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If you’re thinking of crossing the Atlantic to work in the US,

perhaps you should consider buying a return ticket. For while the

experience may be valuable, marketers generally come back.

Mike Batt, a former British Airways marketing director and now president

of Carlson Leisure Group in the US, recommends that all ambitious

marketers do a one- or two-year stint in the US.

He believes both countries offer attractions, but says the US lifestyle

does not suit everybody. Batt puts the differences down to four words:

size, pace, accountability and reward. ’Things are simply much bigger,

the pace is faster, accountability clearer and rewards higher,’ he

says.

MT Rainey, founding partner of Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe, spent six

years in the US with Chiat Day. She found that there was no real sense

of an advertising community in the US and that the UK had more of a

creative culture, with less hard sell.

Originally from the US, Allyson Stewart-Allen is now director of

International Marketing Partners in the UK. She thinks marketing is

taken more seriously in the US as a profession and that marketers over

there have a stronger voice.

The idea that Americans are workaholics appears to be a myth. Rainey

thinks the difference is that they work when at work, rarely take a

lunch break, and then let their hair down after 6pm.

Whatever the cultural differences, a stint in the US can give a marketer

valuable experience in a more complicated and diverse environment, with

the benefit of leveraging salaries on their return.