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North by North West

February 24th 2011

Deborah Stuttard

Deborah (Debs) Stuttard is a senior account manager at Marketecture. She comes from an in-house background as a marketing manager, so is ideally placed to understand and address the day-to-day client frustratons and challenges. A former politics graduate she is often found ranting on all things political. Sorry about that!

The great North/South divide is alive and well this week.

Not only have BBC Breakfast staff ruffled the feathers of some Mancunians for their unwillingness to move to our lovely City, but Vision+Media has kicked off a veritable online riot.

Launching a campaign to encourage North West born creatives living and working in our capital to resign and return to the North, ‘Resign London’ although no doubt well intentioned, has backfired somewhat.

The campaign, which includes a pre-written resignation letter, a website with regional house prices and the latest creative news has, it seems, enraged rather than engaged many of the Manchester and Liverpool creative set.

Indeed a selection of tweets on the campaign include:

  • Surely putting one's time into keeping / promoting existing talent in Manchester instead is a no brainer.
  • So talented Northerners get overlooked then? Is that the way forward
  • A North-West funded campaign saying that the North-West lacks talent - marketing genius
  • I like the idea of @ResignLondon but wouldn't be better to utilise some of the talent in Manchester that's out of work?
  • I think the Stereotype is there is naff all talent in the NW which is @resignlondon saying. It’s utter crap

And that seems to be the crux of the matter. Resign London implies, despite what we all know to be true, that the North West doesn’t have the creative talent needed to take the sector to the next level. Rather than promoting all that we have to offer, it intentionally or not p***es of the very people that are driving the industry forward. It may have been meant as tongue-in-cheek, but it just doesn’t work.

What we need is a campaign that promotes the great work being undertaken in the North West. That rather than being a poor relation to our peers in London, we too are working on quality projects for fantastic clients. We’re also picking up the odd award or two along the way (cough, cough did we mention we’re a B2B Marketing Awards Winner?)

Rather than implying we have a lack of talent, let’s focus on the great opportunities we have up North.