Editorial: What we can learn from adland's best of British.(Editorial)

If you had an open chequebook and could roll back the years, who and what would you bring together to create Britain's greatest agency?

In fantasy land, you could mix and match the big players. In reality, agencies have their own methods, agendas and cultures, and clashing egos would doom any such attempt to failure.

It would be an extraordinary creative department that combined the quiet and thoughtful style of David Abbott with Charles Saatchi's chair-throwing tantrums. It would be a nightmare to try to reconcile the Saatchis' ruthless new-business strategy with the laid-back approach of Collett Dickenson Pearce, which believed more business would follow if its creative work was good enough.

But let's just suppose that you could fuse the best qualities of the five agencies that make up Campaign's best-ever list (see page 24). What a formidable aggregation would result.The swaggering self-confidence of CDP in its heyday; Boase Massimi Pollitt's determination to be best of breed; Saatchi & Saatchi's rule-breaking boldness; the principled and well-managed approach of Abbott Mead Vickers; ...