OK, something a little less edgy this week.

I said in the Scarfolk blog that much of the best creative work is definitely not safe. It’s challenging and unsettling.

So why have I picked this famous, but very mainstream and unchallenging Sainsbury’s ad campaign?

Sometimes creative work is great simply because of the sheer excellence of the idea, and the outstanding craftsmanship that goes into its execution.

So let’s take a trip back in time to the late 1970s. Back then, money was tight. There were strikes throughout the Winter of Discontent. The three-day week. Power cuts. They were dark days, literally.

Nobody had any money. People were looking for bargains. So supermarket ads were designed to be as bold and bloody as possible with BARGAIN!, SAVE!, DISCOUNTS! in BIG TYPE. They were crammed with products (check out those prices) and stuffed with starbursts, flashes, roundels. They certainly caught the eye.

Around this time, David Abbott’s secretary put a call through to him saying there was someone from Sainsbury’s on the line. It was Peter Davis, the Marketing Director and he said that he had a project David might be interested in. David Abbott was one of the best copywriters in the world and creative director of new agency, AMV – Abbott, Mead, Vickers.

Peter told David that he wanted to do a high quality press campaign for their fresh foods and own label products. To David Abbott and his art director Ron Brown, this was an amazing opportunity to do something completely different in supermarket advertising - a big, bold, beautiful, colour press campaign for a really popular high street name. For a new agency like AMV, this was a massive coup.

Interrogate the product

Before even thinking of ideas, David and Ron spent hours with Sainsbury’s buyers. They asked them about their products, where they came from, whether they were sourced sustainably and how the workers were treated.

In fact, they brought authenticity, brand purpose and CSR ideals to the campaign decades before these were even buzzwords.

It became one of the longest-running and most successful press campaigns in British advertising history. I had just started my career and was a lowly trainee copywriter at the time. The campaign absolutely blew me away. Still does. It’s hard to convey the impact it had at the time. As they would say now, it totally disrupted FMCG retail advertising.

The idea is simple. You don’t have to say quality, just show it and prove it. If Sainsbury’s put that much effort into finding the right sausage for you, you know they apply that same attention to detail to everything they do.

Best of all, because Sainsbury’s are smart buyers, they can say, GOOD FOOD COSTS LESS AT SAINSBURY’S. So don’t compare prices when looking at supermarket ads. Just buy at Sainsbury’s and get a better product at a great price.

Of course, you might say that this is all very nice creating pretty ads that other agencies and ad people will love, but did they actually work?

Did they.

An ad for mangos increased sales from 1,000 cases a week to 10,000 cases. An ad for sparkling Saumur wine boosted sales by a factor of 14. And Sainsbury’s entire range of speciality pasta sold out within a week of the ad launching it.

These days, sell is almost a dirty word. Persuasion isn’t.