"You're a wally." "Right," I said, keeping my voice firmly in neutral, intrigued to see where this would lead. "And when I say you're a wally, I don't mean anything offensive by it," he assured me. "It's just that, in my book, there are two kinds of people: those who spend money with us and those who don't. And if you don't spend money with us, that makes you a wally."
His office was vast, set out in such a way that every visitor had to endure what Deyan Sudjic, the curator of the Design Museum, would later describe as "the long march to the leader's desk". But once my status as a wally had been thoroughly clarified, we proceeded to have a delightfully frank and wide-ranging chat about the state of the industry.
He had the kind of persona – wide-boy South London charm that deliberately failed to obscure the underlying menace – that would later seduce the nation in the guise of DCI Gene Hunt in Life On Mars. That exchange has come, for me, to typify the rare blend of chutzpah, bluster and hubris that characterised the elite band of Clerkenwell repro houses that made their fortunes serving the advertising industry until the 1990s.
The arrogance was utterly understandable. The men (and it was nearly always males) who ran these repro houses were working for the most important customers in the land – the West End advertising agencies, which, as the UK economy revived in the consumer boom of the mid-1980s, were incredibly profitable and glamorous – people even wrote novels and made movies about them. The repro houses were also trailblazing electronic page composition systems – a technology so new and misunderstood it was widely regarded as electronic sorcery. Their knowledge of their craft and customers, their deep technical skills, and the very expense of the systems they pioneered, safeguarded them against newcomers trying to muscle in on their business.
No holds barred
And they had the bling – the chunky watches, the cigars as wide as the thighs of the Cuban women they were rolled on and the skiing holidays at precisely the right resorts – before the word had even been invented. Even in the less puritan business world of the 1980s, they stood out: Adplates' jamboree for clients at Drupa in 1986 inspired the kind of urban legends of hedonistic excess usually associated with rock and roll tours.
But such self-belief served them, the industry and their clients well when new technology first beckoned. As Stuart Macer, the former sales director of the then Scitex UK, says: "They were tough, shrewd negotiators and extremely competent business men. At product demonstrations, all the traditional skills were consulted and all the colour proofs were examined in the finest detail. But if the product reached expectations, they were fast decision makers and, in view of the capital outlay required, extremely courageous."
What nobody – not the users, suppliers or the clients – could foresee at the time was that the technology they were pioneering would, one day, render their business obsolete. Scitex ushered in this grave new world with the launch of the Raystar scanner in 1985. A year later, the national newspaper industry would undergo a traumatic, seismic technological revolution but, even though Fleet Street (EC4) was only a few miles east of Scrutton Street (EC2), where many of the big repro houses flourished, nobody really made the connection. The precedent seems blindingly obvious now. But at the time, Wapping seemed a dark parable about uncompetitive working practices. Few foresaw how radically, thoroughly and traumatically, digital technology would transform print or pre-press.
From dirty to digital
Michael Burman, managing director of FE Burman, has seen the same trends reshape the magazine pre-press market and puts the shift into context: "Clients – publishers and ad agencies – didn't used to want to get involved. When you had film and wet proofs, repro was regarded as a dirty business." Burman says that digital technology, no matter how alluring, didn't change that attitude overnight. For a start, clients didn't fully understand the technology for a while. "It was like putting something into a black box. When it came out, you could say you didn't like it, but you couldn't change it. If you didn't like it, you'd just have to start again."
And then there was the cost. "If you're talking about £350,000 for a Scitex system, a client is going to think twice. But once that comes down to several thousand pounds for an Apple Mac, it's a different story," he adds.
Suddenly, the business model that had kept this compact, yet highly profitable, industry going was under threat. As Macer recalls: "The big repro companies also had colour labs attached and developed output to transparency materials which was an extremely high-cost operation." And high cost meant high margin for many years. But then, as Macer says, "Postscript and Macs arrived at the end of the 1980s and completely changed the world".
The Macintosh and Postscript were launched to not very much fanfare in 1984. Four years later, the first iteration of Photoshop – version 0.63 for the Mac – crept into the market. It was appropriate that John Knoll, one of the brothers who pioneered this revolutionary new software, had worked for a company called Industrial Light & Magic.
As UK industry began to recover under Mrs Thatcher, the pre-press industry experienced massive structural change. In 1985, a former finance director of Saatchi & Saatchi, called Martin Sorrell, bought a controlling stake in a marketing services company called WPP. Suddenly, ad agencies had global horizons, which meant – the logic seemed flawless – their suppliers had to have similar ambitions.
A string of acquisitions by Wace and Parkway – which reached a kind of crazed zenith with the £11m purchase of Parkway by Wace in 1990 – transformed the industry, creating a Frankenstein's monster of a print and pre-press conglomerate. Although this particular takeover spawned a Department of Trade and Industry inquiry and Wace ultimately imploded, the strategy behind such acquisitions has been vindicated by the rise of groups such as TAG. As if the ad agency repro house didn't have enough to deal with, a mini-recession in the early 1990s prompted many agency clients to focus on the bottom line.
A change in colour
Bob Holt, the former head of print and production at Saatchi & Saatchi, insisted that ad agencies were massively overcharging their clients for production services. The golden age was well and truly over. However, the game wasn't completely up. Managers who had spent their lives in pre-press, controlling the processes and making them automatic, did suddenly feel they were unnecessary. But as the client – which in many cases meant designers – experimented with this fabulous new technology, they began to make mistakes.
Burman says: "The old production process system had many checks and balances built in to guarantee quality. After the advent of the Mac, we spent a few years putting those checks and balances back into the new process so that, for example, a designer didn't get a shock when he saw how the colour he'd specified had printed." Some staff with the right expertise saw where all this was heading. "Many of the young apprentices of the late 1980s now work as production people within the ad agencies," says Macer. "Their knowledge of colour has proved an invaluable asset."
TAG chief executive Steve Parish is a perfect symbol of the revolution that swept away the old-school ad agency repro house. Mentored by Vernon Tickel and Murray Stroud, doyens of Adplates, he acquired their company in 2008. Revealingly billed in the ad industry bible Campaign as the "man who made repro respectable", Parish now runs TAG, which calls itself a worldwide design and production agency. Even though he serves publishers not ad agencies, Burman has similarly redefined his company's mission: "We provide solutions for businesses that want to communicate."
The world of the old-school ad agency repro house is the land that time forgot. "We are talking," says Burman, marvelling at the realisation as it comes to him, "about a world before Photoshop". Print is a duller place without these maverick geniuses who had the peculiar misfortune to become obsolete in their own lifetime. As Burman points out, if they had been carpenters, not repro men, their skills and working practices would hardly have changed in the past 50 years. "I remember 10 years ago, I bought my wife a scanner that cost about £80 or £90. And as I gave it to her, I thought: 'What am I doing? I've made my life's work out of that.'"
