Paul Arden memorial site

Watch the British Airways 'smiling face' advertisement

The Eighties were the adman's decade; Saatchi & Saatchi were the admen's admen, and Paul Arden was the mercurial creative spirit who gave the agency its visual character. He was involved in some of the decade's most memorable advertisements, including Silk Cut's slashed purple, The Independent's launch campaign and the British Airways spot in which hundreds of people come together to make a giant smiling face.

He was also one of advertising's most distinctive personalities, inspiring and insulting in equal measure. His sharp photographic eye and his extravagant commitment to detail got his ads noticed and put him at the forefront of the shift to a more visual style of advertising.

In later life, despite confessing that “I'm not a writer, I'm afraid of words”, he became a bestselling self-help guru, and his approach to life is summed up by the titles of his books: It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be (2003) and Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite (2006).

Paul Howard Arden was born in 1940 and grew up in a council house in Sidcup, Kent, son of a commercial artist. He went to Beckenham Art College before going into advertising, working at a succession of such leading agencies as Doyle Dane Bernbach and Ogilvie & Mather and getting fired from most of them. For a time he was a freelance photographer before becoming creative director at a small agency. In 1979 he joined Saatchi & Saatchi as an art director. Jeremy Sinclair, who hired him, said that Arden gave “another dimension” to the agency, complementing the verbal skills of Charles Saatchi with the ability to make advertisements look as good as possible.

Under Charles Saatchi's direction, Arden created the Silk Cut campaign in 1983, finding exactly the right silk to be cut and exactly the right photographers to capture it. Run without any slogan, sometimes with only the official health warning to identify the brand, the ads became some of the best known of the decade; in David Lodge's novel, Nice Work (1988), the characters use the iconic image as the basis for a lengthy discussion of semiotics.

Arden created award-winning ads for Alexon clothing and worked on the campaign for the launch of The Independent, adding a smart series of visuals to force home the independent-minded message of the classic slogan, “It is. Are you?” Other notable hits included the InterCity Relax campaign in which chess pieces unwind contentedly, and advertisements for Trust House Forte featuring nuns bouncing on hotel beds. In 1987 Arden became executive creative director at Saatchi and oversaw the hugely ambitious airborne spectacular for British Airways, which Saatchi had branded “the world's favourite airline” earlier in the decade.

He searched relentlessly for new and surprising ideas and was unafraid of refusing to give clients what they wanted, believing that only the unexpected would stand out. “There is no distinctive style here,” he said in 1990. “If there was we would have to put a stop to it immediately.”

Arden was notoriously difficult to work with; he was intolerant of substandard work and unafraid of making his displeasure known in direct, and sometimes physical terms. “Life with Paul was one long furious row,” said a former colleague. Advertising for him was more of a way of life than a job. His drive for perfection paid little heed to constraints of cost or time and while many found him infuriating, his passion for good advertising enthused his colleagues. He carefully cultivated his image as an eccentric and a maverick.

In 1992 Arden left Saatchi, reportedly after a row about costs. The following year he set up a film production company, Arden Sutherland-Dodd, and won awards for his ads for clients including Nescafé, BT, Colgate and Right Guard. He also directed a short film, The Man Who Couldn't Open Doors (1997).

Unexpectedly, he turned to writing in 2003, taking to heart his own message in It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be. This was a richly illustrated, low-density book full of pithy aphorisms based on his own approach to life, such as: “Knowledge is the opposite of originality” and “If you can't solve a problem it's because

you're playing by the rules”. Reviews in this country were poor, but USA Today called it “a wonderfully designed manifesto of no-nonsense career advice”, and many of the book's hundreds of thousands of sales came in the US. Arden said he wanted the book to encourage young people to believe in themselves. “I'd really like to have given it away to people leaving sixth form, before they go to work.”

For several years he had an Independent column dispensing bite-sized wisdom such as “the problem with making sensible decisions is, so is everyone else”. Last year came his attempt to provide a short introduction to the meaning of life, God Explained in a Taxi Ride.

Arden collected the works of numerous important photographers, which he exhibited in a gallery at his home in Petworth, West Sussex. He was scornful of those who looked down on advertising. “We are all advertising, all of the time,” he said. “Even the priest is advertising God.”

He is survived by his wife, Toni, a son and a daughter.

Paul Arden, advertising executive, was born on April 7, 1940. He died of a heart attack after a long illness on April 2, 2008, aged 67