Graham Thomas

Mostly when we read stories about advertising in the media or in books, they concentrate on the big names of the business - whether advertisers and their brands, agencies, or people. Yet while they sit at the undoubted glamorous end of the spectrum, picking up creative awards and with tales of off-screen outré antics to spill, they represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers. Under the waterline most of the smaller ad agencies were independent; a few were the regional subsidiaries of the biggest agencies (Saatchis, Dorlands, JWT, McCanns, Royds and Streets all had offices in Manchester for example); a few were also second string agencies in London set up by the main agency for a variety of reasons: specialist agencies that worked in recruitment, finance, corporate, and business-to-business advertising for example; or to handle conflicting accounts, or clients that were too small for the main agency to handle profitably. But as Campaign once wrote, there is a ‘stigma attached to these agencies.’ They were (still are?) seen as second class and on the fringes of the business. Rarely did they act as feeder agencies for talent (unlike journalism where many leading journalists started their careers on local newspapers before ending up on Fleet Street). Even the Chairman of JWT Manchester admitted in the early ‘80s that ‘Northern advertising people have a bit of a complex about their London counterparts. All regional agencies are in danger of being a bit provincial in their outlook.’ This volume looks at those agencies mainly through a diary written in the late 1970s. This gives a vivid, truthful, warts-and-or portrayal of what life was like in the tail-end of the advertising business.

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