My Mentor: Paul Hammersley On Frank Lowe

'He taught me that quality is important in everything, not just in ads'

"The first time I met Frank, he interviewed me wearing a bathrobe in his extraordinary house in Chelsea. In 1993, after 10 years at Saatchis, I'd slightly lost faith in the ad business and I needed someone to refresh it. I had a real sense that that person was Frank from the first moment I met him, and the offer to work for Lowe in New York was extremely exciting: he was certainly at that point one of the top five most significant people in advertising in the UK.

"The first time I met Frank, he interviewed me wearing a bathrobe in his extraordinary house in Chelsea. In 1993, after 10 years at Saatchis, I'd slightly lost faith in the ad business and I needed someone to refresh it. I had a real sense that that person was Frank from the first moment I met him, and the offer to work for Lowe in New York was extremely exciting: he was certainly at that point one of the top five most significant people in advertising in the UK.

I was involved with Frank very closely for the four years I was in New York and we travelled a lot in the US. I got to know him personally quite well and professionally very well. He always had very clear views of our business, its value and how it should be done and he's never wavered from them.

He was very demanding and exacting, but for all the right reasons. He taught me that quality is important in everything you did; not just the ads, but the way you behaved, the way an office looks and the way people work. Quality and style had some commercial value.

Sometimes, he would be criticised for being bloody-minded and obdurate, but the people who never ever complained about Frank were his clients. Because he had the respect and trust of his clients he could sell them any piece of work, and as a consequence of that he always had the best work done for him by creative people.

People were very proud of the brand Lowe, but Frank's greatest weakness was that most of his staff never saw the real Frank. They just saw the iconic reputation and they heard about the bad side and the temper and the difficulty of working with him. I don't think Frank engendered great affection among people at arm's length, but he did engender huge loyalty from people close to him.

What Frank stood for was utterly clear. He was obsessed about rewarding consumers' attention and ensuring that advertising wasn't a blight on the cultural landscape. He was old-fashioned in a sense, but the truths he espoused are as true, if not more true, today than they ever were.

Frank and I were both sort of discarded by Lowe at the same time. It's a shame, and very rare, that a company carrying the name of the founder of an agency network doesn't have him as a figurehead."

Paul Hammersley is the chairman and chief executive of DDB London