Robert Harwood-Matthews - Badger's parting shot

Now, he is calling The Drum for one last interview before he leaves. Calling, that is, from the departure lounge at Manchester Airport, waiting for a plane to Geneva for a meeting about Infiniti, the car account he will manage in his new global role based at TBWA\Chiat\Day in Los Angeles.

Go back to 2006 and again Harwood-Matthews had travel on his mind. At the time he was client services director at TBWA\London, looking after the likes of Nissan and Sony Playstation. But he had grown frustrated at not being hands-on enough and in what he calls “typically hotheaded fashion” told his bosses that he wanted to do something bigger and gain some operational experience. They had something in mind. “Are you geographically mobile?” they asked him.

“I don’t know why, but I immediately thought China,” he remembers. “For years everyone had been talking about how China was one of the big growth markets and I thought ‘crikey, I’m off there’. I already had visions of my children speaking Mandarin...

“And then they said, ‘how about Manchester?’ It caught me by surprise because I didn’t know anything about what was going on in the Manchester office. I think people at London agencies, and certainly in the account team I was working in, are blind to the regions. We think, ‘oh, we know about New York, we know about Paris’; but we forget that about that other office in the UK.”

PROUD PAST

Drizzly Manchester might not have been quite as exotic as the adventure he had first imagined, but Harwood-Matthews was wowed by the legacy of the agency then known as BDH\TBWA – its moniker a nod to the independence it occupied before becoming part of the global ad network – and he had no hesitation in becoming its CEO. When he took up his post, he found an agency with a proud past, but one “lacking a sense of vision,” he says.

“There wasn’t a shortage of vision in 1964 but I’m not sure it was the same by the time I got there. It felt like when you read about managers walking into Japanese agencies and there are all sorts of ties and connections and things that can’t be broken. It was evident to me that there were some fantastic people there, but there was also a lot of hanging on to the past and not enough thinking about how the agency was going to go forward.”

What happened next was a complete transformation. He initially set himself a “90 days” maxim to get stuck in quickly and surround himself with allies. After his self-defined settling in period, the changes came thick and fast and started to become noticeable on the outside. After a little over a year in the job, BDH’s existing senior team had gone, along with the agency’s name.

Robert Harwood-Matthews had built a new team – which included the man now succeeding him, McCallum, as chief operating officer – and TBWA\Manchester was born.

Despite those changes in his first year which saw several of the agency’s old faithful move on, it is not a conversation topic he has ever laboured upon. Many observers said at the time it was a sign of a man with a big reputation from London who wanted to make an instant mark to announce he had arrived in Manchester. But despite the swiftness with which he acted, Harwood-Matthews always maintained he was playing the long game. And if there was a clash of cultures between the old guard and the new man from down south, he would never indulge us in it. Admitting “there were petty grievances, and things that people were aggravated about that I did,” is as telling as Harwood-Matthews gets. “But I had a job to do and got on with it – and spirited people came with me,” is how he puts it into perspective.

Because of the splash his impact made, Harwood-Matthews – or ‘Badger’ as many of his peers and colleagues have come to know him for his slick of grey hair – became a fixture in the trade press and started to pen columns for the media page of the Manchester Evening News. In one such column, he described the standard of creative work at his first Roses advertising awards as “rubbish” and asked why Manchester “settles for creative mediocrity when there’s so much rock and roll in its veins”.

DIPLOMATIC

A year since that column was published, he is coy about whether his view on the region’s creative standards has changed and is certainly more diplomatic than when the ink was still wet on his MEN article.

“The debate in itself was a valuable exercise because it threw up a whole load of people who got talking about it. It got some people’s backs up, so if nothing else at least we’re talking about what we’re here to do which is deliver great creative work. But there’s been so much change in the last 12 months that it’s quite hard to gauge [whether the standard has improved]. I will be Googling you guys to see what Trevor Beattie makes of it when he comes up to judge the Roses.”

During his time in Manchester, Harwood-Matthews could often be spotted at networking events and group forums to discuss the city’s creative future. Despite being a critic of the city’s creative standards himself, he recalls one forum meeting where he entered into a war of words with Peter Saville, after the revered ‘creative director of Manchester’ told him, ‘You won’t ever find a really exciting advertising agency in Manchester.’ Harwood-Matthews was outraged.

“I was really angered by his comment because I thought, ‘that’s what I’m trying to do’. I’ve since softened though because in some peculiar senses I think he was right.

“What has happened is that at TBWA\Manchester we’ve focussed our energies on becoming a really exciting creative company. We haven’t specifically used the term ‘advertising agency’ because we think that sort of angle is old and besides, we’re making all manner of different things for clients like ghd, Co-Op and Manchester United.

“You probably hear that from a lot of agency heads, but look to London, for example, and they are still advertising agencies down there, and they are still grappling with how to change themselves into multi-disciplinary creative companies.”

So, the future for TBWA\Manchester then. What will McCallum inherit compared to what Harwood-Matthews faced when he arrived? “I wish right now you could walk in before and after to see the energy of the place,” he says. “That energy is made up of so many little different things. It’s people feeling good about themselves running about the agency getting on with stuff, it’s music playing in the background and better kit; it’s made up of a whole host of factors. I’m not singularly responsible for all of them. But hopefully I set the agency in the right direction and to some extent set the pace.”

There is a bing bong chime in the background and it is Harwood-Matthews’s boarding call – time to go.

He leaves TBWA\Manchester a very different agency from when he arrived. And love him or loathe him, one of the north west’s more colourful characters leaves the region a much quieter place.