George Parker: how the ‘Two Bobs’ invaded Britain

After ten profligate and rewarding years in New York I arrived back in England in 1972. In those days, anyone with that amount of American advertising experience could trouser a small fortune at a British agency. Unfortunately, I allowed myself to be wooed by Geers Gross.

At the time it was regarded as one of the “hottest” agencies in England. It was only after I joined them as creative director, I found out that, in reality, Geers Gross was a giant scam. Bob Geers and Bob Gross, two expatriate Americans, had spent a couple of years sucking on the tit of the London office of Benton & Bowles. Then decided to open their own agency and show the Brits how things were done on Madison Avenue. Being American, everyone assumed they were Ad Geniuses.

The truth was, they knew next-to-nothing about advertising. Or, as we Brits with our unmatched command of “The Queens English” put it: “They didn’t know their arse from their fucking elbow.”

In those days British commercial TV was in its infancy. So anyone with half a brain and a transatlantic accent could pretend to be the master of the genre. This is how the Two Bobs pulled off their scam. Most UK clients assumed they were TV experts, whereas, in reality they’d done little television prior to moving to the UK. So, virtually every spot that came out of their money factory was an animation. Remember Homepride’s “Flour Graders” which was the work of brilliant animator Tony Cattaneo, who used John Le Mesurier as the voice of “Fred?” The beauty of this method of production was that they could simply hand over a bare bones script to an animation house and let them get on with it.

However, being fresh from New York, and full of piss and vinegar, I decided I was going to change this state of affairs by creating lots of live action commercials. Unfortunately, the Bobs not only felt threatened by my attitude, but they also saw me as a danger to their money-making machine, the one dictating regular monthly trips to Zurich with suitcases of well-laundered cash for deposit in their respective Swiss bank accounts. Needless to say, in six short, acrimonious months, The Bobs and I decided to go our different ways. In a fit of hubris, in 1977, the agency opened an office in New York. This survived until 1987, when the flagging US operations were bought by Interpublic and submerged into the BDA cesspit of McCann-Erickson. And yet another “Agency of the Future” bit the dust.