McCann's enfant terrible unveils vision for Europe.(McCann-Erickson's Ben Langdon)(Brief Article)

Ben Langdon is relishing taking on an International role

Ben Langdon says that his decision to leave CDP for McCann-Erickson was made on the basis of a pitch. One that he, uncharacteristically, lost. The year was 1996 and the account up for grabs was Sega, which Langdon felt should be a shoe-in given his agency's Japanese credentials. All the same, he'd given the pitch the full treatment, jetting around the world drinking cocktails with the company's senior management, charm turned up to full.

"Then someone told me that Sega felt the door to the west was being opened by McCann rather than Dentsu," he says. "That absolutely killed me. I realised then that the game was up at CDP." A couple of months later and he was moving over to join the agency with the key.

It's a story that sums up much of Langdon's character. There's the ultra-competitiveness, the ferocious focus on the job in hand, a hint of the intense natural charm that he focuses on senior clients. There's also the pathological refusal to accept defeat, the ruthless ability to size up a situation, and the ambition instantly to assess the prospects of an agency network and do what had to be done as far as his career was concerned.

Five years on and Langdon, at the tender age of 38, is one of the most powerful Englishmen in world advertising, becoming the first non-American to command McCann-Erickson Worldwide across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The same week, CDP is being merged into its one-time subsidiary, travissully.

It's far from the first time that Langdon and the UK's advertising heritage seem to be moving in different directions. Adland has enjoyed caricaturing him as a wild-eyed chief executive from the Genghis Khan school of management, most memorably as David Crutton in Matt Beaumont's e. Langdon gets his own back by talking about London as an advertising culture in self-induced decline, cut off from the crucial international arena.

"People are particularly blinkered here," he says. "If you asked creative headhunters to find the talent who could do a Nike or Gap campaign, you'd be met with blank faces. We don't tend to get the higher-end creative ideas that global campaigns need."