travel.
For the past 150 years, transport has
given us some of the most compelling
advertising imagery possible. Advertisers
sold their clients’ brands of trains and
boats and planes: the Flying Scotsman
snaking across the country; the giant bulk
of transatlantic liners rendered as Deco
drama; the astonishing beauty of the
newest “Big Bird” jets. But advertising
also sold the zeitgeist of speed and
luxury so powerfully that you can date the
themes and tropes to the year at a glance.
The BA advert, as it turned out,
captured the spirit of a group of
interlinked 1980s mythologies: the
glamorisation of air travel and airlines;
the high point of British “soft power”
as projected through our films, clothes
and music; the rise of British “creative”
advertising to apparent world leadership;
and the seemingly unstoppable rise of the
Saatchi brothers, Maurice and Charles.
Over the next 10 years they’d all be
humbled by the late 1980s recession;
by the rise of budget airlines and
price competition which changed the
marketing of airlines for ever; by the dip in
British confidence after the Great Leader
Margaret Thatcher was replaced by theGrey Man John Major. The Saatchis,
meanwhile, began the grim slide that
ended with them being ousted from the
agency group they had founded.
“The Face” first aired on British TV in
1989 at a time when “mainstream media”
TV still achieved huge audiences. Channel
proliferation and the huge expansion of
satellite TV was still to come. It was a
national water-cooler moment, publicised
and reviewed like a programme. It was
one of a series of expensive talking-point
stunners that Saatchi & Saatchi had made
for BA since it won the account in 1982.
Its mission was to turn the airline into an
exciting global player from a drab 1970s
nationalised industry.entire population of Manhattan). This
commercial launched the slogan that
BA was “the world’s favourite airline”.
Arguably, the Saatchis had been forced to
do something radical; BA was in such a bad
way that conventional claims wouldn’t
be credible. And the whole thing was
designed as much to enthuse demoralised
staff as to revive the consumer brand.
The adverts served two other
interlinked purposes. The first was to
make Saatchi & Saatchi famous outside
the bubble of Madison Avenue and
Mayfair agencies with WASP-ey names
like J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy &
Mather. The aim was to become globally
famous, a real business with a stock-
market flotation. The second purpose was
privatisation, a key strategy of Thatcher’s
fiercely free-market government. To do
that, they needed to add value.
The late Lord King, chairman of BA
since 1981, told me in 1995: “My brief
was very simple and direct. It was to
organise the company in such a way that
it could be sold to the investing public
rather than continue as a state-owned
industry.” King had been introduced
to the Saatchi brothers—whom he’d
never heard of—by an art dealer friend.
“Over dinner they said, ‘Let’s call it the
world’s favourite airline’. Pride. That’s
what we found. And we found it when
the Manhattan advertisement was run.
And today that advertisement is in the
Museum of Modern Art in New York.”
The Tory government—and Thatcher
in particular—were convinced of the
voodoo-like power of advertising
and marketing. And, of course, the
Saatchis started working for the
Conservatives in 1978 and were widely CAME
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The Saatchis’ first big BA commercial
“Manhattan” (1983) had broken with
the conventional themes of airline
advertising—safety standards, service,
exotic locations, sexy stewardesses—in
favour of an audacious combination of big
claims and an amazing Spielberg-like film
in which the Manhattan skyline hovers
over a London Victorian suburb (the story
was that the number of people BA brought
across the Atlantic in a year topped theCALLING BA-DAY!
From left: Maurice and Charles Saatchi, 1979;
Campaign, September 11, 1970; Lord King,
Chairman of BA from 1981 to 1993; Daily Express,
March 13, 1991; Daily Express, December 16, 2009The whole thingwas designed asmuch to enthuseBritish Airways’demoralised staffas to revive theconsumer brand09-19British-Airways.indd 56 18/07/2019 09:08