creativity for 20 years, so he rightly sits among my list of influencers. David would approve. CHUCK PORTER There was a moment in the mid-1970s, when a young freelance copywriter was nervously standing in a Madison Avenue office by a wall festooned with his concepts for a British Tourism Authority campaign, when David Ogilvy swept in, with his entourage, asking, “Did you do these?” Chuck Porter – for it was he – remembers that David looked “kingly”; and also that he said to himself: “Someday I want to be like that.” The agency he built was the most striking of the new agencies that grew up in the Digital Revolution: a creative boutique that then transcended itself, and found both fame and scale. But as Chuck says: “I’m the most un-cool guy.” A thoroughly nice 70-year-old, bursting with energy, who dotes on his Labrador and likes cooking, he has lived with his wife in the same Miami house for decades while the neighbourhood changed around them. He was, though, the “master of the fireworks” of the agency that bore 2 his name, as it blazed through the crazy noughties, “the agency that couldn’t lose.” The niceness comes from Minnesota: but it’s not the “bad” Minnesota nice of legend where you smile courteously at someone even if you’re angry with them. Chuck does do angry when necessary: if, for instance, the writing is not up to scratch and the writer doesn’t give a s**t, he’ll yell at them. It’s the real nice of someone who doesn’t seem to have an enemy, and who has a very controlled and un-jealous ego.