Guy Hayward admits he would be torn if a talented young employee wanted to move to another leading advertising agency. “I’d find it very hard to say ‘don’t do that’. Having made a move myself I know it adds value.”
Mr Hayward, chief executive of JWT UK, is 46 and joined the company – previously known as J. Walter Thompson – as a graduate trainee in 1987, the same year it was bought by Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP.
A fluent French and Spanish speaker, he spent two years from 1990 at JWT Barcelona in a spell that coincided with the Catalan city’s hosting of the 1992 Olympics. But after returning to London briefly at the end of that year, he decided he had other fish to fry.