Remembering Tim Ambler

We are very sorry to report the death in August at the age of 87 of Tim Ambler, one of our most distinguished and energetic fellows. Hugh Burkitt, former Chief Executive of The Marketing Society has written this appreciation.

Tim Ambler was a man of many contradictions. His marketing achievements were considerable and yet, unlike many marketers, he rarely mentioned them. He trained as a chartered accountant but complained that too many accountants not only join boards but become CEO’s. After three decades in the drinks trade, he became a senior fellow at the London Business School and relished pointing out to his students how existing business theory did not always work in practice; but then in a third phase of his working life, he developed for the Adam Smith Institute a theory on how government departments should deliver better “taxpayer value” and was miffed to find that few politicians were prepared to put his theory into practice.

He was a most sociable man with a keen sense of humour, but his directness in expressing his view took many by surprise and sometimes caused offence. I was an admirer of his intellect and very fond of him as a friend, but there were times - even quite recently - when I found myself acting as his disciple among us mortals of the marketing scene, endeavouring to explain what Tim was pronouncing from his Olympian cloud: “I think what Tim really means is…..”.

Eulogies, at least in modern times, tend to read like some kind of application for canonisation, and Tim, who was educated by monks at Downside and remained a committed Catholic all his life would have found any suggestion that he had lived a saintly life somewhat hilarious. Indeed, I think we would be doing Tim a disservice not to point out that he enjoyed being controversial and he cared so much about good practice in marketing, that well into his eighties he was quite happy to aim withering criticism at what he saw as errors in other people’s thinking.

But let us return to the achievements. Tim discovered marketing while on the Sloan MBA course at MIT, and in his highly entertaining memoir “The Lucky Marketeer” he describes it like this: “Company boards do three things: make money, count it and spend it. Any idiot can count it and spend it; the difficult bit is making it in the first place and that is marketing…..accountants promote the belief that the more often one counts a pile of money the bigger it gets. At best accountants keep score: they do not make runs. My Pauline conversion from accountant to marketeer had taken place.”   

Before Tim embarked for the US with his wife Katie, his employer, International Distillers and Vintners, had reluctantly given him a year’s leave of absence from his job as an accountant and he was fortunate that when he returned he slotted into an ideal marketing director role working for George Bull at Gilbey Vintners. Bull was also a recent convert to marketing - in his case from being a salesman - and many years later he became the first Chairman of Diageo. During Tim’s decade and a half as first marketing director and then managing director of what became IDV UK there were many spectacular brand  successes

The first of these - a brilliant campaign for Smirnoff vodka - neatly summed up Tim’s own career with its slogan: “Accountancy was my life until I discovered Smirnoff. The effect is shattering”. As a marketing student, I admired this campaign so much that I bought copies of the posters, created by Young and Rubicam, to display on my own wall. One showed a silhouetted  line of camels on a distant horizon riding across a vast expanse of sand and read: “I used to take the caravan to Southend until I discovered Smirnoff…..”  and in another, a clearly liberated young woman proclaimed: “I was the mainstay of the public library until I discovered Smirnoff….”

After a few years this campaign was banned by the ASA as the effect on consumers was indeed felt to be too shattering, but by then Smirnoff had grown from sales of three hundred thousand cases a year to over two million.  Meanwhile, Croft Sherry with its pale colour but sweet taste had cunningly overtaken its darker and better-known rival, Harvey’s Bristol Cream, with the socially confident Jeeves explaining to Bertie Wooster that one serves Croft because “One instinctively knows when something is right”.

But it was the succession of successful new brands - Baileys, Malibu and Piat d’Or - that surfaced in this era of IDV marketing that was Tim’s most remarkable achievement.  Of course, many different people contributed to all of these successes and I recall one of Tim’s marketing managers observing that “The number of people who invented Baileys would have difficulty fitting their annual reunion into Wembley Stadium, whereas the number of people who invented Greensleeves (a mint chocolate cream liqueur that failed to catch on) would have no difficulty fitting their reunion into a public telephone box (they still existed then). But the system that Tim had created played a significant role    

The IDV marketing philosophy under Tim was to launch at low cost as many palatable new products as possible; see which ones sold a few cases, and critically which got repeat purchases, and then put television advertising behind the successful ones to turn them into national brands. Tim admits cheerfully in his memoir that at the time Baileys was launched, he thought that an orange-flavoured brand called Primavera was going to be a bigger success. It wasn’t. And If a coconut-flavoured brand in a white bottle called Malibu could be such a success, perhaps a passion fruit-flavoured spirit in a black bottle called Topaz would sell just as well. It didn’t.

Piat d’Or leapt from nowhere to national brand leader in wine in by1985, but then it became the victim of its own success as its popularity caused the wine critics to sneer, and the claim that “Les Français adorent Le Piat d’Or” became hard to justify. Meanwhile, Malibu sailed on and was eventually sold by Diageo to Allied Domecq for $800 million. Baileys today is said to have brand value of over a billion dollars and is still one of Ireland’s most valuable exports.

Working for IDV during this era in one of their advertising agencies was great fun - apart from their ghastly location at Harlow -  and Tim presided over his brand empire with a jovial and un-pompous enthusiasm. He also stammered quite badly at times. I tend to forget this because I became so used to it, but one of my colleagues noted that he used this to good effect in meetings because it gave him more to think, and made us listen more closely.  In any case, he had a keen appreciation of a good ad and enjoyed the company of advertising people and the cut and thrust of debating the potential efficacy of an ad, but he retained his accountant’s beady eye for what he regarded as an unnecessary expense and the estimates we submitted for making television commercials were never greeted warmly.  He believed that TV commercial film crews were both over-staffed and too highly paid because they were strongly unionised. He wasn’t entirely wrong, but the film-makers at that time were also extremely talented, and agencies on commission weren’t very interested in breaking up the system. Despite Tim’s protestations, a series of classy TV commercials were made for IDV - especially for Piat d’Or.

When Tim moved on to work for IDV Internationally, I saw less of him, but once he went to  The London Business School I joined him in the classroom from time to time to contribute to his International Marketing Course. I enjoyed pointing out the hopelessly uncreative systems that many big international companies used to develop international advertising campaigns, and Tim clearly enjoyed provoking a debate. Having worked in so many different international markets himself with IDV, he was ideally suited to his role at the LBS and I enjoyed watching him teach with a youthful zest.

By his own account, however, his attempt to take over the marketing of the London Business School itself was a complete failure. He naturally wanted to start influencing the product that he was marketing, whereas his fellow academics merely wanted him to stop poking his nose into their courses and to get on with producing a few ads.

As an Oxford maths graduate and a former accountant, it is not surprising that Tim’s greatest contribution to the study of marketing has been on the topic of metrics.  “Marketing and the Bottom Line” is subtitled “Creating the measures of success - The marketing metrics to pump up cash flow” and is still an excellent read. Its second edition earned him the praise of Philip Kotler (writer of the definitive marketing textbook for many generations of marketers) who nominated it for the marketing book of the year award in the US.

Tim was brilliantly helpful to me in my early days as Chief Executive of The Marketing Society. He always believed strongly in the role of The Marketing Society as an organisation dedicated to identifying and sharing best practice in marketing, and he contributed many hours of his time as a volunteer.

We embarked, for example, in the era when Nick Smith was our Chairman, on some ambitious plans to try and change the way annual reports and accounts have to be filed by companies in order to show how much effort companies were putting into marketing, and what care (if any) they were taking of their precious brands. I have to say that the accounting profession remained deaf to our arguments about brand equity, but I like to think that by debating the subject publicly we provided some ammunition for hard-pressed marketing directors to argue their case for a sensible level of marketing expenditure in board meetings.

More recently Tim has been particularly active with Chris McLeod, our current Fellows Chair, in putting together “Ten Key Topics for Marketers “ -  a series of papers written by ten leading marketers. Tim has himself addressed his favourite topic in paper number 5: Assessing Brand Performance -  Brand Equity. [Editors note: This series will be released later in the year]

He returns there to one of his familiar themes: “Brand or marketing performance should never be assessed by ROI. Non-financial metrics as well as financial are needed.” He argues that ROI will give some measure of the last campaign that ran, but whether the return is high or low will depend on how much goodwill the brand has generated in the past. More importantly, ROI does not give any view of the underlying strength of the brand. As Tim has written elsewhere:  “Marketing is not an expense like any other: it is more important than that. It is the source of the firm’s life blood, its cash flow. Any firm needs to worry about its health more than it worries about the cost of the next meal.”

Chris told me that when he had agreed with Tim that he would begin recruiting ten of the Society’s wisest fellows to write these papers, Tim would email him every day to ask impatiently how he was getting on. His eagerness was in truth slightly tiresome, but of course, on reflection we now know that Tim was probably aware that as the poet had it: “At my back I always hear, Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near”.

When Tim retired from the London Business School, Judie Lannon, then editor of the Society’s journal Market Leader and I tried to set up an annual competition in Tim’s honour to find the academic paper each year that was most useful to current marketing practitioners. Sadly though we received many entries the competition fizzled out because the judges agreed that we couldn’t find a satisfactory winner. Marketing is not the only subject where the academics and the practitioners don’t always speak the same language, but Tim was an exception and his contribution to the Society was unstinting right to the end of his life.

Two activities not directly related to marketing drew me to Tim. We shared an enthusiasm for golf, but our metrics weren’t exactly championship standard. The only time we won a prize at an industry golf day it was for a team that made “The best use of the golf course”. We also shared an enthusiasm for music - especially singing - from Wagner to Tom Lehrer. Like Lehrer, Tim was a mathematician turned composer, and he wrote a number of serious choral works that were performed at both Westminster and Norwich Cathedrals. He also liked to describe himself as Deputy Organist at his local church at Blakeney, but admitted, when challenged, that this meant he would play a CD for the hymns if the regular organist was unavailable.

Tim might never have begun his long marketing journey if his mother had not escaped with him on the last passenger ship to leave Singapore before the Japanese arrived in the Second World War, he then nearly perished at the age of five when his mother left him alone in their house in Oxford to go out to work, and his experiments with matches caused their house to catch fire. Neighbours seeing the smoke rescued him just in time. I am very glad they did as Tim has made a huge contribution to the marketing profession and the Society can be very proud of him.

Incidentally, six of those ten key topics have now found Fellows to write about them but do get in touch with Chris McLeod if you think you can contribute some of your accumulated wisdom to our wider marketing community. It would surely be an honour to be an author in Tim’s company, and the final collection of ten will provide a fine professional memorial to him. Indeed could they be the Society’s new Ten Commandments?

Tim Ambler 1937 - 2024.

Published 30 August 2024