Mike YershonMedia pioneer and adviser to chief executives, with a twenty-year plan that runs to 2039.

Mike was born in October 1942 and grew up in the East End of London among the bomb sites. At fourteen he walked through the door of the Brady Boys' Club, the first Jewish boys' club in the country. “I was like a duck to water,” he says. “The minute I walked through that door, I was there.”

Brady gave him Yogi Mayer, the club leader who opened doors for him, and it gave him weekends at Skeet Hill House in Kent. That is where he met Rita, one of twelve Bloom children, whose family took him in as one of their own. They married in 1964. Rita, his late wife and the love of his life, sits at the heart of this whole story.

He left Central Foundation Boys' School in the City at sixteen with no job to go to. Then he saw an old American film on the BBC about an advertising man stuck at a blank drawing board until the idea arrived at two in the morning. “That was my eureka moment.” Asked at interview what he knew about marketing, he described two freezing winter weekends running a costume jewellery stall in Petticoat Lane.

“Advertising is only part of marketing. And a market stall, that's marketing too.”Mike, on the Petticoat Lane stall

In November 1959 Mike started in the despatch room at Colman, Prentis and Varley in Grosvenor Street. Six months later a vacancy came up in the media department. Five other messengers turned it down, because media was, in Mike's words, “the lowest form of plant life”. He said yes, and went to evening classes in statistics and economics to learn the numbers behind it.

In 1965, aged 22, he moved to McCann Erickson as a media group head. When his boss proposed splitting planning from buying, Mike threatened to resign: “You can't separate planning from buying.” In 1968, at 26, he was Media Director and on the board. Around the same time he became the youngest ever Fellow of the IPA.

In 1973 Frank Lowe hired him to run media at Collett Dickenson Pearce, the agency behind the Hamlet and Hovis ads. On his first evening he sat alone in the basement and watched the agency's famous reel. He had never seen most of it. “Why was I not seeing these commercials?” The answer was that a busy man who got home late watched little television, and the ads were running where he would never catch them. From that came his thinking on light viewers, and on buying for influence as much as for reach.

Then he read the Thames Television rate card closely and saw that a sixty-second slot cost only half as much again as a thirty. Cut into three twenty-second spots, it was a bargain. Thames agreed to the split. He then sold the idea to every ITV sales director, and the twenty-second commercial became a standard length. For the launch of the Ford Capri he bought every 48-sheet poster site available, around 4,000 posters, and in 1976 he set up Portland Outdoor with J Walter Thompson to bring order to the poster business.

“Mike Yershon was the most influential media guy in town. Mike was a game changer.”

In 1978 Leo Burnett slid a signed blank cheque across a breakfast table at the Hyde Park Hotel and asked him to fill in the figure. He joined as Vice Chairman, in charge of media and research with sales promotion alongside, and by the spring of 1980 he judged the job done.

Mike joined the TMDH board and chaired the Yershon companies through a three-year earn-out. When Aegis bought TMDH in 1991 he became a founder director of Carat UK. In 1992 McCann Erickson asked him back as Media Director, on a contract he wrote himself, to save the Coca-Cola and Nescafé accounts. He kept both, won Panasonic and left at the end of 1993.

Early in 1994, walking a beach on Cape Cod into the evening sun, he noticed he was looking at his feet. He made himself look up at the horizon, and he thought: twenty years.

That first twenty-year plan ran from 1994 to 2014. He set up his own consultancy, Media Assessment, and kept it to a handful of clients at a time, working directly with chief executives on where their money should go. With Peter Wood he helped launch Direct Line Financial Services in 1994 and Esure in 1999. He helped Standard Life open its bank and helped build Intelligent Finance from a greenfield site. Later came Gocompare, where from 2017 to 2019 he advised the chief executive of GoCo Group, including on the launch of the switching service Weflip.

He kept writing for the trade press, often about transparency in how media is bought, and in 2017 the IPA's centenary list named him among the game changers of British advertising's first hundred years.

His daughter Nicole followed him into the business in the late 1980s, on the creative side. In her book Rough Diamond she remembers people hearing her surname and asking if she was any relation, “because he was in Campaign every week”. His advice to her stuck: “Unless you are moving forward then you're going backwards.”

“Have a plan. Develop your story. Control your agenda. Take your corners slowly but just do it.”Mike Yershon

On 19 November 2019 seventy people filled the library at Shoreditch House for the Fearless Breakfast. Tickets sold out in two hours. Nicole, his daughter, was the MC. Gemma Greaves of the Marketing Society opened on fearlessness and Dave Trott told the light viewer story from the stage. Then John Caswell sat down with Mike for a fireside conversation about what comes next.

Mike announced his second twenty-year plan. He had weighed up becoming an entertainer or a politician before he chose to stay an entrepreneur. “I don't want to look back over the 20 years and think I've done nothing particularly, just vegetated.” The plan runs to 2039, when he will be 97. Part of it is putting back into his East End roots and into his old school, where he wants former pupils to mentor the ones about to leave.

Since then he has built a new kind of agency model with Nicole and John, and he still works directly with chief executives on media and growth. He is teaching himself bridge and plays chess like a conversation. In July 2026 he spent a day going through his archive with Alison Norrington, who is writing his life story, And Then Mike Walked In, with a foreword by Dave Trott.

“Mike Yershon did what he was told he wasn't allowed to do. He changed things that he was told couldn't be changed.”