Guardian, 15 June 1998, by Michelle Martin
"A drama to the last drop. The curtain is coming down on one 
of Britain's longest-running campaigns."
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A drama to the last drop; The curtain is coming down on one 
of Britain's longest-running campaigns. Michele Martin looks 
back at the saga that became part of advertising heritage, 
and the international corporate decisions behind its demise.


The sexual chemistry between them was clear from the start. 
She was the young, feisty magazine photographer sent to take 
portraits for a feature. He was the rich, handsome tycoon on 
the end of her lens. As the session finished, he wanted to 
know if she had got anything good. 'How close were you?' he 
rasped. 'Very close,' she murmured. 

Not an extract from a Barbara Cartland novel, but the plot of 
the first instalment in a new Nescafe Gold Blend saga that 
hit British screens in January. As the third couple in the 
coffee's phenomenally successful 11-year advertising 
campaign, actress Simone Bendix and her leading man Neil 
Roberts might well have thought they were on their way to 
fame and fortune. Sadly, however, it was not to be. 

Parent company Nestle announced last week that it was dumping 
the sagas and replacing them with a series of one-off adverts 
which would retain the 'sophistication and romance that 
consumers have come to associate with Gold Blend'. It marks 
the end of one of the longest running, and most immediately 
recognisable, advertising campaigns in Britain. 

Knowing when to end a successful campaign is never easy for 
an advertising agency, but news of Gold Blend's demise came 
particularly suddenly. The ads were still regularly topping 
consumer polls of favourite advertising and sales were 
healthy, with Nescafe claiming a 70 per cent rise since the 
start of the campaign in the 1980s. 

The commercials also had a unique place in British popular 
culture. When Tony Head told Sharon Maughan 'I love you' in 
the original campaign, 30 million people watched and the Sun 
splashed the photo on its front page. A novel based on the 
ads and a branded CD of love songs became best-sellers. 

But the sad end of Gold Blend appears to have had little to 
do with what British consumers thought of them. Just a week 
after the international owners of Walker's Crisps caused 
controversy by moving the brand out of BMP DDB - the agency 
behind its phenomenally successful Gary Lineker campaign - 
Gold Blend's move appears to be yet another example of 
international policy affecting great British ads. As one 
industry observer put it: 'This wouldn't have happened, left 
to the UK.' Nestle denies any kind of central interference, 
but the facts seem to speak for themselves. At the heart of 
the decision appears to be a broad rethink by the Swiss food 
giant of how it markets its coffee brands internationally. 
Traditionally, it had been happy to support individual makes 
- such as Gold Blend and Blend 37 - rather than the umbrella 
Nescafe brand under which they all sit. But the conclusions 
of the strategic rethink suggested that the company needed to 
place a new emphasis on overall Nescafe branding. 

As a result, it began to test the approach a couple of months 
ago when it created 'Open Up', a Coke-style generic Nescafe 
commercial showing different nationalities enjoying coffee. 
So far, the film has run in the UK, France and Germany and 
has apparently been sufficiently successful to justify 
pushing the rethink on to its next stage. A company statement 
said: 'As a result, we have decided to make changes to all 
our coffee advertising, including Gold Blend.' In other 
words, we can expect to see more generic, international 
Nescafe ads and fewer specific UK brand ones in the future - 
a move that could make British advertising just that little 
bit duller. 

The story of how the Gold Blend couple came to be such an 
important part of British advertising heritage grew from 
surprisingly inauspicious beginnings in 1987. The idea of a 
series of commercials linked by lovers was nothing new; 
Cointreau had been doing it for years with a campaign 
featuring a cool Englishwoman and a passionate Frenchman, and 
the ad industry hated it on sight. More saccharine and less 
ironic than Cointreau, the establishment regularly passed 
over agency McCann-Erickson, the firm behind Gold Blend, for 
creative awards. 

'I think the ad community has been really snobby about the 
whole campaign,' says Andrew Cracknell, chairman of ad agency 
Ammirati Puris Lintas. 'I may not be a big fan of it 
personally, but what's that got to do with anything? People 
liked it and it worked gangbusters.' Gold Blend became 'The 
People's Campaign' very soon after Maughan and Head met for 
the first time when they became neighbours in November 1987. 
The first commercial immediately stuck out in ad breaks for 
its spectacular sets and glamorous characters. Its soap opera 
formula also rode the wave of an increasingly popular 
television genre. 

'The focus of people's lives began to narrow in the late 
eighties towards interpersonal relationships and away from 
political and business issues,' says Jason Jacobs, a lecturer 
at Warwick University's department of film. 'It isn't a 
coincidence that the Gold Blend couple became successful at 
that time, in the same way that EastEnders did. It was an 
epic of the everyday.' And viewers could not get enough. 

On the assumption that 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', the 
second series of ads five years later, in 1993, more or less 
kept the winning formula intact. The only significant change 
came in a sudden flash of Girl Power which gave the female 
lead a job for the first time. While it had been only implied 
in the first ads that Maughan worked, the new campaign 
starred Louise Hunt falling in love with her man while hard 
at work for a media company. He, on the other hand, is just a 
humble caterer. The couple shared their first kiss on a South 
American train, appropriately enough at the tail end of a 
business trip. 

But it was not just the natural development of the ads that 
kept public interest bubbling along. Behind each campaign was 
an innovative PR push, stoked by press ads flagging the time 
and place for each new commercial. More sophisticated stunts 
included a very public search for an actress to replace 
Maughan, which attracted 4,000 applicants. Hunt, the lucky 
winner, ensured further column inches when she did a Liz 
Hurley in her handover commercial, wearing a body-hugging 
dress designed by 'king of cling' Herve Leger. 

The mixture of story-telling, glamour and hype worked in 
business terms too. During the campaign's first five years, 
Gold Blend sales rose by 40 per cent and the coffee became a 
pounds 100 million brand by 1996. And while most of its 
competitors saw falling sales in the four years to 1996, Gold 
Blend has comfortably maintained a 10 per cent market share, 
making it Britain's second biggest instant coffee, according 
to Datamonitor. But such success has not come cheaply. 
Adspend began at pounds 7 million in the 1980s and has risen 
steeply since. 

How far the need to support Gold Blend with such huge 
resources affected the decision to change its advertising 
tack is not clear. Nestle will not talk about whether budgets 
will go down in the future, but the fact that the new ads 
will be one-offs will give it the flexibility to spend less. 
On-going sagas are notoriously expensive, since they require 
substantial and consistent adspend to maintain public 
interest. 

In the meantime, fans await the new work with interest and 
guilty pundits wonder whether now is the time to give the 
campaign a 'Lifetime Achievement' award, since it never got a 
real Oscar. Trevor Beattie, creative director of TBWA GGT 
Simons Palmer, is all for it. 'It was a much maligned and 
historic campaign,' he says. 'I would give it a heritage 
prize for its contribution to advertising. It was famous and 
people knew what it was for. You can't ask much more than 
that, can you?' 



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