Ben Langdon says that his decision to leave CDP for McCann-Erickson
was made on the basis of a pitch. One that he, uncharacteristically,
lost.
The year was 1996 and the account up for grabs was Sega, which Langdon
felt should be a shoe-in given his agency's Japanese credentials. All
the same, he'd given the pitch the full treatment, jetting around the
world drinking cocktails with the company's senior management, charm
turned up to full.
"Then someone told me that Sega felt the door to the west was being
opened by McCann rather than Dentsu," he says. "That absolutely killed
me. I realised then that the game was up at CDP." A couple of months
later and he was moving over to join the agency with the key.
It's a story that sums up much of Langdon's character. There's the
ultra-competitiveness, the ferocious focus on the job in hand, a hint of
the intense natural charm that he focuses on senior clients. There's
also the pathological refusal to accept defeat, the ruthless ability to
size up a situation, and the ambition instantly to assess the prospects
of an agency network and do what had to be done as far as his career was
concerned.
Five years on and Langdon, at the tender age of 38, is one of the most
powerful Englishmen in world advertising, becoming the first
non-American to command McCann-Erickson Worldwide across Europe, the
Middle East and Africa. The same week, CDP is being merged into its
one-time subsidiary, travissully.
It's far from the first time that Langdon and the UK's advertising
heritage seem to be moving in different directions. Adland has enjoyed
caricaturing him as a wild-eyed chief executive from the Genghis Khan
school of management, most memorably as David Crutton in Matt Beaumont's
e. Langdon gets his own back by talking about London as an advertising
culture in self-induced decline, cut off from the crucial international
arena.
"People are particularly blinkered here," he says. "If you asked
creative headhunters to find the talent who could do a Nike or Gap
campaign, you'd be met with blank faces. We don't tend to get the
higher-end creative ideas that global campaigns need."
Langdon has always focused on the bigger picture - and his excitement at
getting down to serious international business full time is apparent
during the interview. The media's obsession with his image has always
grated with him. He sees it as an outdated hang-up that gets in the way
of business.
Langdon is, in his own words, an "issues-based" manager, a corner-office
trouble-shooter sent in to a situation to size up the issues, rally the
troops and sort things out as quickly as possible. "The people he gets
frustrated with are usually the lazy ones," Johnny Hornby, Langdon's
deputy at CDP, says. "If you're up for it, then Ben's very liberating to
work for. He's incredibly driven though. He needs to sort out today's
problems today."
Most of the time he seems able to do so. As the managing director at CDP
between 1993 and 1996, Langdon oversaw a stunning new- business
turnaround that effectively staved off the possibility of Dentsu closing
the agency. In McCann, he inherited a fragmented business outside the
top ten and drove through a reorganisation that leaves it at the top of
the UK income table.
Balancing the books at CDP and McCann, though, has not been enough to
give Langdon the reputation he wants as a genuine creative thinker.
Former colleagues are unanimous when it comes to respect for his
intellect - but it's something he's rarely had the chance to show up to
now.
"When I came to McCann, I knew I had to grow the company and I doubled
the size of it in four years - but it wasn't visionary," he says. "With
a region you have to have a vision. You have to know where the industry
is going and what the clients want. You have to have a plan and get it
done."
Langdon's vision for Europe is twofold. On one hand, it involves
recruiting creative-minded international strategists who can inspire
clients to produce quality global work. He wants to win at Cannes within
the next three years and show those "blinkered" UK creatives where
they're wrong.
At the same time, Langdon talks about diversifying McCann-Erickson's
advertising offering to allow several different "routes to market" and
help the network ride out recession without cutting resources too
severely.
"We've got to be tight on costs but at the same time there's never been
a more important time to keep investing," he says. "The danger is that
if you ratchet the business down, you've got nothing to come out of
recession with. We have to do both."
It's a tough time that calls for tough management decisions - and in
many ways, Langdon could not be better cast. He sniffs at the suggestion
that rumours linking him to other agencies might have forced McCann's
hand. Nonetheless, it seems possible that the agency opted to promote
him now rather than risk losing him.
McCann need only have looked at CDP to see how difficult Langdon can be
to replace.
