Karen Cunningham

Karen Cunningham is the founder of the Pink Film Company, based in London. A long-time producer, Cunningham made her directorial debut with Wonderful World, an award-winning promotional spot for the Half Moon Theatre Company.

I live with my partner, Anthony, who is a corporate lawyer and our daughter, Tallulah, who is 11. We have a house in Hampstead [north London] and a house in Suffolk.

When I first started in advertising it seemed like a very glamorous business, which encompassed so many of the things I was interested in. As I was growing up we watched commercials such as I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing [Coca-Cola], Proper Little Madam [Clarks Shoes] and Beanz Meanz Heinz, and we enjoyed them as much as the programmes. But it never occurred to us to think about someone actually making them or dreaming them up. They were just there. When I realised that there were people whose job it was to write those ideas, it was fantastic.

I grew up in a large family, with five children and a noisy dog, which taught me how to get on with people and how to share. Our father, who was a policeman, was a very big influence in our lives. He was very strict, in a good way, and had a strong work ethic, which he instilled in all of us. My mother was very creative. I was mad, and still am, about fashion. In my teens my brother and I would design these amazing outfits and my mother would make them.

I was a happy child, but I suffered from a recurring nightmare in which I would get home from school and different people were living in our house. Part of it must have been that we moved a lot because of my father's job. I went to four different schools before I was 11.

Although there were only six years between the eldest sibling and the youngest, we were all very different. We fought and laughed in equal measure and drove our parents crazy! We don't fight any more but we definitely have a laugh and four out of the five of us have our own businesses.

My mother is fantastic, one of the kindest, loveliest people on the planet, and all five of us were allowed to bring a friend back after school each day. I remember walking home and praying that the house would not be full of people. But it was great being one of five and having lots of different influences as a teenager: five styles of music, five points of view. Our house was a kind of melting pot of what was going on in the outside world.

Drama was a huge part of my childhood and I used to make up plays with parts for my brothers and sisters and dream of collecting my Oscar. But then I really just fell into advertising. I had just finished drama school, I couldn't get an Equity card and I was desperate for money, so I answered an ad in the Evening Standard. I didn't even know what an agency was, but it paid well and I didn't have to type.

That was the end of my drama career and the start of my career in advertising. I worked my way up through the departments and landed a job as an account person at FCB (at the time, one of the best agencies in town). I also worked for them in Hong Kong, where my then husband was running an agency. It was a life-changing experience.

When you grow up in London you can very easily believe that it's the centre of the world, where everything begins and ends, and you don't really question it. Hong Kong made me shed that tunnel vision because it was such an alien world. It was like opening up a box and finding things that I never knew even existed.

I find that people outside of advertising are really not that interested in our industry. When someone asks me what I do and I tell them, the next question is whether I've worked on anything they might have seen. And then that's it - we're on to the nitty gritty of life.

I have never felt that there's any stigma attached to working in advertising. If I did, I couldn't stay in the business.

My greatest mentor was Mike Luckwell, who owned and ran The Moving Picture Company. He believed that account people made great producers and I am eternally grateful to him for that.

I loved producing, but most of all I loved looking for, and working with, new talent. It allowed me to have a creative input. I signed Ian Eames and Malcolm Venville to Jennie & Co, then signed and helped launch Daniel Barber at Rose Hackney and Harald Zwart and Michael Geoghegan at Pink. I have learned a lot from all the directors I've worked with. It was the best apprenticeship I could have had.

When I set up Pink with my then business partner, Bash Robertson, I was desperate for a new challenge. I called the company Pink because I had just been working on the launch commercials for Orange and had colour on the brain. I was also six months pregnant and desperate for a girl! Shortly after we started, Bash broke his neck. I remember we went to the bank to try to deposit our first month's rent, with me pregnant and Bash in one of those head cages. They took one look at us and suggested we went home and had a rethink. I look back now and wonder if we were mad, but I think we got the sympathy vote. Our first job was for Nike and we won lots of awards, including Production Company of the Year.

It's a tough job owning and running a production company. You have no ongoing business and effectively each job you're working on could be your last. You stake your own reputation and your income on your directors, so you have to be really convinced of their abilities, especially if they're new. In this global market talent alone isn't enough. Directors need charisma, commitment, tenacity, good marketing and an innate belief in themselves. For a production company, finding a director is like a marriage; you go into it all loved up and hope it lasts forever.

Ten years on I am not so afraid of the challenges. I have definitely had bad things happen to me, both personally and professionally, but in the end they have probably made me stronger. Not many things would faze me now.

In all honesty, I haven't encountered too many difficulties as a female director. In fact I have had a lot of encouraging letters from my peer group and support from our directors at Pink, all of which has definitely given me more confidence.

My brother Daniel is a very successful fashion designer, so when we were looking for an office revamp I got him in to take a look. Because we spend such long hours in the office we wanted to have somewhere that we enjoyed and felt comfortable in. It's now this fantastic mix of bright colours, fabric and patterned wallpaper.

I have always wanted to direct but I didn't have the courage of my convictions. Then The Media Trust approached me, looking for media people to fund commercials for charities that couldn't afford advertising. I thought, it's now or never. So I said I would happily do something but only if it was a children's charity. I wrote them an idea for the Half Moon Theatre Company that they liked, and I made it. In the end it was that simple.

My parents are both very ill with Parkinson's disease, even though they're still relatively young. When people around you are ill it really does make you move faster in your life - it's a kind of reality check. When I look at my father and remember him in his prime, as a strong determined man, it spurs me to get on with what I really want to do.

I loved working with the children at the Half Moon Theatre on the Wonderful World spot. Most of the children come from disadvantaged backgrounds and the Half Moon uses drama to give them confidence in other areas. I feel very good about it because the children loved every minute of doing the film and were very pleased that it won awards. The whole experience made me feel that we should all be doing more to help people who are not as privileged as we are.

My political sympathies definitely lie with the underdog and if I could change the world I would make sure that no one was hungry. Also, after doing the Wonderful World spot I got really angry about the lack of spending on education in Britain. If I had my way, all children would get the same opportunities.

I don't care what anyone says; there's nothing like an award to make you feel good about what you do. Recognition from your peers is not only motivating but helps to bring in more work.

I know it sounds like a cliché, but the moment my daughter was born and they handed her to me I felt the kind of happiness I had never experienced before. That feeling hasn't changed.

I think most parents would agree that once you have children nothing else really matters. But in some jobs you almost have to pretend that you're not a parent if you want to get on. I think that's one of the reasons I set up my own company, in a way; I wanted to have the freedom to be a mother and still do a job that I enjoyed, without having to be accountable to anybody (except myself, of course).

Like a lot of working mothers I do feel guilty. But ultimately I know that I give Tallulah my love and my time. Apart from that, all you can do for your children is make them feel loved and give them a strong sense of themselves. I tell her constantly that she is not only beautiful on the outside but on the inside too - and she is! Seeing the world through her eyes has definitely helped my own thinking and invigorated my life. For a child, anything is possible. One minute my daughter is going to be an archaeologist, the next day she's going to change the world. As adults we get put into little boxes and there we're expected to stay.

At the end of the day I just want my daughter to be happy and to have a job she loves and feels passionate about. The worst thing in the world is to be in a job you hate and at the same time feel that you ought to be grateful.

Advertising is a very male-dominated world. But ultimately it's about talent. Evolution, not revolution, will make a difference.

I'm absolutely chuffed because I've recently been sent a great script for a rugby product that has no children and no women. I'm thrilled because women often tend to get given the more feminine products to work on.

I don't really think about the amount of money earned or spent in advertising. Good advertising and good ideas cost money and that's just the way it is.

My strengths are also my weaknesses. I'm driven by what I feel passionate about; sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it isn't.

What gives me real pleasure? Rereading the books of my childhood with my daughter, munching on Iced Gems, knowing that everyone at Pink is busy and that after thinking about it for 20 years, I am finally directing.

When I am an old woman I shall hopefully be surrounded by lots of lovely grandchildren, still have all my teeth, be living in the present not the past, and [as in the Royal Marsden ad] I shall probably be wearing purple.

In the end what really matters is… good health, and to love and be loved.