As I write, Manchester is some 5031 miles away. By a bizarre coincidence 5031 is pretty much exactly the number of days ago that most of the following stories began. If I’d started walking a leisurely mile a day back in August 1993, I’d have just about reached the suburbs of Beijing by now.

It’s a sobering thought and (at 22.30 pm Beijing time after being on holiday for four days) those are always useful things – especially with beer currently selling here for around 15p a bottle.

This is the second part of an article that looks at the iconic figures that dominated the North West media and marketing communications scene in the nineties. It is an unashamedly personal memoir and this second installment looks at three figures who individually, in my opinion, towered in the PR, media buying and media representation arenas respectively…

Typically a man who disposes of his partners and sells his business to a multi-national, before promptly buggering off to spend more time with the huge stack of cash he has made in the progress, should be universally regarded as a ruthless operator. It is a testament to Paul Carroll’s ability to, as the CIPR say, manage reputation that he has largely avoided this fate.

I first met Paul in September 1993. This was at a point when he was really in his Glory Days in the North West PR scene. He was chairman of the IPR in the North West and had just launched the first IPR NW awards. I had just started at Adline and this was my first trip both to Manchester and to an industry awards event.

Not knowing a soul, I gingerly sidled up to the top table (where I’d presumably got the place they truly wanted to reserve for PR Week!). As an anonymous no-mark journalist on his first trip back to his home city in an official capacity, it was a little off-putting to see Paul Carroll glance at his watch and announce to his guests; “Where’s that c**t from Adline, then?”

It was an odd introduction to an individual whose career would be one of the ones I would follow most keenly over the next few years.

Dominant force

Communiqué, Paul’s PR company was just on the cusp of becoming the dominant PR force in the North West. This caused a degree of bad feeling with some of the consultancies in the area – notably Staniforth and Mason Williams who resented this upstart organization and the degree of success and high profile that surrounded it.

Writing in his blog (http://eariam.blogspot.com/), Nigel Hughes, a former account group head at Communiqué, commented recently: “Back in the late 90s when I worked for Communiqué, the bosses believed there was something called ABC syndrome, ABC being: “Anyone But Communiqué”. They claimed that the company's success so irritated others in the North West PR world, that it didn't matter who won an award, a pitch or a new contract, just so long as it wasn't us.”

I think Hughes’ comment pinpoints exactly the feelings that existed towards the consultancy at that time, but it wasn’t a feeling that existed towards Carroll per se. Carroll was and remains to this time, highly personable, an excellent host and highly adept at making people feel welcome and appreciated.

Moon, Leslie and Beech

Yet this “hail fellow well met persona” belies a much more steely side which saw Carroll single-mindedly prepare Communiqué for sale to Burson Marsteller. Much of this process saw Carroll dispose of shareholding partners in the business, including a couple (notably John Moon and Iain Leslie) whom he’d a long personal and business relationship with. And that’s without mentioning his spectacular falling out with one Brian Beech.

It has to be said that Communiqué, post-Carroll, is predictably not the force it once was. A statement from Burson Marsteller in May 2001, upon the announcement of the acquisition, put the staff numbers at 35. A quick peruse of the company’s website today sees only 15 members of staff listed, including one in the London office.

One interesting addition to the staff list is Nigel Sarbutts, who joined as managing director from Connectpoint PR in January of this year. Sarbutts was an alumnus of Communiqué but left under a cloud after falling out with Carroll in the early 90s. Surely, I can’t be alone in wishing I was having a beer with Carroll on the day the news of Sarbutt’s appointment broke.

A far less controversial character was Ray Sale, chief executive of Mediaedge CIA Manchester. From the early 90s to his untimely death in December 2001, Uncle Raymond was Mr Manchester Media.

In 1993 Ray was startlingly omni-present. Aside from his day job with CIA, he was chairman of the Manchester Publicity Association, past president of the First Friday Club, chairman of NABS North West and chairman and presenter of the Roses Advertising Awards.

His previous day time job had been as regional sales manager at Granada, in the days when Granada really meant something.

Frankly, it was difficult to attend any media function in the North West or his native Yorkshire without bumping into Ray.

Ray was having a fairly cushy time in the early 90s. CIA had a fairly settled senior staff and Ray had a lot of leeway in terms of his high profile industry social life, something which his CIA lieutenants would occasionally grumble about.

What a team

Ray had a team which included Paul Wheeler, Declan McKenna, Andrew Bartholomew (now all managing partners at Mediacom North) and Steve Blakeman (now head of Initiative Media in Singapore.) and Ian Tinker. In 1996, Bartholomew, McKenna and Wheeler spectacularly jumped ship to launch the then Media Business North, although the start-up was initially billed as BMW after the initials of its three principals. So launched in mixture of acrimony and acronymy, the nascent BMW was a huge challenge to Uncle Raymond’s rather relaxed lifestyle. But fair play to him, he took it on the chin and turned up to present that year’s Roses Awards with a job recruitment board and a tin hat.

Ray’s presenting style at the Roses awards, a synergy of his natural wit and charm and his experience of treading the boards in am-dram, won him many admirers. It’s not easy to control a crowd of 600 pissed-up creatives in a hotel in Manchester, all of ’em unhappy because the awards had gone to a handful of Edinburgh agencies once again, but Ray managed it with aplomb.

His self deprecating humour and references to his other half, Pat, being up on the roof carrying out some improbable household maintenance task, actually endeared him to cynical young creatives in a manner, which on paper, looks wholly unlikely, but undeniably worked.

Only two fallings out – good by my reckoning

I only fell out with Ray twice, which was pretty good by my reckoning. The most serious time was over the Roses. For a couple of years, I’d been in negotiation with the Roses steering committee, headed by Ray, about securing exclusive sponsorship of the Roses for Adline.

For various reasons – not least the financial importance of Scottish entrants and hence the involvement of the Drum – it had come to naught. We’d launched the Birmingham Cream awards in May 1996 and rather quickly decided to follow it up with the first Cream NW awards in October of that year.

Ray never really took this well. The then Roses steering committee had long maintained that the event made no money, but this didn’t really hold a lot of water when you started to do the sums on it.

I’d been observer at the Roses Judging day on a number of occasions and it had always left me slightly uneasy that no-one, except the steering committee knew the results of the judging, even after the judging had finished. This “secret ballot” procedure and the “adjustment day” that took place after the judging day proper was always a little open to abuse.

Basically – and this is true of every judging day I’ve ever been involved with, the event organizers always want as many different companies on the shortlist as possible – with the obvious theory being that you go on the shortlist and you take a table. Obviously, across thirty categories, this is incredibly open to abuse.

Deliberately doing down the Roses

With Cream we’d taken a decision, uncomfortable as it sometimes was, that no matter how unhappy we were with the results, we wouldn’t shoehorn people on to the shortlist and that all the judges would walk away from the judging day knowing all the results. When I pointed this out in print, Ray took big umbrage and saw it as deliberately doing down the Roses, which was maybe true.

However, I do think now, as I did then, that event organizers are the last people who should be solely entrusted with knowing the results of awards. We didn’t speak for months and Ray called me a “twat” very loudly at a subsequent First Friday lunch, possibly the first and last time an FF member has been called that, well non-sotto voce-ally at least.

The other occasion was much less serious. I was a guest on the top table at the MPA Christmas bash and was sat in between Ray and Terry Savage, then head of DM at MAP and also the new chairman of the MPA.

We were well into the serious drinking by then (in those days it started at 10 a.m.!) and were post-prandially waiting for the first of the bands to come on. The backing band duly struck up and the opening strains of “Under the Boardwalk” echoed around the Piccadilly Hotel, then stopped, then started again.

The Drifters stuck in the lift

The organizing committee, perched on the top table, was now starting to look a little uncomfortable and as we went: “Under the Boardwalk” for a third time, Ray passed a hastily scribbled note to the comedian Mick Miller who was hosting the event. It said simply: “Mick can you do another five minutes? The Drifters are stuck in the lift!” Ray, the consummate showman, never saw the funny side when I subsequently printed the note in Adline…

Ray died on December 24, 2001 on a date that was also his birthday. He’d gone into hospital with stomach pains and had an emergency operation to remove a tumour from his stomach. Ray suffered a heart attack during the operation and died before most of his many friends even knew he was ill.

Due to a share deal that went through just a short time before his illness, I think Ray actually died a millionaire, although sadly he hadn’t had many days in which to enjoy this status. Ray had always had a touch of envy for those of his contemporaries, such as BJL’s Michael Barrington, who’d set up their own businesses in the eighties and subsequently benefited hugely in financial terms. I am glad that, even at such a late stage, he’d been probably able to reap the benefits of his career and pass them on to his wife and step children.

Ray’s funeral was predictably huge, with a vast crowd making its way to his Holmfirth home on a bleak January afternoon. Many took his untimely death as a reminder that there is a time to get out of the business and enjoy the accrued benefits of such a long career. That, though, wouldn’t have worked for Ray, he simply enjoyed being in the business too much to have countenanced early retirement, no matter how well advised it might have been.

Along with Ray Sale, Robert Johnstone was one of the first two people I met in the North West media scene.

During work on my first issue of Adline, I’d called Robert about something to do with a press release he’d sent us. I think it was the announcement that his company’s name was changing from “Media Sales North” to “Media Sales Network”, but that might have come later.

Such was Robert’s shock that someone from Adline had called him with an editorial query and not merely on a pretext of trying to flog him space, that he invited me to lunch.

So it was, that a few short weeks later, I was sat on the top table at an MPA bash, between Robert and Ray. I was bemusedly wondering what a media independent was and just what a media representation house did and they, in turn, were equally bemusedly wondering (I imagine) why Adline had employed such an ignorant prick who didn’t know the answer to these (fairly key!) two questions.

Robert took a lot more getting to know than Ray did. I felt for many years he always exercised a degree of restraint towards me and he frequently, but fairly mildly (at least to my face!) sent me up. He was a Scot by birth, but wholeheartedly embraced the North West scene – to the point where he could be a little dismissive of his countrymen North of the Border.

Car crash in 2004

That he died aged just 56 in a car crash in March 2004 was a huge loss to the industry. It was even more tragic as it seemed to occur at a time when Robert finally seemed to be genuinely happier than he’d been for a long time.

The end of the 90s had seen his company. MSN, shafted by one of their large radio clients, Capital, who’d suddenly announced that they were launching their own regional sales operation. Robert had anticipated this, but it still came as a blow.

This came at around the same time that he’d been diagnosed with MS, an illness he talked freely about and one, that apart from some problems with one of his legs, didn’t seem to slow him down at all. One of his sons, Laurie, had also been diagnosed with MS, a fact which Robert seemed to blame himself for, although there was medically no justification for this belief.

He’d initially anticipated leaving MSN through a management buy out, but the desertion of a key client, problems with his health and his changed personal situation acted as a catalyst for him to seek another route and, in 2001, MSN became part of Noel Edmond’s and Rob McLoughlin’s Unique Communications Group. As if he hadn’t suffered enough, wags said at the time, he now had to sit in board meetings with the man from Crinkley Bottom!

It was whilst Robert was going through the process of what direction to take MSN that I got to know his other son, Alan. At Robert’s suggestion I interviewed Alan for a job as my deputy on The Marketeer, the ill-fated regional marketing publication I’d launched with the backing of the Carnyx Group in 1999.

Alan and Ernie

I inadvertently did an “Ernie” here. Doing an “Ernie” in North West media circles meant inadvertently appointing your successor, as had SBW chief executive, Ernie Bate, when taking on his ultimate replacement, Simon Howitt, as SBW managing director some years earlier.

However, I never bore Alan any ill will. He became editor of the Marketeer through his own merits and is now part of a new wave of titles entering into the Manchester market with his self-published Bob magazine that launched earlier this year. Good luck to him!

For all his good will and kindness, Robert could be a canny bugger as a media operator. One of the more bizarre conversations I remember with him occurred in 1997.

Martin Conry, chief executive of the then TMD Carat had just died and Adline was carrying an obituary piece for him. At the same time, MSN had just moved offices to its current location in Beaver House. Predictably the ad that MSN ran with Adline to announce its new address made a somewhat feeble “beaver” joke -equally predictably the facing matter it ran with in Adline was Martin’s obituary!

Less predictably, Robert and I had a half an hour conversation as to whether the late media independent head would have been offended by the “beaver” gag or amused, the outcome of which would decide whether MSN paid full whack for the ad or got it repeated for free in a subsequent issue. In the end, I think, again predictably, Robert managed to wangle both. You can take the boy out of Scotland…

My favourite memory of Robert, though, is a much more joyful one. With Cream launching in Manchester and the MPA being let down at the last minute for a lunch speaker, we rather rashly attempted to do “Adlive” – a live version of the magazine performed over the lunch.

To say it was a hit and miss affair would be only half true, but one of the genuine successes of the afternoon was tying in the PA system of the hotel room with an external phone line and me conducting some 200 members of the MPA to sing happy birthday to Robert on the occasion of his fiftieth whilst he sat with members of his staff outside the Peveril of the Peak. Next year he would have been 60; I hope the MPA remember to sing to his memory on that occasion too.

The third part of this article will look at the last two figures who complete this personal recollection, but will also ask who are their 21st Century boys and girls who have taken their place…Any additional suggestions most welcome.


tonymurray37@hotmail.com

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