Member Content: I WOULD WALK 500 MILES — Your Marketing Budget Already Has

It’s tempting to assume that advertising industries scale neatly with population. I’ve done it myself. New Zealand has five million people. Scotland, not much more. Individual Australian states are comparable again so we should have the ability to keep up a rocking creative advertising culture here, just like what happens over there, right? Wrong.

So why is it that places like Auckland or Melbourne (where I spent 15 years in global network agencies and indies) sustain confident, globally recognised advertising scenes, while Scotland, with all its cultural weight and export success, is so much thinner on the ground?

The answer isn’t talent. Nor is it creativity. It’s structural. Advertising industries don’t form around population size. They form around where commercial gravity sits and in Scotland, that gravity is allowed to sit elsewhere.

In New Zealand, Auckland is the centre of it. In Australia, Sydney and Melbourne act as powerful, semi-autonomous hubs. Businesses are headquartered there and marketing decisions and budgets are made there. Agencies cluster around that density of power. The result is a kind of creative pressure cooker. Work has to be good, because there are always other agencies, other clients, other campaigns raising the bar.

Scotland operates differently. Its economy is productive, often world-class, but the locus of decision-making is mostly displaced. For many large brands with Scottish roots, marketing authority sits down in London. Media planning, brand strategy, and creative direction are pulled south toward the UK’s dominant commercial centre. Advertising follows that movement. Of course it does. It goes where the budget is, and where the decisions are made. Whoever has the pesos has the say-so’s.

Basically, Scotland becomes a branch office economy. And here in the North we're a subsiduary of the branch. Even when the product is made here, the brand is allowed to be built a long way away from here.

This links to the second, compounding issue of client density. Strong advertising markets aren’t just built on a few large companies. They depend on a concentration of many marketing-active organisations. FMCG firms, retailers, banks, telcos, government departments all spending, testing, competing at the same time. In Auckland or Melbourne, that density exists. Agencies can move between clients, compare approaches, learn quickly. Clients, in turn, are constantly exposed to what others are doing. Standards rise because they must.

Scotland has excellent industries in whisky, energy, tourism, for example, but fewer large, marketing-intensive headquarters clustered together. The competitive heat is set lower. There are fewer moments where a client feels the immediate pressure of a rival’s better work landing in-market. Without that pressure, the system tends toward adequacy rather than excellence.

There’s also the question of market orientation. New Zealand companies, by necessity, think globally from the get-go. Distance forces ambition. Australia’s states, meanwhile, operate within a large and competitive domestic market. Scotland sits in a more ambiguous position. It has globally successful export sectors, but then the global marketing of those sectors is handled outside of the UK, never mind London. The most interesting, high-stakes brand decisions are made closer to global media centres and investor scrutiny not necessarily where the product originates. That can’t be healthy.

Overlay this with something less tangible but equally important, cultural confidence. Australia and New Zealand have spent decades proving, to themselves as much as anyone else, that world-class work can come from a small, geographically isolated market. Australia, particularly Melbourne, has cultivated a combative creative culture, a history of punching above its weight. This was drilled into my head at BBDO in the 2010’s. We used to win so many global warads that they sat in wheelbarrows in the agency reception. Scotland, for all its pride, sometimes has a meeker commercial instinct. There is, at times, a tendency to defer. A sense that “proper” advertising happens elsewhere. That instinct doesn’t announce itself loudly. But it shapes decisions and over time, it becomes self-reinforcing. (Not everywhere, obviously. There’s a few agencies and brands that compete so don’t @ me.This is an argument for more to follow that lead.)

Talent flows follow the same pattern. In NZ and Oz, it is totally possible to build a full career at the highest level without ever leaving the market. The biggest briefs, the most ambitious campaigns, the industry recognition are all available locally. I saw loads of talent pop off to New York for a couple of years, then come scuttling back because the advertising culture in Melbourne was better. In Scotland, ambitious talent often migrates to London and then doesn’t come back. Not because Scotland lacks ability, but because the perceived ceiling is higher elsewhere. And when people leave, they don’t just take their skills with them, they take the accumulated knowledge of how to operate at scale. And so, fewer experienced practitioners remain to raise the standard for the next generation.

Perhaps the most overlooked factor is what might be called the missing middle. Scotland has small businesses, and it has a handful of large global players. What it has less of is a dense layer of mid-sized, aggressively growing, marketing-driven companies, the kind that are hungry enough to take risks, and resourced enough to act on them. These are often the clients that push agencies hardest. They can’t afford to be invisible, but they also can’t rely on legacy or scale. They demand effectiveness and distinctiveness in equal measure. Where that layer is thin, the overall ecosystem loses a key source of energy.

None of this is about a lack of capability. Scotland can produce excellent advertising. It has, and it occasionally does. Take Irn-Bru, a brand that has consistently punched above its weight not by mimicking global soft drink codes, but by leaning hard into its own distinctiveness, humour and attitude, a kind of knowing Scottishness that feels both local and broadly accessible shows exactly what’s possible when a brand commits to being noticed rather than blending in. The point isn’t that Scotland can’t do great work. It’s that there aren’t enough conditions in place for that level of confident output to be the norm rather than the exception.

Advertising is often talked about as a creative industry. In reality, it behaves more like a byproduct of economic structure. It emerges where there is pressure. Pressure to compete, pressure to grow, pressure to be noticed. Remove or diffuse that pressure, and the output changes accordingly.

Which is why a comparison with New Zealand or Oz, while superficially logical, misses the underlying dynamics. Those markets are not simply similar-sized populations with better advertising. They are environments where commercial gravity, client density, and cultural expectation all align to make strong work more likely.

This isn’t an argument about constitutions or flags, by the way. It’s an argument about where decisions get made. Advertising follows money, and money follows authority the people setting budgets, signing off strategy, choosing partners. When that authority sits elsewhere, the industry forms elsewhere too. Change the location of decision-making and the ecosystem changes with it. Leave it as it is, and the outcome shouldn’t be a surprise.

Our challenge - and opportunity - is to recognise that the issue isn’t inherent. It’s structural. And structures can change, or be worked around. Because if advertising follows power, then part of the answer lies in reclaiming more of that power locally.

A big part of it lies in behaving, deliberately, as if Scotland were not a satellite market, but a primary one.

Do that, and the industry doesn’t need to wait for conditions to improve.

We start to create our own. Who’s with me?

Eaon Pritchard | TheSignalWorks  thesignalworks.co.uk