Lateral thinking the key to getting ahead in advertising

I'm a runner. I've done nine Dublin city marathons as well as marathons in New York, London and Europe. I love the spiritual aspect of being alone with your thoughts when you're running. Some of the best campaign ideas have come to me when my thoughts are in that freeflow. I could tell you the exact spot in a 10-mile run where a certain idea hit me.

I've been in the business 30 years, but I still find it hard to pin down what makes an ad man. I don't think you could explain what drives the inspiration in an ad campaign - perhaps if you could explain, it would take away that creative force. I love the job.

I was a doodler and a dreamer in school. I was always getting in trouble for drawing on the cover of my book when I should have been doing something else. I don't claim to be a great artist, but it did help open up the imagination. When I left school, I started as a production assistant in Arks Advertising and did the advertising course in Rathmines at night. It's come full circle now because I do some lecturing in DIT Aungier Street for the same course.

Now that I'm older, I feel more like a mentor. It gives you a thrill to have some of the students you've passed your experience on to get on well. I have one young guy who worked with me, Kevin Finn, and now he calls me from Sydney, Australia, where he is the senior designer in Saatchi and Saatchi. You get a lot of energy from things like that.

I did a bit of travelling myself earlier on in my career. I worked in London for a while and then in Beirut for 18 months. It was an amazing place. In spite of the war situation, there was still a real vibrancy about the place.

I need to have a number of jobs to keep me occupied. On any given day I could be going to creative meetings, thinking about how to tackle a campaign or I could be at an account meeting to present ideas. I'm trying to think about what it the most powerful thing I can say about the product or idea I'm working on.

You have to be comfortable sitting in silence when you're having a creative meeting. The creative relationships that you have can be quite intense because you're working on an emotional level. All of my good ad campaigns have come out of good relationships of respect and admiration for the people I'm working with.

One of the downsides of the job is the disappointment you can feel when, as a creative team, you have put together an idea and it is rejected. It is very difficult to keep creative energies high in that sort of situation.

I have a great passion for solving problems laterally or in an emotional way. It's necessary, because products no longer have a USP - or "unique selling point". I mean that they can be replicated overnight. There is nothing unique about a new brand of orange juice, so you have to think how you can use the ESP - or "emotional selling point". You're chasing after human insight.

In addition to the emotional aspect of the job, you are also dealing with a business problem. You are trying to shift a product, change perceptions and so on. Because you can change perceptions, it is a very powerful tool.

You may have scruples about who you will work with on a campaign. One campaign which I was very pleased to work on in terms of changing perceptions was for the Irish Epilepsy Society, which we helped to rebrand as Brainwave.

Although I would say that the best campaign I ever worked on was the campaign of my own career (if that doesn't sound too corny), there have been a few moments that really pleased me. I'm glad to say that I did get the chance to work on every adman's dream, which is a Guinness campaign - I did nine posters in the "Not every thing in black and white makes sense" campaign.

I was also really pleased when I was asked to be the president of the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design in 1992. It is an honour to be asked to do something like that, because you realise that your peers appreciate your work. The most recent award we've received was for an ad campaign for Lyons tea bags in the Aer Lingus magazine, Cara.

My current area is recruitment - or the employee communications business, as we call it. You're working with companies like Glaxo Smith Klein or KPMG and trying to outline what the company stands for.

This business has done a lot of good things for me and I'm really proud that my two daughters and my son have followed me into creative enterprises. At the end of the day I hope people say: "He still runs a good ad."

In conversation with Janet Stafford