Now Ogilvy’s Brian Cooper exits the ever-revolving door of the London creative C-suite

It’s a funny old game being a creative director in London these days.

It’s emerged that Ogilvy London ECD Brian Cooper (left) is on his his bike after just a year, following a similarly brief stint as creative head of Apple’s stuttering iAd operation in Europe. He reported to CCO Gerry Human at Ogilvy (how can you have an ECD whose title means something and a CCO above him?)

Cooper, who’s going to ‘pursue other interests’ (which probably means spending more time in his garden) worked on Philips. It’s also emerged that Ogilvy quietly hired TBWA London creative director (not quite sure which sort) as the global creative director for Unilever, a post previously held by Human.

Laurentino was a big star in Brazil before he came to London but then TBWA went and lost Muller and some other stuff and former AMV/BBDO creative director Peter Souter was drafted in to turn things round, with the aid of various old pals.

And, of course, we’ve recently had Neil Dawson leaving BETC London after a failed putsch by CEO Matthew Charlton who also left. Quite why Dawson had to go too remains a mystery.

Maybe the cause of some of this stuff is the growing tendency of big agencies (especially WPP ones) to have ECDs or global wizards or whatever the hell they’re called on each big account. So if some marketing bloke decides they don’t like them, they’re out.

Ogilvy London, which is built around servicing biggies like Ford and Unilever, is always likely to fall prey to this.

There must be a better way to run a railroad. How much do all these top-level creative departures cost?

Taking a job like this must be akin to becoming a Premiership football manager: make sure you negotiate the settlement before you turn up on the training pitch.