12
WORK
LIF E
9 3
A�ONE-DAY�DIARY��
FROM�MORNING�LATTE
TO�LIGHTS�OUT
Farah Ramzan
Golant, CEO
of Abbott
Mead Vickers
Farah Ramzan Golant, 45, is CEO
of advertising giant Abbott Mead
Vickers. She lives in London with her
husband Ben, an academic, and their
two children, Ishtar, 12 and Zachary, 8
Our company has come up with
some pretty famous ad campaigns:
everything from the ‘Sainsbury’s:
Feed Your Family For A Fiver’ to the
‘Make Poverty History’ campaign,
which we were really proud of.
Whether it’s increasing people’s
basket size at Sainsbury’s or getting
people who would normally never
read The Economist to pick it up, it’s
my job to come up with a clever and
creative way of making it happen.
My alarm goes off at 6.15am. I’m
not a morning person so it’s a mad
scramble: a blur of coffee, cereal and
looking for uniforms. My husband,
Ben, works from home so he’s my
support mechanism.
I generally have two or three
meetings a day where a client will tell
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6
FARAH’S LOVE
OF DANCE COULD
HAVE BEEN HER CAREER
me what they want or I’ll show them
ideas that we’ve come up with. The
rest of the time I’m in internal
meetings with our talented team.
Working on a pitch is like being
a detective. You have to find out lots
of information on the consumer. With
a Snickers campaign, for example,
you have to think who’s eating
Snickers, what do they like about it,
how do they feel and what does that
brand stand for. Then you talk to the
creative teams and they come up with
lots of ideas – they’ll show bits of
FARAH’S AD TEAM CAME
UP WITH THE ‘MAKE
POVERTY HISTORY’ SLOGAN
films, drawings, references from
TV or old adverts. Brainstorming
is massively fun. The rule is anyone
can put forward an idea and anyone
is allowed to speak. It’s my job to then
connect the creative idea with
the business’s challenge.
For lunch I have a salad at my
“Brainstorming meetings
are a lot of fun. The
rule is anyone can put
forward an idea”
MY�PLAN�B��CHOREOGRAPHER
desk from the organic cafe in our
building or go out with clients.
This job can be very stressful. If
I’m working on a pitch, I’m holed up
in a room at the office day and night,
the weekends get swallowed up too.
I’ve had to be very determined to get
where I am today. When you work in
a business which is about creative
ideas it can seem very personal when
something you came up with pans the
minute it gets to market or if you
don’t get a pitch you sacrificed an
evening in with your kids for, but
there’s always a lesson to be learned.
I play tennis every weekend and do
Pilates one night a week. It really
helps me wind down. I’m also on the
board of trustees for the National
Theatre which keeps me involved
with arts and culture. I’m on an
advisory committee for Cancer
Research UK too and I advise them
about their communications strategy.
It’s an awesomely gifted organisation
and it’s good to be able to do my bit.
There’s no point looking for
a work/life balance. I think accepting
that is easier than giving yourself
a hard time. I took my full maternity
allowance, six months, with each
child and had children slightly later
because of my career, despite being
married since I was 25. Maternity
allowances are there to be taken.
I don’t see the point in being an alpha
female and returning to work two
weeks after giving birth.
I finish work around 7pm. Twice
a week, I have client dinners or go
to industry awards. Otherwise I get
home at about 8pm and catch the
children as they are off to bed. I have
dinner with Ben, who is a great cook.
We’ll often watch a box set such as
The Wire. I go to bed at 11pm and read
my book before crashing out.
I still feel overwhelmed when I
come across an ad campaign I worked
on. I was watching Nine at the cinema
the other day when one of our ads for
The Economist came on. I got a flutter
of excitement because I could
remember when it was only a blank
piece of paper and now it was up on
the screen. It made me feel so proud.
amvbbdo.com
I danced right through my teens and into my 20s. I loved ballet, particularly jazz ballet, but I knew I wasn’t
talented enough to go professional. When I was at university in Cambridge doing modern languages, I had a year
out in Paris. I studied at the Sorbonne University but I also managed to do a choreography course while I was
there. I loved it. I was fascinated with the mechanics of choreography; planning the moves ahead and seeing it
all fit together. The technicality of dance is so precise and so difficult but the fact that you could watch people
perform steps and learn how to create choreography was for me, as interesting as dancing it yourself.
My daughter loves her hip-hop dance classes so it’s obviously in our blood.
WORDS��AMY�GRIER��PHOTOGRAPHY��DEAN�BELCHER��REX�FEATURES��HAIR�AND�MAKE-UP��LUKE�ANTHONY�AT�SOHO�MANAGEMENT�USING�KÉRASTASE
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