Feature: Sales Promotion for Sheep

Ian Moore of Blue-Chip Marketing in Edinburgh provides a perspective on creative life in the Regions.

What did the Scots ever do for us? It’s a familiar refrain - especially in light of the SNP’s recent pyrrhic victory in the Holyrood elections - but a dangerous question to ask a Scot… unless you’ve got a good half-hour to spare. Well – there’s whisky, for starters. Britain’s single biggest packaged export, at just over the £2.5 billion mark, accounting for a quarter of all the food and drink the UK sends abroad. Then, of course, they invented or discovered everything that’s ever been of any use to mankind, ever. It’s a list for those with orang-utan like arms, ranging from the bicycle to television. They even invented the Bank of England!

But… aha… you retort – that’s all very well – but what about the creative arts? What have the Scots ever done there? (At this point names like Burns and Scott and Rennie Mackintosh spring disconcertingly to mind and you realise your second mistake.) The fact is the Scots are a creative bunch, and it can’t even be said that ‘those days are past now’ – think Rankin and Rowling, Bellany and Vetriano, and Travis and Franz Ferdinand.

Now, perhaps the Scots are good at celebrating their culture of achievement. But, I reckon you could actually do this kind of analysis for most of the regions of the UK. And I think for each you’d come out with a surprisingly impressive list of achievements, historical and present day. After all, that daily essential to the Londoner, the Hackney Cab, was invented in good old Hinckley. Great ideas (and even quite usefully good ones) come from people, not places. Wherever there are people, there’ll be ideas. Having both owned and worked in agencies in London, Manchester and Edinburgh, I find it difficult to draw any distinction between the so called ‘creativity’ from London and its distant swede-hacking second-cousins. Indeed, recently I’ve had chance to work in a range of provincial centres throughout Eastern Europe, and have been consistently wowed by the creative output emanating from the collectively oppressed ex-Soviet sticks.

Today I’m not so sure. The march of modern technology has been a great leveller. When a client can post a brief on a website and wait for ideas to wing their way from Wallamalloo, who needs WC1? The critical mass of a great city weighs just the same on the worldwide web as a bright bloke with a wireless powerbook beneath a coolabah tree.

So, while the regional agency is not for everyone, it’s certainly not for the sheep in our business. If you want a challenging, creative, entrepreneurial, multi-tasking environment then it could be just the ticket. Remember – it was the Scots wot cloned Dolly!