Creative duo Rob and Lolly on Kevin the Carrot, Snoop Dogg and reinvigorating M&C Saatchi

After navigating a slight detour by studying politics at university, where he was “motivated by fear” and felt like he should learn about the subject, he found himself at the Watford Ad School under the watchful eye of the late great program leader Tony Cullingham.

Brutal criticism

“He was good practice for the real industry because he was really hard on you in a good way,” recalls Doubal. “And he basically said, ‘Look, you’re an idea machine, and you spit out ideas and you’ll learn how to get better at that.’”

Cullingham wanted to see new ideas constantly and if they didn’t work he would rip them apart in a productive way, which Doubal feels was excellent training for the advertising industry. As he puts it: “It’s not, ‘Hey, I’ve just made something beautiful.’ It actually has to do a job. And once you line everything up, it’s quite hard for every idea to be amazing.”

That spurred Doubal to create new ideas consistently and daily. After a year of learning under Cullingham he landed a job in Amsterdam (as there wasn’t much hiring happening in London at the time) at an agency called John Doe that was set up by KesselsKramer. After three years at his first job, working on fun accounts such as MTV, he returned back to the UK and interviewed at Mother.

“Lolly interviewed me, basically,” laughs Doubal. “I think the big boss was away that day and they thought, well, Lolly will do.” This gave him a foot in the door, although his role wasn’t fully formalized.

Robert Saville mistakes Doubal for a Dutchman

Doubal recalls that he was so naïve to all of the advertising words and phrases that he didn’t say much at first, to the point where co-founder Robert Saville actually thought he was Dutch.

“When I started to speak, they were like, ‘Oh, your English is quite good’,” he adds. “And I was like, ‘Well, I’m from Scotland.’”

Thomson says that what he liked most about Doubal was just how “tenacious” he was. Apparently, the young creative would put an idea down on a yellow post-it note and leave it on Mark Waites’s (the co-founder of Mother) desk.

“It was in the pub. Mark’s like, ‘I keep getting these ideas. I don’t know where they’re coming from,’ and I was like, ‘I know where they are coming from,’” says Doubal. “I remember I called it ‘Idea de Jour’ and it was just a collection of the ideas I had over the years. But luckily, I think he spotted it and hired me on day 90 or something, but I was running out of ideas for sure.”

“He’s still using them today,” jokes Thomson.

Thomson’s path into the industry wasn’t linear either. He grew up in West London, near Heathrow. At school, the career advisor asked him which subjects he enjoyed trying to find a suitable career for him. “I said, ‘Well, I really like art. I don’t like doing English that much. Math is OK, but I really like art. I really like design. I’m not sure what career I want to do,’” he remembers. “And she filled out all these forms and then she went, ‘Have you ever thought about a career at the airport?’”

He wasn’t too enthusiastic. Luckily, Thomson’s father was ahead of the times and enrolled his son in a computing course when he was 14. This was even before Photoshop was invented. From there, he began making visuals for club nights in London which is where he began to make a lot of connections and ended up studying illustration at university.

A job at 90s digital design and branding company Deep End soon followed. It was a hot shop at the time but went bust in 2001, although the talent that had worked there went on to establish agencies such as Poke and Glue. Thomson wasn’t sure he wanted to remain in that space, so used his connection at Mother to try and get in there.

Forging a partnership

In time, Thomson and Doubal were partnered together at Mother. “They said, ‘Right, Dutch, boy, you go and learn from these two. You learn from Lolly and his [then] partner,’” says Doubal. “And so, we went off as a trio and just made a load of stuff together. I learned a lot, which was cool. And I think your partner left at some stage and then we teamed up.”

It was competitive back then, the two recall, like an “open brief sport” with all the creatives in one room together. Thomson and Doubal have been creative partners ever since, creating some of the industry’s most loved work during the past two decades for brands including Just Eat, Aldi, Xbox and Sky.

From Mother the duo worked as creative directors at Wieden+Kennedy before spending 12 years at McCann London, eventually climbing the ranks to becoming joint co-president and chief creative officers.

McCann Manchester, with chief creative officer Dave Price at the creative helm, has worked on the Aldi account for almost 20 years (although the media account moved to Starcom in 2022) and Doubal says that the team there “invented funny ads for retail” with the brand. But nothing could compare to the success that a cheeky little root vegetable called Kevin the Carrot would have when he burst on to screens in 2016.

Thomson and Doubal say that the McCann team was spitballing during the Christmas pitch and had the revelation that if John Lewis sold a toy Mog the Cat at a high price point then Aldi should have its own Christmas hero, too – at a fraction of the price, of course.

“Aldi is like the pirate, not the Navy. It is like the heroes, the Robin Hood of retail,” says Doubal. “So surely the Aldi Christmas character should be a 2p carrot? And then the team just took off. And have done a great campaign for years.”

“The original thing was that we’d just sell eyes that you could put on any carrot,” adds Thomson. “That was in the pitch deck”.

Another notable ad in the duo’s roster is the work for Just Eat. Yes, they are responsible for that jingle. It was 2019 and the McCann London team had enlisted Snoop Dogg to star in the now famous ads. Apparently, after being slightly late to set, the American rapper performed his part in the spot in one take and absolutely nailed it. They did another take just to be sure and then Snoop left.

It was the last shoot just before the UK shut down due to the Covid-19 outbreak and when it was released, it was at a time when home deliveries were given the OK and people were a bit bored in their houses. “It just captured what was going on on people’s phones in their homes. And that’s why I think it was so successful,” says Thomson. “It just felt very light and at the right time, and people went ‘Yeah, that’s what life’s like, it’s joyous and fun and do you know what? That’s what food brings me.”

Doubal jokes that the other children in his kids’ school would ask him if he made the “Snoop Dogg ads” and that gave him a bit of “cultural cache” with them for a while, but it’s running out a bit now.

In a shock move, the duo left McCann London earlier this year and were unveiled as the joint global chief creative officers at M&C Saatchi. It’s something you can tell they are both very excited about. They emphasize that the name “Saatchi” on the door holds great creative weight, as well as legacy and that they want to show just how good the independent shop can be.

“Doing work that didn’t fit in traditionally is what we’ve always kind of done. You can make a product or make a game show on a billboard [as they did for a Tomb Raider reboot]. Everything we’ve done has been a bit media agnostic,” explains Thomson.

“We’ve made things and objects and artifacts that live on. The M&C Saatchi name has done that in people’s brains and it’s about creating new objects and new things that people can interact with and enjoy again. It’s a bit of reinvigoration.”