Acxiom man is a ‘Different Class’

Celebrity direct marketers may be thin on the ground – Edwina Dunn and Clive Humby at a push – but DecisionMarketing can reveal that one man working in the industry graces the cover of possibly the most famous Brit pop album of all, Pulp’s Different Class.
The artwork of the multi-platinum album is in fact the wedding of Dom O’Connor, client director at Acxiom, although even he did not realise it was being used until his mother phoned him up after seeing a poster advertising the album in an HMV record store back in 1995.
In an interview on BBC Radio 6 Music O’Connor – who worked at Claritas and Wegener before joining Acxiom in 2005 – recalled how the album cover had come about: “When we got married we were putting the wedding together ourselves, we pulled a lot of favours from people we knew…
“My little brother Ben went to art college in Edinburgh and he made friends with a guy who subsequently became a photographer and had done a lot of work with the Britpop bands.
“So we asked him about a couple of months before whether he would be prepared to do some photos for us, and he couldn’t actually do it because he said he was busy working on some Pulp stuff.
“But he phoned us about a week before and said Pulp were thinking about using some photos with real people in them, including a wedding photo, and if we would do some joke shots where he’d bring some life-size cutouts of the band down, he would do some proper wedding shots for us as well. They rocked up on the wedding day with the life-size cut-outs of the band and took the photos.”
Apart from the bride and groom, the photograph features the parents of both the bride and the groom, O’Connor’s two brothers, his two best friends and his wife’s best friend.
However, Pulp’s record company at the time did not pay the family for the use of their picture, but when Pulp reformed in 2011 Rough Trade paid for the family members to see Pulp play live.
O’Connor said: “Rough Trade very kindly sent us a copy of the photo that Jarvis had signed, just saying ‘Thank you very much Dom and Sharon for letting us crash your wedding’, which I thought was a really nice touch”.