Meet Andrew White: Man behind 'Mimi ni Member' slogan

By the time you are done talking with Andrew White, you feel like a professor in advertising.

You feel inspired to create a killer advert that will have everyone nodding.

You believe you are ripe enough to develop a concept that will see products flying off shelves.

TRADE SECRET

It is Mr White who came up with slogans like “Mimi ni Member” for Equity Bank, “Let’s talk about Trust” for Trust condoms, “Ni sawa hasa” for Sportsman cigarettes, “Milele” for Tusker, “Smooth all the way” for Embassy cigarettes, “Calpol takes it away” for the Calpol drug among many others.

He is 62 and hails from Australia. He has been living in Kenya for three decades.

He has a clean-shaven beard, a receding hairline that doesn’t seem to bother him, a laid-back tone and a monk’s patience in answering even the most inane of the interview questions.

One reason why one feels like an advertising master after an hour’s chat with Mr White is the number of trade secrets he shares.

One of them is: “The last thing you want is an ad that looks like an ad; because, let’s face it, who wants to read an ad?  Nobody.”

SOCIAL MEDIA
Another one goes: “If a piece of communication is something that people are comfortable with, then it’s not breaking through.

"If I’m comfortable with something, then it’s passing right by me. If I’m uncomfortable, then I’m noticing it.”

The third is his contrarian verdict on billboards that have recently been pulled down, like the one on Jogoo Road advertising Kiss condoms that was pulled down on October 2017 after an uproar.

“You see, in the days before social media, if your billboard went up and was down in a day, the only people that saw it were the ones who passed by that billboard,” he says.

“But now, with social media, there are people photographing it and commenting on it and sharing it. That can be more successful than a billboard that stays up for three months.”

BANK AD
It is easy to believe him. He once made an advert for a multinational bank that ran on TV only once.

For that ad, he had a simple message to put across: You can open an account at the bank with virtually nothing.

After racking his brain, he created an ad that depicts a man walking naked to a banking hall.

“We had a naked man walk through the streets of Nairobi,” he says, noting that they shot it in a way that even though the man appeared naked, there was always something to cover his private parts.

“As he steps into a bank, somebody else is walking next to him with a briefcase,” he adds.

EFFECTIVE ADVERTISING

Brilliant as it may have seemed, it was played on TV just once.

“It ran one night and the Governor of Central Bank called the head of the said bank (name withheld) and said, “Take that off,” Mr White says.

After a pause, he gazes into the azure sky beyond the shade in which we are seated at his Lavington home that shares a compound with his offices.

Then he drops a clincher: “That’s effective advertising.”

He was also the brains behind the Trust umbrella commercial, where a man rolls a condom on an umbrella being held by a woman.

“It made condoms something that people could talk about, could laugh about; they didn’t have to be embarrassed about it,” he says.

MENTORSHIP
Mr White considers himself a controversial advert creator who has inspired “well, probably thousands”.

“Each of the people that I trained right from a very small agency in 1984 up to now has trained other people,” he says.

Mr White’s first visit to Kenya was in 1984, when he was posted to Nairobi by advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather to work as a creative director.

He was then charged with conceptualising and copywriting campaigns to be run on television, radio and print platforms.

By then, Ogilvy & Mather had been in Kenya for about a decade or so.

INDUSTRY GROWTH
Those times, he recalls, Kenya’s advertising industry was in its infancy.

That is why he had to sing “As smooth as Embassy Kings” cigarette advert “because I couldn’t find a singer that could deliver what I was looking for”.

“And then the industry grew and grew; and now we’ve got great musicians,” he says.

Kenya currently has at least 12 advertising firms registered with the Association of Practitioners in Advertising.

After working in Kenya for four years, Ogilvy & Mather transferred Mr White as executive creative director to Ogilvy Singapore in 1988.

SCANAD
But two years later, on the invitation of Bharat Thakrar who ran Scanad — then a rival Ogilvy & Mather — he left Singapore for Nairobi.

“Mr Thakrar started Scanad, a small agency in the ’80s and he was trying to build it.

"He was one of the few smart managing directors who knew that to build a great agency, you need great creative,” Mr White recalls.

“He flew over to Singapore to convince me to join him. Ogilvy was a huge international company. It still is.

"And Scanad was a little agency in Nairobi. But I really liked Kenya, I really liked Nairobi.

"I really liked Bharat. I enjoyed the people here; the friendliness, the warmth of the place,” he adds.

SCANGROUP
He says they worked hard and within 10 years, Scanad had become the biggest agency in Kenya.

“We helped by pushing often controversial and unusual advertising,” he recalls.

Scanad became Scangroup ahead of its public listing in 2007 and later, multinational advertising firm WPP bought a controlling stake in the firm, which then changed its name to WPP-Scangroup.

WPP-Scangroup is today the owner of Ogilvy, Scanad among other companies and it has invested in advertising, media, public relations, specialty communications, digital projects and research.

Mr White was the executive creative director of Scangroup Africa until 2013 when he retired to start the Village Creative Group.

CREATIVITY
His idea for forming the Village Creative was to create an inviting, stress-free space where people working in diverse fields such as film production, graphics, content, music and visual art could work together.

Today, the Creative Village thrives in a plot adjacent to his house.

Some of the firms whose offices are currently based at the Village include Supersonic Sound Studios, Africa Post Office, Fat Rain Films and Wilde EPZ.

Supersonic is a state-of-the-art music studio run by Mathew and Sean Peevers and Matthew Wakhungu while Africa Post Office is run by Frankie Ashiruka, a seasoned film editor, one of the most accomplished editors in Africa, alongside a South African partner.

CONSULTANCY
Fat Rain Films, headed by Thomas Kalume and Fatma Wandia, has produced adverts for dozens of companies like Safaricom, Guinness, Airtel, Broadways among other brands.

Also, there is a creative consultancy within Creative Village.

It deals with graphics and design like the billboards all over Nairobi that advertise Two Rivers Mall.

He hopes the companies operating from the Village will find even more ways to collaborate.

“Each of these companies earns its own revenue and pays for services. I don’t collect any rent and I don’t earn a salary. The money that is collected for back-office services goes to developing the property,” he says.

CITIZENSHIP
Despite his long stay in Kenya, Mr White is however yet to get Kenyan citizenship despite applying for it in 2013.

“I don’t know why,” he replies when asked why the delay.

“I renew my investor’s permit every two years. I haven’t received any indication that there are any problems; so I’ll still wait. I’m quite positive about this; I’m not worried about it,” he says.