Helen Calcraft

Helen began her career at AMV BBDO, where she became the youngest woman to be promoted to the Board (at 28) and from there to New Business Director.

After a decade at AMV, she went onto the London Business School’s Executive MBA programme, where she graduated with distinction. Despite taking precisely none of the LBS’s great courses in entrepreneurship, she co-founded ad agency MCBD in 1999. Ten wonderful years later, MCBD was a top 25 agency, hailed by Campaign as “one of the more impressive start ups of the last decade”. Helen was lucky enough to work on some great brands such as Waitrose, Hovis, Virgin and the Department of Health and MCBD was named the IPA’s Effectiveness Agency of the Year 3 times (2005, 2007 and 2010).

After a brief stint as Chairman of Dare, Helen opted for start-up life all over again, with Danny Brooke-Taylor and Andy Nairn. Lucky Generals is a creative company for people on a mission. The agency is fast approaching its second birthday and is already working on some fantastic missions for clients such as Paddy Power, Amazon, Pernod-Ricard, the Labour Party and Unilever. The partners are finding that the harder they work, the luckier they seem to get.