1. The oldest man in Adland
83-year-old Tony Dell has created eye-catching campaigns
since the days of rationing. Alex Benady hears why he
refuses to retire
At 8.15am each day, Tony Dell leaves his large, spartan flat on
the outskirts of Croydon and catches the X68 bus for the 40-
minute commute to Waterloo Bridge. From there he strolls into
the Covent Garden offices of Delaney Lund Knox Warren, the
advertising agency where he is a senior art buyer.
At 8.15am each day, Tony Dell leaves his large, spartan flat on
the outskirts of Croydon and catches the X68 bus for the 40-
minute commute to Waterloo Bridge. From there he strolls into
the Covent Garden offices of Delaney Lund Knox Warren, the
advertising agency where he is a senior art buyer.
It's not the journey itself that is remarkable, but the fact that
Dell has being doing it - the odd illness and very occasional
holiday excepted - every weekday for the 55 years since his
working life began.
Dell was 84 in September. That he is still employed full-time is
impressive or depressing enough, depending on your outlook.
That he is still working in advertising, an industry long
regarded as almost the exclusive preserve of the young, where
many are burnt out by their mid-thirties and fewer than one in
five are in their forties, makes Dell's career longevity seem
little short of miraculous.
Slim and upright, dressed in a casual turquoise shirt and
baggy grey corduroys, it is only a slight paunch that gives
away the truth that he is in his ninth decade. In fact, it's not
his age that first strikes you on meeting him, so much as a
youthful, playful, and slightly camp vitality.
Dell comes from an era when advertising was known as
"edvertising" and he sounds like David Niven with a touch of
Noel Coward. "It may seem some sort of miracle to you. But to
me it's just normal," he retorts. "The fact is that I work
because I need to work, for health, money and love. I mean
what else would I do?"
As the oldest man in British (if not world) advertising, his work
record reads more like a seminar in modern history than a CV.
His career has spanned the years of post-war rationing, the
introduction of television advertising, the consumer boom of

2. the Sixties, the recession of the Seventies, the yuppie
explosion of the Eighties, and the dotcom bubble of the late
Nineties. During this time he has worked closely with many of
the most famous names in art, photography and design of the
past 50 years. They include Lichfield, Donovan, Bailey and
Snowdon, to name just a few.
And when he says work, he means proper work, not pottering
around for a couple hours a day generally getting in the way,
as is often the case with older people who can't bring
themselves to retire. He puts in a full nine-hour day and is
responsible for one of the biggest, busiest accounts in the
industry; that of the country's largest bank, the Halifax. "As an
art buyer I have a threefold role. I have to buy photography
and illustrations and whatever else, at the standard required
by an art director, at the budget available from a client, in the
time for its best reproduction," he explains.
Despite spending his entire career in advertising, Dell drifted
into it more by chance than ambition. He served in the Royal
Lancers during the Second World War but then spent three
years in hospital with TB and another two years recuperating.
"Eventually a friend's father who was ad manager for Van
Heusen [the shirt manufacturer] suggested I try his agency,
Willings Press Service, where for reasons best known to
themselves, the entire creative department had walked out.
"Naturally I was invited in. What else could they say? But
within a month the studio manager had lost his job and I was
in charge. It was terrible, terrible. But it wasn't my fault.
Nothing ever is."
It's a role he has carried out in a variety of agencies pretty
much ever since. Does it bother him that he has never made it
to the top or that he is now taking orders from people young
enough to be his great-grandchildren?
"Oh my God, no. I'm not interested in money. I don't need to
own anything. I'm not acquisitive in the least. And at my age
you realise status is nothing, nothing at all. I've never sought
to be anything or anywhere other than what I am. It's just not
my way.
"Of course young people are ignorant. But it's not their fault
.They are not taught. So the only judgment I make about
younger people is to think what gorgeous figures they have."
However this hasn't stopped him from keeping a sharp, if non-
judgmental eye on how his industry has changed. "The biggest
thing has been increasing sophistication and pace in every

3. department. When I first joined, it was telephones and
messenger boys, now it's computers and e-mail," he says.
"There's also greater sophistication in terms of provision of
materials, and consumer insight. Advertising used to be almost
exclusively aspirational. But now consumers are more
sophisticated it's much less unreachable and much more to do
with reality."
Perhaps surprisingly Dell says his favourite ad of all time is not
some classic from the Sixties or Seventies, but the Guinness
"surfer" commercial which he describes as "Unquestionably
magnificent and beautiful. If you see it, you remember it for
ever."
Perhaps even more surprising is his claim not to be particularly
intrigued by advertising as a cultural form. "I don't care. I'm
just not interested. I'm interested in the procedure of
advertising and the process of making money through
advertising. It's advertising - not adverts - that I like."
Ask him about retirement and he admits he did retire once, 20
years ago, "for the party and present". But he was back to
work the next Monday. Now he has every intention of "dying in
harness". That may sound horrific to those who aim is to
expire wearing a beige nylon tracksuit on a Spanish golf
course. But he dismisses the current debate over retirement
age as "nonsense".
"Everything is individual. But most jobs these days aren't
exhausting manual labour. People don't need to retire in the
same way they used to. Which would you rather have, a few
extra years of congenial work or spend the rest of your days in
poverty?"
Dell claims repeatedly that he has never been ambitious in his
career. However he does still have one personal ambition left.
"The biggest of all is to see tomorrow," he says.
'The cult of youth in advertising is laughable in a society
that's growing older'
An old lady is slowly traversing a zebra crossing on her
Zimmer. Another follows with a shopping trolley. But this is
not an advert for walking aids or baggage, and it's certainly
not a road-safety message. "Let's Make Things More
Interesting", is the slogan for the betting-shop ad, giving odds
on the chances of the women eluding an approaching white
van - "2:1 against leading lady, 4:1 against following lady".
This poster for Paddy Power is among Reg Starkey's all-time

4. most ageist adverts. "Striking, but too cruel, too tasteless," is
how the adman describes it.
Starkey has decided to fight back against what he sees as
blatant discrimination in adland by heading a creative team
that have volunteered their services for the latest campaign
for Age Concern. From today, in cities across Britain, billboards
will be unveiled featuring just the top of an older man's head.
"Ignore this poster, it's got grey hair," will run the caption - a
reference to the media's usual portrayal of older people. Age
Concern's research shows that 59 per cent of the population
believe that media coverage of the elderly is negative.
Starkey, 64, who has campaigns such as Don't Cheat on the
Cheese and Put Milk First in his portfolio, is the creative
director of a team whose average age is 55. "If you want
evidence that ageism exists, look no further than the creative
industries. Here, you'll see age discrimination in its rawest
form," Starkey says. "Ad agency professionals who are over
50, including creatives and marketers, are first in line for
redundancy and are treated as has-beens. In advertising,
older people are under-represented or portrayed as
stereotypes. The cult of youth in advertising is laughable in a
society that is growing older."
Starkey has many examples of ad ageism. Talksport takes a
swipe at Classic FM by using a hearse and graveyard and the
"Attention All Undertakers" alert, making the point that 78 per
cent of the music station's listeners are over 55. There's also
the award-winning 118 118 campaign's old codger who
portrays the demise of the old directory enquiries. "The
implication was that BT is dying, just like old people are dying.
Aren't we all, always, dying?"
He's philosophical about why such views exist. "I believe it
must be because, historically, we were a young country. If you
look at the post-war baby boom, youth was vitally important.
That got into the DNA, and there's a feeling that youth is what
it's all about."
But marketers are making a big mistake, he argues. "I think
there's a fault in the marketing industry in that the way it is
constructed does not in any way reflect the population profile,"
he says. "The world ends at 45 as far as marketing is
concerned. But 45- to 69-year-olds have the highest
disposable incomes in the country; 16- to 24-year-olds have
the lowest, but they are the most represented group in
advertising."
Ciar Byrne