The Artemis Profit turned 20 this year.

Since 2004, it has featured in hundreds of ads. On taxis, posters, press ads, videos. As well as
appearing on Christmas cards, chocolate bars, even on the side of a biplane.

We think that’s what they call ‘a big idea’.

And in that time, we’ve lost count of the amount of times we’ve been asked how we came up with the Profit Hunter campaign in the first place.

We’d like to say it was pure genius but the reality is that luck had a lot to do with it.

Fact is, we didn’t really know what we were doing. We’d never done any investment advertising before.

The client – led by the legendary Dick Turpin – came to us because they liked our Spitfire beer ads. (‘Downed all over Kent, just like the Luftwaffe’ and all that.) They asked if we could we ‘do a Spitfire’ for them?

A tall order, we thought. Investment? Jokes? Really?

Anyway, we threw ourselves into it, familiarising ourselves with the curious world of financial advertising. Lighthouses, rowing eights, mountain climbers and grinning pensioners walking through the woods. We learnt what ‘boutique’ and ‘outperformance’ mean and the difference between ‘active’ and ‘passive’.

And then we set to work.

The thing about Artemis, we discovered, is that they were a small group of very experienced, very successful fund managers, picked from large, established companies. Freed from their previous corporate strictures, they had total freedom to go where they wanted, venturing off the beaten track, to wherever they thought the best returns were to be found.

Rather like hunters, we thought. Artemis, hunting – now there’s a match we weren’t going to ignore.

Setting it in Ancient Greece was the obvious thing to do but that would be too esoteric. We toyed with a photographic treatment where real people pursued blue, furry animals. But that felt rather self-indulgent, like we were being whacky for the sake of it.

Eventually, we developed the Profit as we know it today – basically a graph line with eyes. And set it in a strange, fictionalised environment based on comics and encyclopaedias from the 1930s. That way, we reckoned, we could treat the whole hunting analogy as if it was real. In other words, to tell the joke with a straight face.

Not that it was a joke in a Spitfire-sense. But we like to think it was wittier and more entertaining than your average financial ad.

Artemis loved it at first sight despite the fact that it was so different from anything else in the sector. In fact, that’s why they loved it.

A view that wasn’t shared by the rest of the industry. “Who’s going to read all that copy?” “Don’t they know that people only want facts and figures?” “Far too flippant for financial services.” And they were some of the nicer comments.

But the client held their nerve. The more executions we did, the more familiar people became with the idea and the doubters started to come round. In fact, 20 years on, it’s hard to see what the fuss was all about.

So, looking back, what’s the secret to the longevity?

That’ll be the luck we mentioned earlier.

In our naivety, we hit upon the magic formula and we didn’t even know it. We produced a physical representation of the end-product of investment.

No one had ever done that before. How do you show the promise of being a bit richer than you might have been? It’s impossible. Hence the endless stock shots of grey-haired couples on beaches, cruise ships and golf courses.

But thanks to the Profit, we did the impossible. That’s what makes the campaign so adaptable, enabling us to tell any and every kind of story. And to evolve the campaign to reflect an ever-changing world.

Unfortunately, we can’t keep coming up with new ways to embody a return. But this whole process has taught us a vital lesson. With every new brief, we have to find that special ingredient – a property, a technique, something – that makes it endlessly flexible.

It’s the only way to create a campaign that can last 20 years.

To see how the campaign has evolved through all the twists and turns of the last 20 years, click here: https://www.libertinelondon.com/artemis-two-decades