My Life So Far

Having failed to secure a position in any of his chosen professions – gigolo, Rock God, pillar of Stoke’s defence - Jim Thornton secured a job at JWT in 1986, on account of their agency football team needing a sweeper of grace and vision. And Jim’s Art Director was just the man for the job.After nearly 10 years working across most of the agency’s portfolio, including the launch campaign for Persil Washing Up Liquid with Robbie Coltrane, the thinking woman’s Nanette Newman, he was sold to GGT in 1996. Which then merged with BST. And then again with TBWA.  In between moving offices, Jim was Creative Director and writer of highly acclaimed work for Holsten Pils, Do It All, The Big Issue and NatWest among others.In 1999 Jim left TBWA to join Mother as a Creative Director. Over the following four years Jim was to work across a wide range of accounts, including Pimm’s, The Observer, Typhoo, ITV Digital and ITV Sport, Coca Cola, Batchelors, and perhaps his greatest achievement, rebranding The National Drugs Helpline as Frank for the COI, Home Office, DoH and DoE.It was while at Mother that Jim won two D&AD Silvers and numerous other domestic and global awards. And during those rollercoaster four years, Mother was Campaign Magazine’s Agency of the Year twice, and won Campaign of the Year for ITV Digital.In September 2003, Jim swapped the ITV Digital Monkey for the far cooler Coco Pops Monkey and joined Leo Burnett as Executive Creative Director.After 4 fantastic and fascinating years there winning much business and even more awards, including 3 D&AD Silvers in 3 different new media categories for the ground breaking Teens Road Safety Ad, he departed Kensington Village in August 2007 in order to reintroduce himself to his family, having found himself singularly unable to remember any of their names for several months, if not years.Immediately after leaving Leo Burnett, Jim was invited to become a non-exec director responsible for brand development and marketing of a start up wealth management company aimed at successful professional women called Addidi, which can be found at addidi.com.In developing the brand identity and website from scratch,  he gained invaluable insight into the client/agency relationship from the client perspective, and a greater insight into what makes a great online brand.After Addidi’s launch in 2008, he was able to devote his attention to watching his beloved Stoke City regain their rightful place at football’s top table a mere 23 years after they last graced it.In between matches, he also found time to form his own company, Lord Plumpton Ltd, through which he’s been developing, besides the inevitable screenplay, ad funded programming ideas, an audio content product, a magazine and a shared experience social networking site.He’s also worked as a Creative Consultant to Specsavers, a freelance Creative Director at Mother for 3 months, as well as freelancing for BMB, Karmarama, Work Club, Digitas and a couple of production companies.In 2009 he ventured back into the agency world as CD at Mother on The Post Office for 11 months, before joining Naked Communications, London, as their Creative Director.In JUly 2010, he helped launch an independent magazine, Eulogy, and website, eulogymagazine.co.uk.He has a wife of 20 years, Melanie; two children, Ellerie (15) and Oliver (13); two dogs, Minnie & Lily, and for the last 15 years has lived at the foot of the South Downs in the rural idyll that is Plumpton, in East Sussex.

He also: plays cricket for the village team plays 5-a-side football every week watches Stoke City, Lewes Town and Sussex CCC walks The Downs dreams of keeping pigs and chickens pretends to garden watches endless box sets of American TV series, both comedy and drama (which he rather loftily considers increasingly superior to most American cinema these days) goes to Plumpton Races once a year and devours European and American crime novels at an unseemly rate (not least because the process of using leaps of imagination to decipher clues in order to solve a puzzle seems not entirely unlike the process of using creativity to solve business problems. Which, when push comes to shove, is what he dearly loves doing most of all.)Jim would like to thank Allen Thomas, Trevor Beattie and, most of all, the truly brilliant Robert Saville, for teaching him everything he knows and quite a lot he used to know but has unfortunately forgotten. He owes it all to them.

Quality Coding and Validation

Well thought out with room to grow