Imagine Saatchi & Saatchi, New York executive creative director and 25-year ad industry veteran Tony Granger sitting in a corner restaurant, guitar in hand, serenading coffee-sipping patrons. Can't? Neither could Granger, and it was this exact dream, or recurring nightmare, that prompted the South African native to ditch a career as a musician and producer for the "next coolest thing": advertising.

"I woke up in my 20s and realized that if at this point I'd not made something of music, then I wasn't good enough," he says, of his dashed dreams of stardom.

For Granger, the pursuit of success has always been front of mind. It's at the root of his exit from music, and it's what led him to believe that a twenty-something with no advertising training or experience could put together a book by redoing ads that were "really awful" and land a job at Grey, one of South Africa's then-hottest agencies.

It seems to have worked as these bold moves set off a chain of events that saw Granger spend 14 years helping build Johannesburg agency TBWA\Hunt Lascaris into one of the country's leading agencies (he was there both pre- and post-TBWA ownership), that brought dusty New York agency Bozell Cannes glory within just 18 months of Granger's arrival before it was folded into Lowe, and ultimately led to his roost among Saatchi's elite.

It's also what leads his colleague and professional mentor Bob Isherwood, worldwide creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi, to say "If I could put a one-word equity on Tony, it would be driven."

Granger joined Saatchi in 2002 after a meeting with worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts and Isherwood, by whom Granger had been offered a job many years before while in South Africa. The timing didn't work out.

However, he and Isherwood kept in touch, and around the time Bozell was being folded into Lowe, Isherwood suggested he and Kevin meet. "I got invited to his apartment in Tribeca and after about 10 minutes he offered me a job in London." While in Blighty, Granger oversaw such projects as the award-winning NSPCC, "Ventriloquist". But after his introduction to New York, Granger knew it was not a mere dalliance, and that he would return one day.

The return to his adopted home of New York was not without its excitement. Granger replaced outgoing David Droga, who was appointed to a global post, and walked into Saatchi New York amidst a colossal power struggle between Roberts and vice chairman/CD Mike Burns that subsequently resulted in the one of the ad industry's most notorious stories - a mass exodus from the General Mills account by a group of staff who would eventually become known as the 'Saatchi 17'.

Always one to keep moving forward, Granger says the shakeup "hastened things along. The idea [when New York CEO Mary Baglivo and I were brought in] was to take an agency that was producing good work and take it into the future. The turmoil allowed us to do things quicker."

Which makes sense considering Granger says he loves a challenge. That's why he took the gig at Bozell. "I didn't even want to go to the interview because they had a terrible reputation in South Africa as being lame." But the meeting changed his mind. The agency's goal was to be reinvented, made famous and to win at Cannes.