Mad Men and Artists – How the Advertising Industry Exploited Fine Art – Thursday 3rd October 2019

By Tony Rawlins

Fine art has provided advertisers and their agencies with a great deal of material to use in their creative campaigns.

Tony describes some of the processes by which these advertisements have been created and why the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo have been a particularly rich source. From the Renaissance through to the present day fine art continues to provide opportunities to enhance Brand imagery with admiration, humour, satire and irony.

In an entertaining and informative lecture Tony uses a wide range of visuals and video to show examples of the original works, the creative process and the (not always entirely successful) advertisements that are the end result.

Tony Rawlins

Tony was educated at  Highgate School, starting his career in advertising in 1965 as a mail boy in J.Walter Thompson. Graduating through the training system there to become an account director he worked in a number of agencies before setting up on his own in 1985, primarily to handle Guinness accounts in Africa and the Caribbean, where he produced many commercials and ads for them over a period of 15 years. He remains active in the industry, but now concentrates on more philanthropic projects – producing a film in the rural villages of Nigeria for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and recently completing a sanitation project in Haiti after it was devastated by Hurricane Matthew in 2016.