The man behind Tony

What a great start to Ad Week as the sun shone through the windows of Christopher Wren’s St James's Church in Piccadilly, we had an insight to the man behind 'Tony' in the form of Alastair Campbell.

He spoke frankly and engagingly about how he believes you can win, and used examples and scenarios from all the people he had interviewed for his new book to bring this to life. Mourinho, Wenger, Anna Wintour, Angela Merkel, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and Dave Brailsford all featured.

He believes in the Holy Trinity (very apt of course given our location) of Strategy, Leadership and Teamship and contextualised this in the current pressures and changing landscape. In fact one of the themes I liked was how he was able to bring his thinking and approach to winning back to our world of advertising and media, after all we are all about campaigning in some shape or form.

With the General Election not far away, this was very timely and Campbell has a clear view on “the only two people who will be prime minster” as well as the strategy, or lack of strategy, of our current prime minister!

The insights he gave into the ‘Teamship’ behind’ Tony’ made great listening. The key was that they all had different personalities but all had the same trait – to challenge.

Interestingly it is his fear of failure that drives him and he talked a lot about how you need a ruthless and obsessive focus on winning. In the Q&A he was asked about staying at the top once you have won. His answer is innovation and in order to stay ahead you have to innovate faster than anyone else. When asked about how to deal with failure, he responded that what you take out of failure is what makes you win.

Campbell was intelligently interviewed by Richard Kilgarriff and thank you to The Marketing Society for giving everyone a copy of Campbell’s new book ‘Winners and How They Succeed’ – nice touch.

Natasha is managing director at Havas Media. Follow them on twitter @HavasMediaUK.