30 from 30. The people who have helped shape the industry and Campaign Brief: Ron Jenkin

June 7 2014, 8:00 am | BY Martin Trevaskis | 1 Comment

For Campaign Brief WA’s 30th anniversary, over the thirty days of June we’re looking back on 30 people who helped shape the industry and us.

Ron Jenkin loved this industry. His passion for the work, the people and the sheer competition saw his agency – JMAO&M light this town up for a few spectacular years from 1988.

Jenkin Morgan Aitken had been around for quite a few years before CB started but by 1986 Jenkin was the only one of the founding partners still with the agency. He had gathered around him a formidable team that included people like Iain Rowe, Paul Yole, Mike Edmonds and Debra Neve.

In 1988 multinational agency O&M decided to pull out of Perth (and Adelaide and Brisbane). Jenkin Morgan Aitken bought the Perth office to become JMAO&M and was instantly catapulted into the big league as the number 2 agency in town.

What followed was an explosion of some of the most consistently creative advertising Perth has ever seen, spectacular new business pitches and some unforgettable parties. Ron Jenkin loved it all.

Sadly, by mid 1992 it was all over. The ‘recession we had to have’ took its toll and the mighty JMAO&M collapsed spectacularly. That in itself was a sobering experience for the industry, but we’re not going to not dwell on that. We’d prefer to remember those few years when JMAO&M was the most exciting agency in town and Ron led the charge.

As creative director until 1991, Mike Edmonds was responsible for a big chunk of the agency’s award-winning work – and the parties. Here’s what he wrote about Jenkin in January 1995 for our 10th Birthday issue (surprise, surprise – we were running late!):

I have been lucky enough in my 34 years to have met a number of people upon whom I would place the title of ‘character’. Characters are people who do the irrational and say the unexpected. As leaders, they inspire as many people as they upset. They’re not people you necessarily like, or even want to be with. But they have some irresistible angle on life you just can’t help admiring.

Ron Jenkin is a character.

When I started at JMA in 1984 as a junior writer I quickly became ‘his boy’. Seems I saw advertising much the way he did. We both enjoyed the challenge, the fun, and the excitement of advertising’s bare-fisted competition. We became closer than most and had a ball.

In the days when JMAO&M won every pitch and damn near every award, he was a classic figurehead. He spoke loudly and walked everywhere like he was entering Madison Square Garden for a title bout. Hell, he even laughed like Herman Munster.

To those few who ventured beyond the gruff, Ron was nothing more than a strong-willed man with a love for his family and an equal passion for advertising. He loved the thrill of the chase; of being in the hunt for a big account and – in the presence of his competition – being the only one to make the kill.

Some days I saw him physically shaking with the buzz of it all.

For a creative department, there were few better chairmen anywhere in Australia.

He cherished creativity.

He loved knocking a client’s socks off with ballsy advertising. Urging us to put on a presentation that didn’t just swing the pitch our way, but wrenched the account from the incumbent in a matter of minutes. JMA creatives were the best paid in town and in its heyday everybody wanted to work there. You can’t do that with a dull leader.

So call him a victim of late eighties greed; call him arrogant and foolhardy. Call him what you like – he’s heard them all. But advertising in the antiseptic 90s could do with a few more characters like Ron Jenkin, if only for the one simple reason that Ron had passion. Sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes dumb, sometimes smart passion. And when we’re all 80 years old and sitting in our Jason Recliners, I’ll bet my last dollar that ahead of the hundreds of nice predictable folk we’re going to meet in our lives, we’ll remember the ones with passion.

Hear hear!