BILLY MAWHINNEY, creative director, Faulds, Edinburgh
Billy Mawhinney is only 23 miles further away from Old Trafford than
when he was in London. He still manages to eat at the Ivy quite a lot
and Scotland has plentiful supplies of champagne.
In short, it’s a contented creative that gets into his car of a night to
drive back to his manse on the shores of the Forth of Firth - a commute
that takes all of 20 minutes. The work environment is good too. As
creative director of Faulds he has at last moved away from the torpor of
giant multinational accounts. ’In large agencies with global networks
your work dies a death by a thousand cuts, and you don’t know which cut
it was that killed it,’ he says.
Smaller, more closely knit agencies like Faulds provide an immediacy
that was missing in his career at CDP, J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy &
Mather. ’Edinburgh is the city of the ’short no’,’ he explains . ’If
something’s not going to work you find out pretty quickly, there’s no
sitting around talking bollocks.’
Outside work there’s plenty of it, however. When he first arrived in
Scotland last February, the creative directors of other Edinburgh shops
took him out to lunch and they all still meet regularly. It reminds
Mawhinney of the old days in London. Yet life is not perfect. It’s the
newspapers.
They keep writing about Scottish football teams. ’I see a headline about
a great win by United, and find it’s Dundee United,’ he says
gloomily.
’I do miss the back pages of The Sun.’
JOANNA WHITSON, planner/buyer, TMB MediaCom Direct, London
Apart from the obvious differences between Scotland and London, things
like pollution, boring commutes and terrible tapwater, the big
difference that strikes Joanna Whitson is how seriously people take
media.
’In London, the client understands the value of media so much more and
we are involved much earlier in the creative process,’ she says. ’In
Scotland, media was just called in at the last moment to fill in the
gaps.’ Whitson, who helped launch the Media Business in Scotland, now
works as a planner/buyer for TMB MediaCom Direct.
Whether this is related or not we don’t know but she’s been amazed by
the social life in London. Because commuting is so tedious, Whitson
says, her colleagues go out most nights straight from work, so much so
that she’s had to squeeze visiting the gym into her lunch break. ’Lots
of friends very quickly,’ is how she sums it up, ’but it’s not that easy
to get really close to them.’ In all, it’s a higher pressure
environment, where people both work and play harder, and eat out more.
Whitson claims she’s put on half a stone since she arrived nearly a year
ago. On the downside is that she sometimes feels trapped in London
because it’s so big. You could jump in the car and drive for two hours
and still not get away. ’It’s great here,’ she concludes, ’but I think
I’d like to go back sometime ... maybe for my old age.’
JONATHAN D’AGUILLAR, creative director, The Bridge, Glasgow
You can love Scotland to death, yet still be irritated by the tide of
nationalism sweeping the country. For Jonathan d’Aguillar it was Sir
Alex Ferguson, or at least an article in the Herald about him that
started him off.
’I became Mr Angry and fired off a letter to the paper,’ he admits.
Ferguson, you see, as well as being an excellent football manager, is
also a Scot, which meant some of the Scottish press felt he should not
help England with its bid to host the 2006 World Cup.
D’Aguillar, who came to Scotland nine years ago, found this too
much.
’I wrote and pointed out that Adam Crozier, a Scot, had been appointed
to head the Football Association, and that there were several Scots in
the Cabinet. Did they expect them not to support England’s bid either?’
In almost every other respect d’Aguillar views living in Scotland as
something akin to a gift from the gods. The five-bedroomed Victorian
villa with half an acre is only 15 minutes from work; the camaraderie,
even between competing agencies, makes work a social event; and, of
course, there is the beautiful scenery.
He decided to move there rather than work in London, and when his
daughter was born a Scot, he was proud of the fact. He’s even adamant
that Glasgow, with its one million people and big city buzz, is
preferable to the more sedate and tightly knit Edinburgh. Which is just
as well for a Celtic fan who’s just made enemies in the press.
GREIG MCCALLUM, senior board planner, GGT Direct, London
Greig McCallum is a Scottish ex-accountant who made his career wooing
tourists north of the border on the Scottish Tourist Board account. Yet
none of his past reserve is evident when he talks about why he left the
place.
’The weather is dismal. It pisses with rain all the time and is freezing
cold. Even in summer it’s grim,’ he says with feeling. There is the job,
too, of course. McCallum, as the planning director of Scotland’s largest
agency, Faulds, had reached the glass ceiling of his discipline and was
tempted south by the larger budgets and bigger names of London. ’I felt
a bit stifled, to tell you the truth,’ he says, and he has not been
disappointed by the move.
The traditional gripes about London - property prices, expensive eating,
tetchy people - have not worried him at all. Edinburgh property prices
are pretty high anyway, he says, and he and his wife, who is still an
accountant, simply traded a five-bedroomed house in Edinburgh for a
three-bedroom terrace in Hampstead. ’Moving to London really does
enliven your life,’ he adds. ’I work with all sorts of people now,
people I wouldn’t have met in Edinburgh, from different cultures,
countries and religions.’ McCallum is currently a senior board planner
at GGT Direct and misses only his friends and family in Scotland. ’The
scale of the place here is so big that there’s so many opportunities, so
many chances. If you live in London all the time you forget what it’s
like being outside.’
