Stuart Smith's Blog

Interesting to see that Jim Hytner – whose career has more switchbacks to it than the mille miglia – is once more emerging triumphant from the quicksand of a career in marketing.

Hytner has just replaced long-serving Richard Beaven as worldwide chief executive of Interpublic Group subsidiary Initiative. Beaven (a surprisingly urbane man for the head of a media-buying house) has apparently left to spend more time with his passion for photography, an alternative vocation he says he has toyed with since childhood.

While none of this is to be doubted, we wonder whether he was also uncomfortably lodged in a career cul-de-sac. Beaven was once seen as a successor to Nick Brien when Brien left Mediabrands (the overarching arm of Interpublic’s media operations) to take on the top job at McCann Worldgroup. But the Mediabrands role instead went to Beaven’s chief rival at Universal McCann, Matt Seiler, who has been aggressively reorganising McCann’s media operations ever since.

Anyway, enter Jim. He’s relatively new to the world of media buying, having joined another IPG subsidiary, Universal McCann’s G14 (essentially the bits that aren’t America), as its boss only two years or so ago. Like Brien, he’s a Brit who has done rather well in the upper echelons of American-dominated McCann – the traditional breadbasket of Interpublic Group. There, however, the parallel ends. Where Brien is essentially a media services specialist who has made it into top agency management, Hytner’s much more colourful career has embraced the full ambit of marketing: he’s been an FMCG client; marketing director at some of Britain’s top television companies; client at one of Britain’s leading banks; a digital content wonk; and is now trying his hand – seemingly successfully – at the agency business.

The first thing to note about Jim is he is the youngest scion of a talented and very competitive family. All three Hytner brothers – the sons of a successful Manchester barrister – have set the bar high in their chosen fields. Nicholas, now Sir Nicholas, is the director of the National Theatre with such successes as the Madness of George III and The History Boys to his name. Richard, a lawyer by training and a Sloan Fellow of London Business School, is now deputy chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide.

“Cheeky chappy” Jim, less cerebral than his two brothers (they went to Oxbridge; he went to a redbrick), gives every appearance of being a lot more entrepreneurial. Certainly the young Hytner was prepared to give anything a go. First, like his eldest brother, he tried to tread the boards, but this was trumped by a potential career as a chef de cuisine. The way he tells it, his attempts to follow in the footsteps of Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay stopped dead one night, when thanks to a kitchen shift at the exclusive Miller House Hotel in the Lake District, he suddenly realised he was going to miss the 1985 FA Cup Final between Manchester United and Everton. To say that Jim is fanatical about Manchester United would be a considerable understatement. He (like more self-effacing elder brother Richard – though I’m not so sure of Sir Nick’s views on this subject) eats, lives and breathes the club’s highs and lows. “It’s the one final I’ve ever missed in my whole life, so I thought I can’t be doing with this hotel lark,” he tells us. Haute cuisine‘s loss was marketing’s or, more specifically, Kraft’s gain.

To this day, football analogies are never long absent from Jim’s utterances. And, in truth, it is a passion that has stood his career in good stead in the laddish, sports-mad environments of Sky TV, ITV – where he was marketing director – and (dare I mention it?) media buying circles. Though what Americans make of all this “soccer” talk, I have no idea.

Will Jim ever reach the top – conceivably, in time, replacing Brien? Over the years, Hytner’s maverick antics have made him a rather endearing fixture of the UK marketing scene. But they have also raised questions about his gravitas. This, after all, was the man who dreamt up those infamous idents of celeb TV personality Keith Chegwin in the nude when he was marketing director of Channel 5. What Jim may choose to call “brave” others in the industry characterise as controversy for the sake of controversy. He did something to allay this enfant terrible reputation during a (comparatively sober) stint as UK marketing director of Barclays Bank. But it remains to be seen whether he has mellowed sufficiently in his middle years…