The IPA is celebrating six advertising greats in recognition of their outstanding services to the industry in its fourth annual New Year Honours.
Each of the honourees has raised the reputation of the industry at large throughout their stellar careers and will be awarded FIPA (Fellow of the IPA) status.
The IPA New Year Honours List is our way of celebrating those who have made a remarkable impact on our industry as a whole, and it is always an honour for me to announce their names. Rosie, Patrick, Tony, Magnus, Mel and Jan are pillars of the advertising community and have consistently driven us forward. I’d like to thank each of them for their passion, determination and commitment to our industry, and congratulate them all on their wonderful and storied careers.
Rosie, Patrick, Tony, Magnus, Mel and Jan join 16 other industry stalwarts to be honoured in the IPA New Year Honours since 2019. The previous honourees are Jenny Biggam, Karen Blackett OBE, Helen Calcraft, Sarah Golding, Sir John Hegarty, Johnny Hornby, Carl Johnson, Annette King, James Murphy, Mark Read, Trevor Robinson OBE, Jeremy Sinclair CBE, Dame Cilla Snowball, Charles Vallance, Nigel Vaz and Michael Wall.
In addition to the New Year Honours List for services to the advertising industry, the IPA will honour exceptional individuals for their services to the IPA in its annual Summer Honours List later this year.
Rosie is one of very few women to have held a senior role in the creative department of an advertising agency in a career spanning 35 years.
She started at Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) in 1983 when it was just a tiny start-up, moonlighting from her Graphic Design degree at Central St Martins to eventually become its Executive Creative Director. While there she was responsible for some of the Agency's most iconic work, from Pretty Polly and Levi's in the 80s; The Independent and TAG Heuer and Levi's in the 90s; Lynx (The Lynx Effect) and Robinsons in the 2000s; and latterly Bailey's and Yeo Valley. In 2016 she moved to AMV to be its Creative Partner and Head of Art.
Her work has amassed many awards including six Cannes Gold, six D&AD pencils and three Campaign Golds and a Drum Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2012 she took on the role of President of D&AD (the second woman ever to do so) and presided over its 50th birthday celebrations. While there she introduced the ‘white pencil’ to reward campaigns for doing good, and one day hopes to win one.
Her talent, energy and enthusiasm for the business has meant she has been much sought after as a judge and chair of award schemes including The British Television Awards.
Since 2019 Rosie has been working on a varied portfolio covering training and consultancy. These days you might find her running any one of a number of masterclasses for D&AD, SCA and various colleges and universities. She is the resident expert for Channel 5’s Wonderful World of Chocolate and has also featured in a Channel 4 documentary on life as an ad creative.
Rosie is a beacon of creativity and a champion for developing talent. She is an exemplary role model for our business and has sometimes has been referred to as a ‘lioness of creative talent’.
In previous lives, Patrick was the Executive Creative Director and Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, London, which was fun.
Then he was the Creative Director of a small network of DM agencies, which was less fun. Good times returned when he was appointed Head of Design at The Zoo, Google’s creative think-tank.
Currently, he’s a non-exec creative director at Ad-Lib.io, an AI-based advertising management platform, which, given he is older than the founders’ parents, is more fun than he could expect at this stage of his career.
He is the publisher of Directory, a magazine dedicated to innovations in communications. His book ‘How to Use Innovation and Creativity in Business’ briefly appeared in the Amazon Top 1,000 list.
He runs training workshops for brands and agencies on creative matters of one sort or another. He shouts regularly at conferences but is generally regarded as harmless.
He has won many pieces of metal and Perspex, including Gold Lions from Cannes.
Tony was educated at Guthlaxton Grammar School in Leicester. He left with a few bruises and a rather dubious pair of A-levels. After failing to secure a job as a professional footballer he took his two left feet to Bristol Polytechnic where he studied Business. While doing a project for McCann Bristol, Tony was bitten by a large advertising bug and decided to become a copywriter. Post-Bristol, Tony worked on building sites as a labourer to fund himself at Watford College where he enrolled on the Post-Graduate Copywriting Course. The very course he would later return to as Course Leader. At Watford, one visiting lecturer, Brian Eno, made a huge impression on Tony. Brian’s talks opened his head and took his blank paper brain into an origami heaven. In 1979, Tony joined Saatchi and Saatchi as a junior writer where he stayed for three wonderful years. Stints at Geers Gross and Lintas followed. Tony worked on Walls Ice Cream, Minolta, Japanese Airlines and Birds Eye and rose to the dizzying heights of Associate Creative Director.
In 1989, Tony took a break from advertising to run The Watford Copywriting Course. That break lasted 32 years. In that time, he tutored and launched the careers of over 700 young creatives. Many of those students are now Creative Directors running creative departments all over the world. From Sydney to L.A. via Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Brussels. In 1992 Tony was the self-appointed Creative Director of the Monster Raving Loony Party’s General Election Campaign. In 2021, at the ripe age of 64, Tony left the Watford Ad School and was appointed as a Creative Consultant at Bartle Bogle Hegarty. His main responsibility hasn’t changed. Tony nurtures diverse, young creative minds for glittering careers in Advertising. It’s been Tony’s life. And he loves it.
Magnus was appointed Chief Client Officer for Publicis Groupe in November 2021. He oversees the Groupe’s global client relationships and is on the Management Committee.
He previously led Publicis Groupe UK’s creative agencies, including Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett and Digitas whose clients are some of the UK’s biggest advertisers, with BT, EE, Direct Line, McDonald’s, Morrison’s and P&G among them. He was also global president of the Saatchi & Saatchi network from 2017 to 2021.
From 2011 to 2020, Magnus was CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi London and led a period of transformation at the world’s most famous ad agency. During this time, Saatchi & Saatchi London grew by fifty per cent and won all the industry’s major creative and effectiveness awards. Prior to this, he was managing director of the acclaimed start-up agency Fallon London, which became one of the most awarded creative agencies of the 2000s, best known for groundbreaking campaigns for the BBC, Cadbury, Skoda, Sony and FCUK. He joined Fallon London in 2003 from Ogilvy & Mather.
Magnus is a leading voice on diversity. He has developed the communications for Operation Black Vote for the last three General Elections and the EU Referendum. He is chair of the MGGB Council, on the Black Business Institute Advisory Board, the English Premier League Equality Panel, the IPA Council and the Effies UK Board. He’s an England Rugby Mentor, Apprentice Nation Mentor and Marketing Academy Mentor. He lives in London with his wife and two young children.
Mel is the Global CEO of the Wunderman Thompson network, and oversees its 20,000 employees across 90 markets, including creatives, data scientists, technologists, and storytellers.
She began her advertising career with TBWA before moving on to M&C Saatchi’s LIDA where she rose to CEO in just over a decade. Mel started her WPP journey at Wunderman as the UK CEO in 2012, quickly moving up to become the CEO of Wunderman EMEA in 2015, and then taking the global role in 2018.
On the merger of Wunderman and J. Walter Thompson, Mel was named Global CEO of Wunderman Thompson and successfully led the network’s business and brand transition. A catalyst for business transformation, Mel is recognized as a leader with a proven record of helping marketers anticipate and navigate change, and under her leadership, Wunderman Thompson has won numerous high-profile accounts and the agency’s largest brands now include Ford, HSBC, Microsoft, Nestle, Pfizer, Samsung, Unilever, and more.
With Mel at the helm, Wunderman Thompson has implemented a gender-balanced Executive Committee, with women in global CEO, CFO, CPO, CMO and IE&D Officer roles. Plus, Wunderman Thompson is the first global network to have launched an Inclusive Experience Practice, with the aim of bringing inclusive design and accessibility to the marketing landscape.
Mel is recognized as one of the most influential people in digital marketing and advertising, having been featured in Campaign’s A-List, The Drum’s Digerati, HERoes Women Role Models, and Ad Age’s European Women to Watch. She has spoken at a number of international conferences including, most recently, RESET in 2021. She is also a Director of the Ad Council.
Jan is known to be one of the UK’s most experienced marketing leaders and is outspoken on a range of subjects from building global brands to inclusive leadership.
She has enjoyed a successful marketing career during which time she has worked with FTSE 100 companies such as BT, British Gas, Diageo and Unilever and, most latterly, as the Group Brand Director at Aviva. In her final role at Aviva, as their first Global Inclusion Director, she was responsible for introducing the ground-breaking policy of equal parental leave.
Jan now pursues a portfolio of interests as an executive coach, non-executive Chair of Given and PAMCo and is President of the Market Research Society. She is on the CMI Race Equity Committee, the advisory board of Utopia and is the former Chair of Stonewall. She is a regular columnist for Mediatel and an Honorary Fellow of the Marketing Society.