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.”
Page and Pemberton became one of the leading pairings in the industry’s golden age in Britain. They worked at great speed and were outstanding in their choices of photographers and film directors. David Bailey shot the original “Dumb Animals” poster. For the Barclays ad they used Ridley Scott. They won many awards, including the coveted Design and Art Direction Black Pencil. When Yellowhammer collapsed, a victim of the early 1990s economic downturn, it was one of the UK’s Top 20 agencies.
Born in Sawston, Cambridgeshire, Alan was the son of Constance and John, who worked for his family’s leather glove-making firm. At Sawston village college he became head boy. Exceptionally bright, Alan used Cambridge Art College as a springboard into advertising in London, where the business was reinventing itself as a vital creative force. In 1978 he joined Yellowhammer, a small design-cum-advertising agency set up in 1974 by Pemberton and the charismatic marketer Jon Summerill. He was instrumental in my joining the company in the 80s and we worked together for 18 years in various guises, each serving as best man at the other’s wedding.
Alan was an entrepreneur at heart, with ambitions untrammelled by advertising. In the early 80s he was co-founder of the London comedy club Jongleurs, and in the late 90s he spotted opportunities in the dot-com boom. In the noughties he became a serial entrepreneur, both in property and in nurturing young creative operations. With a business partner, Lewis Blackwell, he recently took on the management of Cresta, the global creative awards.
In Alan there was a hint of Bill Nighy – tall, invariably well dressed and suave. He was no stranger to nicotine and alcohol – with the support of his family, he showed great strength in breaking their shackles. Quick-tempered, sometimes dogmatic, he was a man who had an acute understanding of the creative world.
Alan is survived by his wife, Julia (nee Kearns), whom he married in 1987, and their three children, Jemima, William and Tom, and by his older sister, Bridget.
