Obituaries

Eoghan Nolan obituary: One of Irish advertising’s most gifted creative directors

A magician with words and a stickler for detail, Nolan demanded high standards

Eoghan Nolan was driven by a strong creative impulse and a shrewd business acumen.

Sat Mar 20 2021 - 06:00

Born: December 15th, 1957

Died: February 26th, 2021

One of Irish advertising’s most gifted creative directors and copywriters, Eoghan Nolan has died following a sudden illness.

Nolan worked for many of the big advertising agencies, including Peter Owens, McCann Erickson Dublin, Irish International BBDO and Leo Burnett. He also founded and ran his own agencies, Think & Son and Brand Artillery. In recent years he was a consultant with Accenture while also working as a manager for Copyclear, the industry body which checks that alcohol advertising complies with codes of practice before being released.

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Driven by a strong creative impulse and a shrewd business acumen, Nolan made memorable commercials across all media. With designer Annie Atkins he developed the Dublin, A breath of Fresh Air campaign for Fáilte Ireland in 2015. And his posters of Glasnevin cemetery – including One Million Dubliners, created with Tony Purcell, made ingenious use of the surnames of those buried there to publicise the cemetery as a tourist destination.

In his 30 plus years in the advertising industry, Nolan won several awards for his advertising campaigns and design work. These include being part of the team in 1988 to win Ireland’s first D&AD pencil, the international award for excellence in design and advertising. He also won the radio ad of the millennium for his quirky Cablelink ads at the Sharks awards in 2000.

Nolan won the best copywriting award in 2012 from the National Newspapers of Ireland and Institute of Creative Advertising and Design (ICAD) gold, silver and bronze awards in 2014 and 2015.

A magician with words and a stickler for detail, Nolan demanded high standards of himself and those he worked with. He hated sloppy design, lazy copywriting, careless typography, “shouty” commercials and the unnecessary use of exclamation marks. He had a particular fondness for radio advertising and enjoyed finding the right voice for the right commercial, drawing on talents of well-known Irish actors to do voiceovers.

Constantly challenging himself, Nolan was also generous with his time, going out of his way to encourage newcomers in the industry. He enjoyed finding and nurturing new talent. He lectured in copywriting and international brand strategy at DIT in Dublin and also in colleges in London. An early adopter of new technologies, he also ran occasional workshops for various business and cultural institutions. More recently, he did a series of podcasts with Luke Clancy on Lyric FM’s Culture File, entitled A Slightly Unreasonable Point of View.

Architecture

Nolan grew up in Carrickmines and Shankill, the youngest of four children of Liam and Millie Nolan (née Martin). Following his education at Blackrock College, he started a degree in philosophy and English at University College Dublin but soon left to work in an architectural practice for a few years. Thereafter, he studied architecture in Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) at Bolton Street but abandoned it after a year.

Living in Dublin city centre, Nolan was a linchpin of Dublin’s creative community in the 1980s, running various clubs where people met. His circle of friends from that era includes composer Roger Doyle, film-maker Neil Jordan and his wife, Brenda Rawn, artists, Nuala Goodman and Gwen O’Dowd and musician/radio broadcaster Fiachna Ó Braonáin.

Nolan began his career as a copywriter at Peter Owens, working on campaigns for Aer Lingus, An Post, RTÉ, ESB and Fyffes. He worked for McConnells as a copywriter before teaming up with art director Gerry McCloskey at the newly-opened Dublin office of McCann Erickson. While there, he was responsible for the award-winning outdoor work for Bank of Ireland and radio ads for Cablelink.

Brand consultancy

He founded his own brand consultancy, Think & Son, in 2000 before becoming a creative director at Irish International BBDO for six years from 2004-2010. Following a short spell with the Leo Burnett agency, he returned to Think & Son.

Nolan met his wife to be, Niamh O’Flynn, in 1996 and the couple married in New York in 1999. They moved to Bray in Co Wicklow when their sons were young.

In 2018, Nolan founded Brand Artillery, an “agency without suits which had high aims and low overheads” to target clients looking for a more flexible approach. Posters with classic images, rare Dublin sayings and internationally-renowned witticisms became a novel part of the agency’s output. During this time, Nolan developed a free-to-view series called Chops on which various individuals in the creative industry spoke candidly about their lives and work. From 2018 until his untimely death, Nolan was a consultant for Accenture – working on ways to communicate in complex technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Eoghan Nolan is survived by his wife, Niamh; his three sons, Carver, Art and Macdara; sisters Geraldine and Clodagh; brother Liam; and many friends and colleagues.

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