I'm Joining Biss Lancaster: A New Direction

So it's with a heavy heart but with great excitement that I can finally annouce (after being under wraps for weeks!) that I am leaving Ogilvy PR London to join as Digital Director @ Euro RSCG Biss Lancaster.

So why am I leaving Ogilvy? There is no good reason, I was not looking or after something new. (Que overused metaphor) But every now and again something comes along an interrupts the norm, and you make a decision to follow a new path, or stay on the road you are on. When Holly Ward at Biss got in touch back before Christmas to say they were looking for a Digital Director, I was a little shocked, in our subsequent meeting we discussed how headhunting really can be a disturbing thing - you are so engrossed in what you are doing, so embedded, that it is hard to imagine what uprooting and moving to something different could even look like.

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It was around this time that I started reading one of the most fantastic books I have ever read - "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" by the phenomenal Don Miller (read his blog here). In it Don explores the process of being approached by a production company about making a movie about his own memoir, the bestselling book "Blue Like Jazz". Through the book, Don explores the idea of what makes a good story and what it's like to try "editing my own life". Throughout the book Don explorers the way that we are much like characters, and life is a like a story. However he also explores how good stories, fictional ones, are not like real life at all - everything is exaggerated, accellerated - the drama is added in, because characters have to develop, and usually to develop them, you often have to put them through the mangle.

And so there I found myself, the opportunity to uproot, to mangle, to tell a new story, or stick in the one I am in. Which by the way is far from boring. In fact the past 14 months @ Ogilvy have been some of my greatest. I have met more challenges, people and problems that ever before, and grown through it, with more people to thank that a Kate Winslet acceptance speech. But now as I sit on the cusp of the next chapter in my own little story I, like Don in his book, remember the last scene from the Catcher In The Rye from the recently late, and eternally great J. D. Salinger, when we realise Holden Caufield has been telling the whole story to a counsellor in a nuthouse. And I too wonder , as Don, Salinger and many more to come will wonder if that's what it will be like when this is all over. We will sit down with God in the new Jerusalem, on the sidestreet cafés of the golden paved streets of Zion and tell him our little story, and he will tell us what it all meant.

So here we go. A new chapter. I'll let you know how it goes.