Barry Day, creative chief of McCann London (when it was McCann-Erickson and the biggest creative network around) has died aged 91. McCann at the time was vying with J. Walter Thompson for London’s biggest agency (they were full service in those days) and made up a trio of top agencies in and around Charlotte Street with Collett Dickenson Pearce (the most creative) and Saatchi & Saatchi.
Something of a polymath (after he retired at 60 he became a Noel Coward scholar) Day possessed a pronounced sense of mischief. He was the anonymous creative director who reviewed ITV’s ‘Monday’s Newcomers’ (new ads that week) on ITV for Campaign. The identity was a closely guarded secret as commenting critically on such works was then regarded as unsporting by his peers and beyond the pale by ITV. Day was paid in posh Piccadilly bookshop Hatchard’s tokens.
More a creative editor than practitioner, Day won the trust of clients for a number of cheesy big budget epics. He had the priceless knack of seeming to know more than he was letting on, framed by those over-the-top whiskers. A big personality in every sense.
Known quite fondly as ‘the weasel looking though a bog brush’…