Mammoth Meets: Graham Daldry, the writer behind “Should’ve gone to Specsavers
Introduction:
“Should’ve gone to Specsavers…”
One of the most famous lines in advertising history!
So it was a major surprise to bump into the writer behind the iconic Specsavers advert in East Bergholt, the remote Suffolk village where we have recently set up a satellite base.
After a thrilling showdown on the tennis court for the village club championships, we sat down with Graham Daldry to discuss his career and work – his experiences crafting one of the world’s most love dads, his thoughts on today’s creative world, and his top tips for aspiring copywriters and designers.
Four years in the making, two decades not out…
Graham transitioned into advertising from academia, having completed a PhD in Victorian Literature. After beginning his career as a copywriter at creative agencies including TBWA\MCR and Ogilvy London, he took on an in-house role as creative lead at Specsavers.
When Graham arrived in Guernsey in 1999 to lead the Specsavers creative team, the company was in a very different place to the household name brand of today. The UK spectacles market was dominated by independent opticians. Alongside Specsavers, bigger chains such as Vision Express, Boots, and Dollond & Aitchison all held 10-15% market shares, with the independents taking 50%. By the early 2000s the situation appeared fairly static.
Targeting a broad national audience, Specsavers needed to break the mould and try something new to invigorate their target consumer and shake up the retail market for spectacles.
Graham saw the potential for an ambitious campaign based on comedy, but first he needed to get everyone else in the business onside. In collaboration with the Marketing Director, Graham’s team spent four years making their case to achieve buy-in from key stakeholders across the organisation.
“In a normal agency cycle it would never have happened because I'd have moved on.”
An early advert structured around eyesight, with the simple pre-“Should’ve” slogan “You need glasses!”, revealed an appetite for that typeof ironic and subtle humour.
Another television ad featuring a sloth became an overnight hit in the playgrounds. “That generated some real excitement at Specsavers”, remembers Graham, “it was the first time they’d seen advertising repeated like that.”
Rather than a “Eureka!” moment, the “Should’ve gone to Specsavers” line evolved from these early comic experiments.
But almost as soon as he wrote it, Graham knew he’d struck gold.
“It caught on very quickly. It had been a long journey, but within a month of the line coming out, we were getting unheard-of PR, and people were repeating it. It was insane actually, the way it took off.”
“Should’ve” instantly caught the public imagination, like a viral meme in today’s terms. The line became embedded into the nation’s popular culture, and there it still remains!
Part of its magic is the line’s endless applicability to the blunders of everyday life – from dodgy haircuts and mismatched outfits, to football linesmen missing offside calls – everyone “Should’ve gone to Specsavers”! It was an instant hit on the football terraces, and as an IpswichTown fan, Graham fondly recalls the first time he heard it aimed towards a referee at Portman Road. A moment to remember, but just one in an unending series of repeats, translations, and crossovers into new genres and contexts.
Collywobble – a timeless TV advert
Over the course of its heyday, from 2007-2017, Graham wrotesome of the most memorable TV adverts, including the famous short-sighted shepherd.
“Collywobble” tells the tale of a seasoned shepherd. We seehim bringing his sheep from the hills for their spring shearing, jumping nimblyfrom crag to crag as he herds them into his little yard, just as he has doneevery year for the last 60 years.
This year, however, will be somewhat less traditional.Arthur accidentally shears his faithful sheepdog. As we see him standing proudly at the end of the commercial, a monument to the human struggle against the combined forces of nature and time, the inevitable words appear: “Should've gone to Specsavers.”
Filmed in the Faroe Islands, with a majestic old Irish song in the background, the ad is an aesthetic and sonic masterpiece, evoking a rugged but idyllic rural scene. The magic moment is the reversal at the end.The viewer knows what’s coming, but it’s the subtlety of it that makes it work– the knowing glances of the sheep, and the wary and disconcerted pause of the sheepdog. Advertising mastery. Graham wrote it in 2008, and the ad is still running, some 15 years later.
That’s one thing that really surprised me during our interview. So many Specsavers ads that I considered recent, like the badly installed billboards campaign, had actually been written by Graham and his team over a decade ago. Because so much of good advertising appeals to our basic instincts and primal needs, effective campaigns can prove timeless.
Copywriting as a Discipline
Graham considers the reversal – delivering the opposite of what you expect, like a sheared sheepdog – a key weapon in the arsenal of a copywriter. “Essentially, it’s all about storytelling.” He refers to the legendary VW Beetle ad that ran in America from 1959. “Think Small”, it said, the very opposite of what every competitor in the automotive industry was saying at the time.
“I think advertising is a rigorous discipline, that involves a high-level understanding of communication and language. It’s all about clarity and accessibility.”
Graham is a writer who takes inspiration from a wide range of sources, from Victorian literature to quantum physics! But for today’s aspiring copywriters, he recommends checking out a short lecture, The Shapes of Stories, by the brilliant novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
“That’s what we do, we tell stories”, says Graham. “And there are proven techniques to do it better. Certain tricks work across the board, to make stories memorable…”
Where we’re all going wrong – the Creative Brief
Graham is currently developing an educational course and a strategy consultancy to help tackle what he has identified as a significant stumbling block in the creative industry – the failed brief.
Whether delivered poorly, or misinterpreted, the briefing proves the downfall of many a creative project.
“A lot of interesting work is done in the brief, and there are three key things you should always come away with.”
For more effective briefs, you need to think about the following:
1) Who you're talking to
“The brief must include an accurate description of the audience- pen portraits of target audience are bloody useless. You need to know:
a) how old they are
b) what they do
c) the evidence that points to those assumptions
If you've got the wrong person in your head, you'll do the wrong work.
It's not a creative exercise; this part of the process should be informed by data.
But most importantly, I always say you have to talk to the person you’re writing for.
Five minutes of conversation is, in my view, worth eight miles of printed data (on single-spaced A4 sheets, laid end-to-end)! ”
2) Where the work is going to go
I.e., where is the target person going to encounter the ad or content? Online on their laptop? On TV? In a brochure? On Instagram on their mobile phone? On the billboards of the London Underground?
3) What you're going to say
“Focus first on the message, make it an engaging message for your target audience.
Too many people try to write a line. Come up with a proposition instead.”
Conclusion
After a fascinating conversation, this was one of Graham’s main insights – don’t focus on the line. Surprising advice from the writer of one of the best lines in history!
But as he explained, that ad didn’t start out as a line. It evolved over the course of half a decade, spawned by a wide-ranging creative process that focused on a problem – how to make Specsavers fun – and came up with a comic proposition for its customer – “Should’ve gone to Specsavers”.
So let’s focus not on the line, but on the whole creative process – beginning with the brief!
