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Earlier this week, VCCP unveiled plans to open an academy in Stoke-on-Trent and create more than 500 opportunities for locals over the next year.

The long-term plan is to make the academy into an agency which serves local clients and employs local staff. With the normalisation of remote working, it seems there is no reason that jobs in the creative industries cannot be fulfilled outside England’s capital.

Speaking to ±±¾©Èü³µpk10, Jim Thornton, executive creative director at VCCP, said: “The whole point of this is that people shouldn't have to leave to be able to work for us any more."

The academy is part of the effort to redress the London-centric industry which, according to Thornton, has dug itself into a hole by recruiting “cookie-cutter” graduates who offer less diversity of thought and aren’t representative of the audiences ads are trying to reach.

But could the establishment of the academy work two-fold and solve adland’s talent crisis as well?

Creative and media agencies during the pandemic and are frantically trying to refill the gaps as clients begin to spend once more. But perhaps agencies haven’t widened their horizons wide enough.

During ±±¾©Èü³µpk10’s In-Housing summit last week (19 October), Richard Warren, Lloyds Banking Group’s director of communications, said they had “not yet” had any trouble attracting new talent outside London.

He attributed its success to Lloyds' main hubs being in Bristol, Halifax and Edinburgh. “The war on talent is particularly acute in London. We had success in Bristol recruiting a team from scratch.”

So, could adland’s talent drought be mitigated by looking beyond the skyline of London?

Adam Bodfish

Executive creative director, McCann Birmingham

We’ve always believed there is talent in the regions and built a very successful agency network with offices in Birmingham, Bristol, Milton Keynes, Leeds, Manchester and London that continues to attract great people and win awards. Here alone, we have a fully integrated offering with 300-plus people, which still takes people by surprise.

In short, location has never mattered to me. Having started my own career in Birmingham, moving to Bristol, Sydney and London, working at the likes of Leo Burnett and JWT before returning to my roots, it has always been about the agency, the people, the work and the opportunities. I firmly believe in recruiting people from different walks of life, not just geographies.

Phil Evans

Creative director, Leith

Economically, London has never been an option for many working-class people from the North. It’s why agencies like Leith are full of folk from Glasgow, Barnsley and, ironically in this instance, Stoke. So I applaud what VCCP are doing. They won’t be the last. As an industry, if we want to better understand our clients’ customers, we need a better understanding of their lives. And, as the BBC and Channel 4 know, the talent is there. Perhaps the greater challenge will be convincing them that advertising is the place to display it.

Camilla Kemp

Chief executive, M&C Saatchi

For too long, our industry has prioritised a narrow pool of talent in terms of location, but also when it comes to education, social class and ethnicity. To address this, in 2020 we launched Open House, a free, eight-week online training course for anyone interested in finding out about working in communications. Since then, we’ve had more than 2,500 people signing up, in places ranging from Glasgow and Sheffield to Delhi and Nairobi (with 35% coming from BAME backgrounds) and we’ve offered roles or internships to 13 of them. Of course, having boots on the ground outside London is a great way to tap into regional talent, but we have proved that by running a remote programme we can attract and hire amazing, diverse people from across the UK and beyond.

Peter Markey

Chief marketing officer, Boots

For me, it's about getting the balance right. At Boots we mix the benefit of the team in Nottingham, which includes our internal agency, Bhive, and we have continued to attract high quality talent through the pandemic. The real attraction for new starters, certainly over the past six months, has been the momentum we have behind the business and the brand, with one new starter moving from Amsterdam to join us in Nottingham. While most of our agency support is in London, the way we work is such that in any given week we get a healthy balance between Nottingham, London and hybrid working.

Suzy Barnes

Chief executive and chairman, Diva Agency

If London is having a talent crisis, we are definitely one of the beneficiaries. In the 1980s, Bristol had a reputation for being the death of all ambition. Now, it’s a creative power house that consistently outperforms other cities and boasts a wealth of agencies, which attract a strong pool of talent. 

As a result, hiring talent has never really been our issue at Diva, but we are definitely seeing more applications from within the networks, at every level of the agency. But the influx of disillusioned Londoners moving West started long before the pandemic. You simply don’t have to work in London to work on world renowned brands any more.

Conversely, what the pandemic has done for us is to open up remote-working access to candidates who are not looking to move West. That suits us, because we’ve never thought of ourselves as a “regional" agency anyway. Our clients, our work and our outlook are all international. Bristol is just where our main agency base is, and it’s where our talent enjoys living.

Rania Robinson

Chief executive and partner, Quiet Storm

While London is certainly part of the problem, with the industry not hiring from a pool of talent that is representative of the UK market we serve, I don’t think it’s as simple as saying this is the single barrier to the talent crisis.

Given that the industry currently isn’t even representative of the pool of talent available in London, this would indicate that many other factors at play stop us from attracting, retaining and developing the talent that’s on our doorstep.

I believe the issues come more from an establishment mindset that is only just starting to change. Looking beyond London is one of those much-needed shifts.

Veriça Djurdjevic

Chief revenue officer, Channel 4

At Channel 4, we believe that there is the opportunity to drive growth right across the UK in everything that we do. We are bringing jobs and growth to the nations and regions of the UK, with our national HQ in Leeds, creative hubs in Bristol and Glasgow, and a sales hub in Manchester. This is a key area of focus for us, and we will continue to invest in skills and training to provide access to the industry for emerging and existing talent. Creating opportunities for talent outside London has to be the right thing to do, both on the production and advertising sides of our business: it builds greater diversity of teams and greater creativity for both viewers and advertisers.

James Murphy

Founder and chief executive, New Commercial Arts

NCA didn’t open in Glasgow because of a talent crisis in London. We went there because we saw a talent opportunity in Glasgow. It grew organically out of a partnership with Glasgow School of Art and has allowed us to create a uniquely diverse talent base across CX and UX designers, ethnographers, prototypers.

The past 18 months showed that, even if some of you are London-based, you don’t have to be London-centric. NCA was born in lockdown and has grown around virtual working and a flexible, “light industrial” model. We’ve benefitted from talent working from the different regions and nations of the UK, and overseas. It’s felt liberating, and drawing on talent way beyond London is just the beginning.