Gerry Farrell

Gerry cut his copywriting teeth at The Leith Agency.  At the time, it was a tiny hotshop, next door to a beansprout factory, in a converted primary school with child-size toilets.

As creative director, he turned it into a creative powerhouse packed with world-class talent that challenged London’s ad industry with funny, multi-award-winning campaigns for Scottish icons like Tennents Lager and Irn-Bru and national brands like Carling, Grolsch and Honda.

In 2014, Gerry set up the Gerry Farrell Ink creative consultancy with his better half Zsuzsa, producing campaigns for the likes of Lego, Guinness, Baileys, Brown-Forman and mental health charity Mind as well as helping to build local brands from scratch like Jump Ship Brewing, Scotland’s first exclusively AF brewery.

Together, they’ve won hundreds of national and international awards, from Cannes Gold Lions for Irn-Bru to Zero Waste Scotland’s Scottish Resources Award for the work of Zsuzsa’s community action group Leithers Don’t Litter.

For five years (until Elon Musk came along), Gerry was a creative writer and coach at Twitter UK.

He’s run creative training courses all over the world for D&AD, sat on their advertising juries and appeared regularly in their awards annuals.

He is Associate Creative Director at NoTosh, helping them to transform international schools by getting them to think differently about the way they work and the impact they have.

It’s a lot.

So to relax, he paints, flyfishes and watches Hibs (if you can call that relaxing).

Gerry still calls it advertising, not ‘brand storytelling’ or ‘content’.

He thinks strategy has its foot on creativity’s neck like never before, leading to a landfill of lazy work.

Above all, he believes a twinkle in the eye gets you a foot in the door.

Because as his long-time mentor Sir John Hegarty says, “you don’t buy things from people you don’t like.”