‘Sir Lenny Henry’s back in Premier Inn TV advert’

It didn’t just make Campaign. This was a headline in last Friday’s Times.

It was illustrated with a photograph of Sir Lenny, blissfully asleep in his plum silk pyjamas. So I admit  I felt a bit let down when I went on to read that he was only actually doing the voiceover in the new ad.

Perhaps that was all he was prepared to do? I have no inside knowledge about this campaign. But having just published a book about advertising which (among other themes) has a lot to say both about celebrities and about the idea of ‘distinctive assets’, I found myself becoming curious about the events that led up to that headline and picture. Based purely on sources available to me online, here’s what I found.

To begin with, it surprised me that the Premier Inn brand has only been around since 2007. Whitbread owned a budget hotel chain called Travel Inn, then they bought another called Premier Lodge. (As their main competitor, then as now, was called Travelodge, you can already see part of the problem). In 2004, Whitbread merged the two brands as Premier Travel Inn, creating the largest brand in the sector with 38% of capacity and 490 hotels. In 2007, they further simplified the name to Premier Inn, invested in new design and room standards throughout the estate, and added stars and  a distinctive purple background to the existing Travel Inn logo of a crescent moon. And they appointed RKCR/Y&R as their ad agency.

In early 2008 the first commercial appeared, featuring Lenny Henry and a yellow rubber duck. Campaign chose it as their ‘Turkey of the Week’:

Larissa Vince is hoping that Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R's first work for Premier Inn is also the agency's last: "Lenny Henry is never going to stay in a Premier Inn, so picking the TV star as the new face of the brand is bad enough. But by adding a series of utterly cringeworthy one-liners and the inexplicable appearance of a rubber duck, the agency has successfully turned this spot into an early contender for the worst celebrity ad of the year. No mean feat."

Despite this damning judgment, Marketing Director Gerard Tempest persevered with the campaign, though the financial crisis later that year must have made this a difficult trading period. In 2009 Lenny Henry appeared in a parody of Psycho and then in 2010 a parody of The Shining – another Campaign Turkey, though research conducted by TNS seemed to show it was quite popular with the public.

In 2012 Gerard Tempest, who had been responsible for  the creation of the Premier Inn brand from the beginning, left to work for a cruise line. Russell Braterman joined from Vodafone as the new marketing director, but chose to stick with RKCR and Lenny Henry – a decision that seemed justified in 2014 when the case history won Silver in the IPA Effectiveness Awards. Hamish Pringle also chose it as no 25 in Campaign’s ’50 best celebrity campaigns’.

In 2014 the media budget was increased to £15m. The campaign was refreshed with new ads that featured Lenny Henry in a bed which mysteriously appeared in unlikely places, a beach, a railway station. In 2015 the budget was up to £25m for more new ads with Lenny (though quite a lot less of him), ‘Beautiful Mornings’. It sounds as if things were going quite well. Certainly the hotel division was now the best performing part of Whitbread’s business.

So it’s not clear to an outsider why, at the beginning of 2016, Premier Inn put the account up for pitch. Even Campaign expressed bemusement at the decision, though they damned the campaign with faint praise as ‘hard-working if not creatively groundbreaking’. Perhaps the decision was connected to a power shift within the organisation, as Russell Braterman left soon after the new agency was appointed and was replaced by an internal appointment, Mark Fells. Perhaps it didn’t help that RKCR had already lost some large accounts – those of us who have worked in agencies know how these things become contagious, the 'smell of death'. (Later the same year the loss of Marks and Spencer, for whom RKCR had done much good work for sixteen years, would prove the final, fatal blow to the agency). Or it may be, as Premier Inn claimed at the time, that they genuinely thought it as nothing more than ‘good practice’ to review the agency after a number of years, regardless of their performance.

Whatever was behind the move, RKCR were clearly upset, and declined to repitch.  And later in 2016 the account was moved to Lucky Generals.

The new agency’s first ad broke in 2017, a commercial called ‘Still Got It’. The one gesture to continuity was a brief voice over from Lenny Henry towards the end of the ad. Elaborate rationalisations for the change of strategy were published - that it was no longer enough to create awareness, but to communicate specific facts, like unlimited breakfasts, or that Premier Inns had their own bars.

Lucky Generals’ first outing however fared no better than their predecessor’s in the pages of Campaign. As well as being voted another Turkey of the Week, it drew this response from creative director Micky Tudor:

I admit, I didn’t really understand this Premier Inn ad. Well, I did, but there are so many moving parts, I was left a little confused. Is there a nightclub at Premier Inn? (No.) But there is a bar? (Yes.) Who’s at the club, then? (Do you mean the nightclub or the bar club?) The bar club. (The girls.) Well, who is at the nightclub, then? (People they have yet to meet, I think.) Who’s the random lech – sweet Jesus, is he a member of staff? (Yes.) Blimey! Do the girls get in a cab to go for another night out? (No, the edit plays with time.) Oh, right, and is "Still got it" an endline? (No, it’s the pretend name on the pretend title sequence of the pretend film about the protagonist, you idiot.) Oh, I feel stupid. (So you should, but the campaign will become clearer when Jim Bolton shows you the next ad in the series.) But I shouldn’t have to see the next ad in the series to get it, should I? (Erm, no.) 

Being Turkey of the Week is certainly no bar to becoming an effective and long running campaign. But this kind of comment from a creative director is in my opinion a more serious concern.

‘Too many moving parts’ is spot-on - the Lucky Generals’ campaign was complicated. Each ad is framed as a pastiche of a movie style – later treatments would include Working Girl, Wes Anderson movies [pictured], Bollywood musicals  and detective-buddy movies – with a title and a (perhaps over-subtle) link to the logo as a ‘Moon and Stars Production’. Each ad also tries to tell a story, while, through the medium of onscreen titles, sales messages like ‘unlimited breakfasts’ are spelled out. As well as all that, they also include actual members of the hotel staff as ‘guest stars’. 

It must all have looked ingenious on paper, satisfying everyone’s different requirements from a commercial. In practice, I suspect it was a recipe for confusion – while at the same time abandoning the powerful distinctive assets of the celebrity and the colour scheme (and even the rubber duck) built up over several years of high spending advertising. I can imagine how it was welcomed as more ‘creatively groundbreaking’ than dear old Lenny – but was it as ‘hardworking’? 

If I doubt that it was, I may be unfair in my judgments – I have no inside knowledge about how well the business performed in the next couple of years. But there has not been another IPA Effectiveness Award to set me right. And what is clear is that, after 2018, Lucky Generals didn’t make any more commercials. In November 2019 a new marketing director, Tamara Strauss, was brought in, and at the beginning of 2020 the account was again put up for grabs, reportedly looking for an agency ‘that shares our brand values’. Interpret that code as you wish - Lucky Generals declined to repitch.

So the virtual pitch wheels ground slowly through last year’s lockdowns, the white smoke finally emerged, and Leo Burnett was appointed. And now, in April 2021, here we are, with a new commercial that is elaborately produced, packed with vignettes and product points, yet – apart from the voice over – appears to contain no campaignable properties or distinctive assets. Will this be enough to maintain or improve Premier Inn’s performance? Only time will tell. We can all be experts in advertising, and we each see it through our particular prejudices about what a good ad should look like, or how advertising works.

Yet I find it significant that when The Times writes this up, it’s Sir Lenny who appears both in the headline and in the picture – an image from a campaign created more than ten years ago by the agency before last. An agency that, sadly, no longer exists.