Media’s Top Ten Thinkers

Media Week

Media – it’s a thinking person’s game. It takes skill to plan a successful campaign, but it takes real grey matter to come up with the innovative ideas that set the agenda for the whole industry. Media Week brings you 10 of the biggest brains in adland

Remember the kid at school who always put his hand up first? Nobody liked him because he was a swot.

Fortunately, the same attitude does not prevail in media, where the cleverest individuals are not so much laughed at as lauded. They are seen as a shining example – and promptly given a baffling title like “head of strategic solutions and consumer insight”.

But part of the brief for being clever is a touch of modesty – you won’t catch our 10 individuals shouting about how great they are.

So what draws our 10 together? They all have plenty of media experience; they all garner respect from the advertising community and they have all won awards. And more than two of them went to Oxford University – can you guess which ones? Over the next four pages, in no particular order, we bring you the people who have risen to the top of media’s class.

Mark Palmer,  Maverick Planet (Formerly Managing Partner, OMD)

“Mark Palmer is a man with two brains,” says Paul Phillips, director of media and advertising services at the AAR.

“He is passionate about the business of media and has the ability to look at an issue from a different angle to most of us and express it in language that is eminently understandable.”

One AAR client made the decision to invite OMD to pitch for its business after reading a single A4 side of paper written by Palmer.

His background is a diverse one and his CV brimming with qualifications, from maths-based A-levels to a degree in business management and a postgraduate qualification in marketing.

He then became a qualified market researcher and ran his own market research company before joining the agency world.

He excelled in communications planning at Dorlands, WCRS and BMP and during his time in the industry has overseen more than 50 award-winning media campaigns, including five Grand Prix. He says that he owes his success to the breadth of his background. “It’s difficult in the media world now to learn to be broad,” he says. “Before, it was broad and simple; now it’s narrow and complicated.”

But he adds that his “big mouth” has helped his cause and Hamish Pringle, director-general of the IPA, agrees. “He’s much too intelligent for his own good. He talks 19 to the dozen, his thoughts tumbling over each other, but he is always compelling.”

Pringle says that Palmer has been a central force in getting media agencies involved in the IPA Effectiveness Awards and taking media to the top table.

Phillips cites his desire to try anything as a big factor in his success. “Mark’s approach can be summed up in a saying he likes to use: “You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”

They say: “He does the things that make other people say ‘I wish I’d done that’.” Paul Phillips, AAR