Beyond Adland S1 Ep2: Magnus Willis
ADLAND: Planner BEYOND: Founder, Sparkler
Beyond Adland is an interview project with brilliant, inspiring people who’ve moved beyond the Advertising industry to do something different.
Born in Newcastle, Magnus has spent his career in London. For a decade he worked as an advertising planner — at Abbott Mead Vickers, BBH and Lowe Howard-Spink — before co-founding Sparkler, a digital insight and strategy consultancy. Sparkler grew to 80 people working with clients including BBC, Google, Diageo and Meta. In 2018, Sparkler was sold to PA Consulting, and Magnus left in 2021. Since then, he has worked across the commercial and charity sectors in advisory capacities, including the creation, with the Community Foundation, of the North East Roots Fund designed to encourage ‘exiles’ to give back to the region.
Listen to the interview here 👇 or read the full transcript below.
When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?
In my early teens, I became interested in graphic art. I would copy logos, I had this huge Nike logo on my wall that I’d measured out from shoe boxes. My room was a collage of poorly represented logos. So there was always something in me which was graphic-y and brand-y. When I was at school, there was a geography project, and I had this idea of doing an advertising pre and post study. Little did I know that was even a thing. But I liked the idea of trying to identify whether advertising worked or not. And this was me, aged 15. The seeds were sown quite early, that this was a world I was interested in.
Where did that come from – were either of your parents involved in business or advertising?
The opposite of business. The notion of me going to the commercial world slightly horrified them. Mum was a doctor, but my dad is an architect, so from an early age I was schooled in the “visual arts”. My childhood involved lots of holidays taking pictures of cathedrals and that sort of thing. The world of value in the visual was something which came from my dad. He respected my interests, although he never understood why I ended up doing what I ended up doing.
You were born as the perfect advertising person! How did you find your way into the advertising industry?
My fear of not having anything to go on to, met my feelings of the appeal of the advertising world. So lo and behold, I found myself there. I basically went, okay, I'll apply to BBH, J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy and Mather. I got second interviews, and finally managed to get one of the two jobs at AMV. It was the agency of the Economist posters and Volvo posters. Lots of iconic, press-driven work.
This is 1992. At that moment, what was the feeling of working in advertising?
There was the industry. But there was also, for me, the notion of place. I'm born in Newcastle, grew up in Newcastle, and then studied at Edinburgh. I got this job in London, and I didn't know London at all. Quite funny, if I look back on my final interview at AMV. Everyone was swanning around talking about the Sainsbury's campaign — a recipe campaign with Sue Lawley and Denis Healey and people who were of the moment — and it was completely alien to me. I haven't seen the Sainsbury's campaign because there weren't any Sainsburys in the North East or Scotland.
So you brought a certain outsider perspective? Even now, the industry is sometimes accused of being London-centric.
My predecessor at AMV, John Robson, who I later founded Sparkler with, was the graduate planner at AMV before me. After me, it was Andy Nairn, who went on to found Lucky Generals. Andy’s Scottish, John's from the North West. At that time there was very much a view at AMV, that account handlers were the voice of the client, and planners were the voice of the consumer. Well, we need consumers who aren't just from the Home Counties. We need the voice of consumers from all over. So there might have been a bit of that.
Going back to your question about the industry. I was just overwhelmed. The industry had very much a glow at that point. As a graduate trainee going into advertising, I felt this was the place to be.
Where do bright, creative graduates go when they start the world of work? What else is there? There wasn't Google or Facebook. That world didn't exist. We didn't have the internet, and definitely no email. All staff memos went around on a bit of paper on your desk. When it came to media: is it TV? Print? Posters? Maybe some radio. You couldn't pause live TV. The world of TV was completely different — all those shared experiences — and advertising was part of the shared experience.
But it was weird, because when I left advertising, I asked myself, what have I really achieved? I worked out I'd been involved in sixteen minutes of TV in nine years. Those big accounts, those campaigns, take a lot of time. Sometimes you can do development, and nothing comes of it, or it goes to a European agency. It’s hard yards.
The ad industry has got a very specific relationship with time, partly because we’re always held to certain time lengths. And one of the defining features of the industry is the constant time pressure. Has your relationship with time changed?
One of the peculiarities of ‘time’ in advertising is the time that’s seen to be needed to create campaigns. Because of the rightful preciousness and veneration of the creative product, there’s a view that: to do this thing takes a long time. How long does the creative team need to do that campaign? Oh, they need six weeks or whatever. And actually; you don't.
Some of the time pressure is client-enforced. Some of it is self-imposed, because there's often an ‘essay crisis’ culture in the way agencies work: a constant drama about time. It's often where the best work comes from.
Going back to that period where agencies were perfectionists, and clients properly expected high quality things; they were willing to take time. There's a trade-off now, which is that clients might not want to spend six weeks getting to 95% brilliant. But if they can get to 80% in four weeks, or 60% in a shorter time… It’s the same issue with research projects. Clients say ‘let's have a topline debrief next day’ and actually topline was all they ever really wanted.
What happens then, is that everyone's aspiration for the whole thing changes, whether it be advertising or research. People stop appreciating what 100% can look like. People don't understand what great advertising is. And the idea of added value research gets eroded. There isn't time to come up with brilliant brand insights, because there's a load of other concerns.
You were the child constructing Nike logos on your bedroom wall, which I find so amazing and charming. And it sounds like you had an interesting time working in advertising, but at some point, you started thinking about leaving?
Advertising was wonderful — it was a great it was a great place to spend your 20s. You get promoted very early, and you get responsibility very young. And so I was — and this is descriptive, rather than the big I am —onto the board age 29. So I've been working for nine years, here I am, notionally, top of the account tree. I’m thinking: what next? In parallel— and John, my fellow Sparkler founder, felt the same — there was a world unfolding where there were opportunities to do more with planning skills, research skills and their application into the world of communications and creativity, than was possible within an ad agency. This is 2001, so the early days of Facebook. We saw things were changing.
We also felt that being a planner within the advertising industry was a sort of luxury. In certain conversations, you felt you were marginalised. The real action was account handlers and the creative department. ‘Let's talk to planners if we need some justification: they can write the brief’. So it was a combination of us feeling like we were better than that. Not saying we were decorative – we were the opposite of decorative! Just sort of specky people on the margins… We had an idea of us putting ourselves in the middle. There's a certain pride, I suppose, in doing what your company sells.
There was a lot of talk at the time of the dissembling of communications agencies, and of clients piecing together specialist studios of planning and creative and media. Which sort of happened, sort of didn't. It’s an ongoing narrative, I suppose. The original idea that we'd be a planning team, like a creative team. What Sparkler became was not how it all started.
Lots of us talk to our friends at work about starting up our own agency. I've had that conversation several times over the years. But most people don't end up doing it. What was different about you and John?
We’d gone to the cricket at The Oval. We were just talking because, at the test cricket, no one watches the cricket. At the end of the day, we said, should we set it up, this thing we’ve talked about? We started walking from the Oval, and we walked as far as the King’s Road, took about an hour and a half. At that point, it sort of became a thing. A thing we were going to think about at least.
We'd meet once a week, and scribble down all those comic things — this shows how we were not necessarily the best business people: what are we going to call ourselves? Are we going to have pot plants? It wasn't ‘what's our business model?’ or all the more important stuff. But nevertheless, it became clear to us that was an interesting way to go.
There's a life-stage thing in this. This was 2000. We were 30. I’d just met Gemma, we weren't married or anything. John was married, but he didn't have kids. We weren't 45-year-olds with dependents and school fees and mortgages and that sort of stuff. John's wife was a lawyer, and we'd been earning well in advertising. You could accumulate money at that point rather than spending it all. We also thought, well, if it doesn't work out, we can always go back. Because if you're 30/31 having been a board account planner or whatever, and you spend two years giving something a whirl, you're still only 33, you would have just had an interesting detour.
People go ‘amazing!’, as if it was a really big risk. It was kind of a risk, kind of not at the same time. There's not a better time to do it. In retrospect, if we’d left it two or three years, it might never have happened, we’d probably have found ourselves within an agency for 20 years. We just thought, now is our time. Let's just do it. Nothing to lose. It doesn't require big financial investment. Just a couple of laptops, and off you go.
Magnus the ad man became Magnus the something else. Giving up a possible self, even if you’ve sensed there’s a bigger opportunity for you to make a contribution, can feel like a loss. Can you remember how you felt, when the moment of departure came?
I felt thrilled. It’s a trait of mine. I want to be free. Same thing happened when I left Sparkler. I loved the thing, but I also love the not thing, not having the thing anymore. I suppose it's like a DJ beat-matching, you want to change tracks and feel like there's no clunk, no period of silence. But know that your life basically goes from one disc to the next disc without any real period of anyone knowing any different, not feeling like: I'm in a big hole here, what am I going to do? You just go: this was one thing, I’m onto the next thing, actually I’m onto the third thing… At no point did I feel that took too long.
I had a review, at Lowe’s, when I was 30 or so. They said: we got nothing else to teach you. I thought, oh dear. It's hard in advertising, as well, because the air gets thin. You're asking yourself, what does my life look like as a 40- or 50-year-old male, in advertising? Do I want to be head of department? I didn't see that as my future. It was a thrilling, stimulating thing to basically go: I’ve done that. Seems very arrogant, but I’d had a really good time and enjoyed it and done well. And this was the next thing. Bring it on.
How important was your relationship with John? Because I think having a partner in this situation can help.
It was essential. Both of us would reflect we couldn't have done it on our own. We’re very different people, but together, we were clearly very good. (There’s a whole thing about the power of twos, which is another fascinating subject to explore…)
It takes a lot to found a business, it takes a lot to create a business. Anyone that joins a business, at any point in their lives, will take loads of stuff for granted. Oh, how does the expenses system work here? When’s payroll? What's the structure? What's the career progression? We had to do that from scratch, every single thing. There was nothing. There were two blokes and two laptops, that was it. When you found a business, over the course of its life – John and I ran Sparkler for twenty years — you make millions and millions of decisions which could have a fundamental effect on its ultimate success. And if you're not totally aligned, if you're not pulling in the same direction, if fractures appear, then the whole thing can fall to bits.
We were both fortunate that Abbott Mead found us, and that we worked together, and managed to start the business when we did. There’s an in-syncness, our children were similar ages. And equally, John's got certain characteristics, I've got certain characteristics, which together worked. It's about understanding what makes you similar and what makes you different. But having similarities in the fundamental things: values, ambition, work ethic. If you have different values, a different work ethic and a different ambition, you're going to struggle. Because so many of the decisions you'll make will be around those sorts of things. How much does success matter to us? It mattered a lot to us. We wanted to be the best, end of. We weren't there to mess around. We weren't there to be off the pitch. We were going to be on the pitch. You know, doing it.
Having been lucky enough to be one of your clients when I was at the BBC, you absolutely were outstanding and Sparkler was considered to be the best at what you did. The branding of the agency had a certain gloss to it, which some research agencies don't have. It felt like you had borrowed from the advertising playbook there. How much did things that you'd learned from advertising help?
Well, there is the ‘doing things properly’. During our time in advertising, we both worked at the best places. We knew what good looked like. We thought, we've got to have the .co.uk website. We weren't going to have one of those new .tv or whatever they were. When it came to our logo, Gemma, my wife, worked at Interbrand. We said, can you get someone to help us do our logo? She put us in touch with Alan Burrell, who was the creative director on the Nectar logo design. He moonlighted for our logo. PA retired the brand. But that logo looked fresh for the whole life of the business. And we were Sparkler right from the beginning.
In retrospect, it’s silly in some ways. Names are like that. Over time, the name gets invested with values and qualities. And it was memorable, apart from Mark Byford — who was Deputy Director General of the BBC — he called us Sprinkler, which I always liked the idea of. Everywhere we go, we spray water on what was previously lovely. But now it's basically a horrible insurance claim…
You’d started off, wanting to be a planning team for hire. You then morphed into a more traditional research agency. What was the tipping point?
We started getting lots of work: research-type projects. We realised what the business model was. It’s really hard, selling time. If you want to charge a client twenty grand for time, that’s really difficult. Trying to sell twenty grands’ worth of planning is hard. What is it? Ad agencies have always been so bad at defining what it is, so there wasn't really the market for it. Selling research projects is a much better way.
In the early days, we did a lot of work on media brands. John and I had both worked on Kiss FM back in the early ‘90s, and our client was at Emap, so he got us involved in some projects there. Then we started working with the BBC. Partly through Laurence Green, who was at Fallon, who introduced us to the BBC. There was a point in the mid-2000s when the BBC was 60% or 70% of our revenue. We did some work with Mark Thompson [former Director General of the BBC]. He had this initiative called Creative Futures. We got involved in defining BBC journalism, which led in part to the creation of One Newsroom, New Broadcasting House, the logo square, the whole re-orientation of BBC News. We were doing those sorts of big projects for the BBC.
There was a fork in the road where John and I thought: what do we do next? With an advertising agency hat on, we’d have thought every agency needs to have a bank, an airline, etc, but that didn't quite fit with us. Instead, we called ourselves ‘the media brand experts’. We specialised. At a time when all these brands were asking themselves, what are we when we go across different platforms? We helped with that. It was timely.
This wasn't about you and John going, what is it we really want to do? It was actually you being cultural researchers, working out what’s needed, and how you could shape-shift to meet those needs. You wanted to have a sustainable business.
Yes, and wasn't anybody else doing it. The advertising world doesn't prepare you for the consultancy world, where clients pay you to be experts in things. Becoming experts in media brands, understanding them and helping clients develop them, was really powerful. That sort of work also makes you quite magnetic as a brand. It’s equally magnetic for staff. When you’re able to say ‘we’re working with the BBC and Sky’, the young, bright people who are entering the industry go, that sounds great.
John and I, for the first decade of Sparkler, were in denial about being a research agency. We thought that was a sign of defeat. We'd begun with this notion of being planners for hire. And we were in denial about all our money basically coming from blocks of research. We always looked at the research world and thought, that's not us. We're different from them. We’re more than that. And then one of our clients invited us to the MRS [Market Research Society] awards do. I put my glad rags on, went along, and looked around and saw other agencies winning things. I like winning things! The next year we entered ‘Best Agency Award’ and won. It’s a big moment, after a decade, to be best agency at the MRS awards. So we were thrilled about that. But equally, we were a research agency now. We'd evolved without ever really landing ourselves in the market, in our own minds.
(Above: Magnus and Sparkler co-founder John Robson, winning MRS Best Research Agency award, 2017)
Your self-perception took a moment to catch up with the reality of what you were doing.
It still hasn't! I If we’d started Sparkler thinking we were creating a research agency, we'd have had second thoughts. To us, it didn't have the creativity we valued. Research feels like you're just being sent out to go and find stuff out, and then you come back saying what you found. This is doing the industry and everyone in it a massive disservice. But that's how we felt. And I still think that the research industry could do with a bit more twinkle, a bit more sparkle…
You and John grew Sparkler, and after 17 years, you were acquired by PA Group. A few years after that, you and John decided it was time to leave. It must have been a whole different sense of change, leaving something you’d created?
When we sold, we hadn’t decided that was the plan. But anyone who goes through an integration knows, it’s a realisation: what is the thing that I created becoming, where is it going, all those sorts of things. Equally, on a personal level, lockdown was difficult. It was difficult for everybody. We ended up integrating into PA during lockdown.
Integration is hard for any business, and then doing that when you're not in the same room as all your people. It was really, really tough. Lockdown was hard for lots of people. For leaders as well as for everybody else, it was hard. We’d always managed our business, by saying, ‘Come on everyone, gather round, momentum forward. I've seen the promised land, follow me…’ We could no longer manage that way. Partly because it was no longer true. And because you couldn't wander around and make sure people were all right. You couldn't make things right. So little was actually in your control.
Every Monday morning, we'd have these staff meetings, and I’d be thinking what are we going to say tomorrow, and I’d end up with these clichés: stick to your knitting, weather the storm... Yes, absolutely, but goodness, it's very different. We don't know where this is going to end. It felt like we had relatively little agency, and so that was hard already. And then you have an organization like ours, which is slightly more fluid, taking on the structures, processes and sign-offs of a 3000-person consultancy. And a consultancy that has not got experience of the marketing services industries and works in a particular way. Both of those things were happening at the same time, and it was just really hard.
I was reflecting on it, after our earn out. We obviously had more financial security. But I thought: I just need to not do it. In retrospect, I perhaps overstate these things, but it was traumatic: you spend eight hours a day on your screen, looking at tiles or faces, and people wanting you to have the answers and be able to help. And because it’s no longer your company, you can't help as you once did.
Like many people who sell their businesses, you obviously enter into it wanting it to be a great thing. And in many ways, it has been. John and myself would make the same decision today. I think, personally, I just realised I need autonomy. Know thyself. I was reminded of the person I was when I started Sparkler. I wanted to be free again. That's who I am. And, that’s the paradox, isn't it? When you start a business, the first person you hire is a brick that lifts you up, but it also a brick that creates a wall that imprisons you.
What have you been doing since leaving Sparkler?
I’ve been getting my life in order, getting some balance back. It’s been twenty years of hard yards, of getting in at eight in the morning, doing groups… I've been spending more time with my wife and daughters. I'm an only child — my mum is in a home in Newcastle. Sparkler was great because John and I, we led from the front and put in all that effort, but it's time to get things back in order.
I felt ever more keen to help people in the North East. Staring out the window, to see who am I? Where am I from? What matters to me? I'm a trustee of a charity in South Tyneside, called Hospitality and Hope. I'm also involved with The Well Placed, an organisation set up by an old colleague of mine, Maya Bhose. It’s a way of getting people who have had careers in the private sector, and are now in their 50s or older, internships in the charity sector. Because for senior roles, charities often go to people who've worked in charities, but that means that a whole load of resource is denied them. This is a way of senior people changing tack, if you like, and helping in the charity sector, in a way that’s really using their skills. The charity thing is perhaps obvious, but it's sort of thrilling.
I've been doing some arts studying stuff. I'm doing a thing on colour theory. So back to the graphic stuff. And I'm a non-exec director of an eco shoe company as well. I don't have a plan. But for the time being, I don't really need a plan. So actually, not having a plan is part of it.
You may feel you don't have a plan. I'm really struck by your sense of purpose. Something I noticed when we were in touch to set up this interview, was the speed and energy and enthusiasm with which you respond, which is so encouraging! A lot of people seem to be feeling a sense of lethargy — perhaps since the pandemic, or maybe just existing in this modern world — but you have this sense of drive and purpose. Is there anything you could say that would help others to have a bit of that?
Have a rest. I’ve had a chance to recharge a bit.
I have something deep down in me: a sense that time is precious. I also believe we have responsibility to each other and to the world. And that does, to an extent, drive me. Although I don’t really think there's a drive, it's just who I am. I just think, how can we each use our talents in the most positive way possible?
This is partly what, I guess, got me into advertising, and got Sparkler where it was, and helped me throughout: I want everything I do to be as good as it can be. I want my time to be well spent. If I'm going to do these charities, I want them to be as good as they can be. The arty stuff I’m doing. Do I want it to just be recreational, or actually, do I want to exhibit? I can't not think like that. My life's not over! When people ask, how are you enjoying retirement? I think: get lost. You might not be in paid employment but you’re doing a multitude of things. I'm still fully engaged with everything, really.
What matters most to you?
Balance. Not one thing, but many, in the right combinations. There’s that old cliché that no one on their deathbed, wishes they’d spent more time in the office. One does reflect on that a bit, of course. So it’s great being able to spend more time with my children. Imogen is 19, Erin 17, I’ve spent more time with them in the last year or so.
Being able to do those things: that feels like a good thing. That phrase, a life well lived. What do you want on your deathbed? What do you want to have achieved? I want to have had a good impact, been a good human being and spent one's time wisely. That’s it, really. I have no desire to go and start another agency. Absolutely not. I’ve done that.
What would you say to someone thinking of making a step away from advertising?
If you have the talents that probably got you into advertising — which will be energy, the ability to build relationships, integrity – I think the world out there can always benefit from more of those people, with those skills, out and about, rather than just in the world of advertising. So I think, go do it.
Creating a business has been a wonderful thing. It’s the ultimate demonstration of creativity: starting something when there was nothing. There was nothing before, now there is something. There wasn't a Sparkler until John and I met, and then there was a Sparkler. And it was a great thing for many people.
In the aftermath of Sparkler, does it matter that PA going to retire the name? It matters less and less. What one is left with is a really good group of people who we had an opportunity to excite and inspire with the world of work and with projects. Many of them have gone on to work at really good places, and been good human beings, and engage with their employer and with each other, and they're on their way.
That'll do me.
https://hospitalityandhope.org.uk