Paul Bainsfair

Paul Bainsfair spent most of his career on the competitive side of advertising.

After studying advertising at Watford College, he joined Saatchi & Saatchi as an account executive and became CEO within ten years. He led the agency through the recession of the early 1990s and left when it was sitting at the top of the new business league table.

Instead of moving to another established network, he built one of his own.

With John Sharkey and Dave Trott, Bainsfair co-founded Bainsfair Sharkey Trott, which became one of London’s most successful independent agencies of the 1990s. When BST was sold to Omnicom and merged with TBWA in 2000, Bainsfair went from independent founder back into the network world – this time as President of TBWA Europe, with responsibility for 35 offices and around 3,000 people. During that period, TBWA was named Best Global Network in 2003 and 2006.

He crossed the divide again in 2009, joining Iris as Partner and CEO of Iris Europe before becoming Chairman of Iris Worldwide.

Then, in 2011, after 34 years spent inside agencies of almost every kind, Bainsfair stepped outside any one of them and became Director General of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

The job changed the scale of the question. Instead of asking how one agency should compete, Bainsfair was now helping shape how an entire profession develops its talent, proves its effectiveness, responds to regulation and sets standards for itself. Fifteen years later, he still leads the IPA.

And the questions keep changing.

In 2026, much of that work is focused on AI – not simply whether agencies should use it, but what happens to talent, intellectual property, commercial models and trust when they do. Bainsfair has argued that the important question is now what kind of advertising industry people want to build with the technology.

He spent 34 years competing inside the advertising industry.

For the past 15, he has been helping it decide what it should expect of itself.