May 23, 2019 • 39 mins
Advertising giant GroupM CEO Tim Castree is everything you want from a leader: smart, calm, resourceful, and a Change Agent who also happens to be a client guy. Learn how Tim got his start as an Advertising Cadet, why skipping college never slowed him down, and how his combination of humility and drive have pushed him to the top. Plus, learn how he convinced all of Australia to turn off their lights!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production I heart Radio.
You're sitting atop the legendary group. I'm the CEO. Which
of the jobs you've had best prepared you for this job?
Probably in shoveling Manua when I was when I was
twelve years old, I searched you well for a lot
(00:23):
of jobs. It has I mean, I'm only how being sarcastic.
I mean, I think you've got to get in These
are not glamorous jobs, at least they shouldn't be. If
you're running a company like this and you feel like
your job is glamorous, then you're probably not doing the
right things. I love rolling my sleeves up, getting in
there and doing the hard things, and sometimes that is
akin to shoveling. But that's just what you've got to do.
(00:48):
I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to Math and Magic. Stories
from the Frontiers and Marketing. We explore the analytical and
creative side of marketing, and our guests covered the spectrum,
from anyone who uses or touches marketing to people who
claim it in their job title. Today's guest is Tim Castree,
who has a fascinating story and actually split his career
between the US and his native Australia. He'll hear that
(01:11):
accent in a minute. Tim is the relatively new North
America CEO of Group M, the WPP parent company that
owns and operates some of the best known names in advertising,
mind Share of Media com, WaveMaker, Essence, and Saxas. Tim
was born in Melbourne, Australia, traded shoveling manure for riding
(01:32):
lessons at age twelve. Is that right? That's probably the
first indication of his incredible deal making skills. He did
not go to college. Insteady started as an advertising cadet,
whatever the hell that is, and we're gonna explore that soon.
He went on to an amazing career in advertising that
had him ping ponging between the US and Australia across
a wide range of jobs and agencies. CEO LEO Bernetta
(01:54):
and Sydney from George Patterson Partners, CEO of Media Vest
in the US, Managing director of Video Bology, CEO of
m E, c CEO of wave Runner, all that, and
he's only what years old? Three? What a career And
we want to dig into and I'm dying to know
about that Advertising cadet deal. But first we want to
get you in sixties seconds, So just give us the
(02:16):
first thing that comes to your mind. Cats or dogs, dogs,
hands down, puzzles or board games, puzzles, Instagram or Twitter Instagram,
kangaroos or koalas, oceans or lakes, oceans New York or Sydney,
New York, Melbourne or Sydney Melbourne. Sunrise or sunsets from sunrise.
Libraries are museums, u museums. Riding horses are doing yoga. Yreka. Now,
(02:42):
smartest person you know g I worked with this guy
and Evan Handling had group M. I think he got
a six hundred and he now he's at your strategy office.
It sounds like the whey he got for the chief strategy.
Childhood hero Batman, first job delivering newspapers. Craziest thing you
did for love, Craziest thing I did for love? Oh boy,
(03:03):
what have I done for love? I've done a lot
for love. I don't think they're crazy, They're mostly desperate.
I think more than crazy. Okay, we'll give you a
passold that historical idle. Probably jesus proudest career achievement, getting
my first job proudest personal achievement choosing my wife quote
to live by Life's too short. Worst fashion trend you've
(03:26):
participated in, Oh, facid washed jeans were pretty tragic. They're
coming back. I know they're coming back. Hang on to
You'll get to make our own mistakes, my generation to
the next. What would be the title of your memoir? Fuldham? Okay,
let's jump into it. You had decided on a career
in advertising it as I understand it, age fifteen, you
(03:46):
did a paper or project in school and that's such
on this path. What on earth was that project? It
was a one day event where they brought in three
or four business leaders. They organized a competition where we
had to launch a business. We got put into teams
and I was the leader of our team. We decided
we were going to import these T shirts from Hong Kong.
We had to source them and market them in our
(04:07):
little high school business plan, and I just loved it.
One of those business leaders that was in he worked
for Done in Bradstreet and he said come in and
I'll show you around now. So I remember taking the
train into Melbourne. There's an hour away on the train,
and I spent a day with him, and I got
home that night and said to my mom, I'm going
to work in marketing or advertising, and it just it's stuck. Well,
it's a great story. So you started as the advertising cadet.
(04:29):
What is an advertising cadet? I think I was the
first and only ever advertising cadet. This wasn't a long
line of cadet ships, but it was basically a way
to give a break to a high school kid who
was in a family situation where he couldn't afford to
go to college. Moment said, look, you need to go
to work for a few years. That's what the family needs.
So I was working in a supermarket after school. I
thought the girl who worked in the Delhi was kind
(04:50):
of cute, and I was showing off to her juggling
watermelons in the supermarket. Two watermelons, not free, and this
area manager came around and she said, what the hell
are you doing? And get back to work, And and
about an hour later, I was on my lunch break
and she came and talked to me and she said,
I was sorry, I'm so hard on you. I said, no,
no problem, I shouldn't have been juggling watermelons. And we
got talking and we hit it off. Her name was
Margaret Kim, and she said, well, you're about to graduate
(05:11):
high school. What are you doing? I said, I don't know,
and I explained my situation how I needed to go
out and work, and she said, what do you want
to do? I said, I really want to work in
marketing and advertising, and she said, well, you know, we
have an advertising department here at Safe Way. Why don't
I make some phone calls and see if there's anything
they could do for you? Lo and behold. He called
me back three days later and said, you know what,
They've just decided to launch this first ever cadet ship program,
and why don't you apply for that and I'll see
(05:32):
if I can help you. And sure enough, I applied
and I was given this cadet ship, which was basically
working in the internal advertising department of Safeway Supermarkets and
loved it. About a year into it, the internal advertising
department got absorbed into Leo Barnett, So I moved from
Safeway into Leo Barnett about a year after I started,
(05:53):
which is a whole other story. And you want to
hear that, Yes, I do. I do want to hear that.
So I was in this cadet ship and they were
waiting to give the contract to Leobennett. A bunch of
folks they took into the agency, A bunch they let
go and moved into other departments, and I was the
last person they hadn't resolved. My story is basically a
long litany of people who gave me breaks. And there
was a guy who ran advertising. His name was John Simon,
(06:14):
and John was saying to the CEO of Leobennett, you've
got to take this guy to him. He's fantastic. He's
a young guy. And they said, look, we just we
don't know what to do with the advertising cadet and
so we don't need him. John was adamant about it,
and they went back and forth on this for weeks
while they were negotiating the contract. We got to the
final day where John was about to sign the contract
to give them the account. It was still unresolved, and
he said, look, I'm not sign until you give him
(06:35):
a job. And he held the pen and he sat
and waited. Took him about ninety seconds after that, I said, fine, fine,
we'll give the kid a job. And then he signed
the contract. And that's how I was what was their
j Well, they basically brought me in a similar capacity
in Leo Bannett. So they said, we'll take him on
for two years and we'll move him around to all
the various departments from production to creative to account management
(06:55):
and media. They didn't have programs like that at the time.
But my boss there was still of my best friends
to this day, a woman named Melinda Gertz. She went
to Northwestern and they've transferred to the Melbourne office of
Leo Burnett from the Chicago office. Melinda just said, well,
I'll take him and I'll redesign what we used to
do at Leo Benett and Chicago. I'll just make a
little training program for one and so that was where
they designed this kind of program to put me around
(07:17):
in each of the departments and learned the ropes of advertising. Well,
you did really well, So you must have impressed somebody.
What did you do in that advertising codat job that
so impressed them that you began to move up in
the world. I had a real work ethic. When you
grow up in a working poor family. I mean a
lot of people who have that experience, they burn, you know,
they really burn with ambition and a drive, and I
(07:37):
had that as well. You know, a lot of fuel
from my childhood circumstances really pushed me forward. So I'd
say it was a real combination of work ethic God
gifted me with a good brain, the gray matters always
worked pretty well, and also real willingness to take risks
and put myself out there. I'd be constantly making proposals
and recommendations that were far beyond my pay grade, far
beyond what I knew. But I really tried hard to
(07:58):
make a difference and to have an impact. And I
think they noticed that. Did growing up in those circumstances
really drive you into your success? Absolutely did for the
first ten or fifteen years of my career, and also
because I hadn't gone to university, a ton of insecurity
that came with it. If you'd asked a lot of
people who knew me at that time, if I was
in any way an insecure person, they would be stunned
to learn how deeply insecure I was. You skip college
(08:20):
that bought you four years earlier starting your career. Did
that turn out to be a competitive advantage to be
there before your peers were there? It turned out to
be an advantage in the end. Yes, I think it
wouldn't happen today. I graduated high school and the idea
that you would get into a white college job without
university was already a pretty far fetched idea. Because Australia
(08:40):
is such a small market. Melbourne was such a small market,
you had to do so much, so I would work
across departments on dozens and dozens of ad campaigns. When
I first moved to the US, I would work for
a year and a half on one television ad for Spaghettios.
How do you work eighteen months on trying to make
one Spaghettios television add I don't know. But the US
have been a great one, arguable. But the year before
(09:02):
I've done thirty there was a lot of volume, and
I think a lot of that volume helped me to
learn the ropes pretty quickly. Do you find in the
US that it meant less that you hadn't gone to college.
I feel it meant more. I was quite and secure
about for a while, and it was really only in
my middle thirties that I really wrestled the insecurity to
the mat and really started to find that deep sense
of confidence and to give a greater sense of permanence,
(09:22):
Like I was always worried, you know, that someone was
going to take it away. They'd find out where I
was from and find out how I'd gotten here and
take it all away. And it was only in my
mid thirties that I really transcended that. So when you
look at someone today and they didn't go to college,
do you go a while I need to give them
a chance they're gonna work harder, or do you say
you should go to college. I have a very strong
ethic around education, and I'm quite adamant that my kids
are going to go to college. Statistically, you see where
(09:44):
the outcomes are. I think the real challenge we're dealing
with at the moment is the amount of debt that
kids are coming out of school with, and it's really
questionable how valuable it is. So when I think about
my own kids, I want them to go to college.
And I opened their five two nines on the day
before each of them were born. That's been the ethic
I've had around it. But when I think of our
group M and what we're doing, we are increasingly looking
at alternative ways to get kids into jobs that don't
(10:06):
require four year degrees. There's a lot that happens in
the world of advertising and media that shouldn't require a
four year degree, and certainly no point in enforcing kids
and saddling kids with all of that debt in order
to get there. So as we think about increasing the
diversity at group M how we think about those kind
of entry level roles is a big part of we
think how we're going to solve the longer term diversity
(10:27):
challenges we're having in the industry. They'll have it around
a long time and there's a big club of us
who didn't finish college, some that didn't go to college.
My great boss and mentor at Warner Communications, Steve Ross,
I think he went for two weeks and there was
once of job posting that came down and said college
degree required for some very low level jobs. So I
call it the HR department just tweak a little bit. You're,
(10:48):
you know, our chairman, so you know I didn't go
to college. Here thinking he's not qualified to do this job.
So they center banks to college degree preferred. So let's
go back to Australia a little bit. Talk about your childhood.
You said you really couldn't afford to go to college,
needed to go to work. What was the family life
like and how did that shape You'm from a working
poor family. My dad was a school teacher in school principal,
(11:09):
and my mom was a stay at home moment we
had five kids on a teacher. Sorry, when we lived
in rural Australia at that point was always pretty precarious.
Then when dad left the family home at twelve, and
really he left, I mean he was gone, you know,
and mom had never worked a day in her life,
so she was pretty much left to figure out how
to provide for five kids. It was very challenging time.
We really were living in the margins financially, but at
the same time just an incredible spirit and sense of
(11:33):
love that filled the home. It was very fun filled
and love filled home. And so that, more than the
economic circumstances, is what shape who I am as a person.
You grew up in a loving but tough childhood. What
lessons do you repeat to your kids about that? The
main thesis of the way we parents is having love
and compassion for everybody. They're certainly showing that seven and
(11:55):
nine years old. They blow me away sometime. Do you
go back to Australia lot. Does the family go back
they feel rooted or just you rooted there. No, my
kids are they're very American. I mean, they sound like
they're from Brooklyn and they've got really thick, little New
York accents. But they loved being half Australian and so
they've really connected to that part of their identity. Both
of my parents have passed away, so a lot of
(12:15):
the impetus to go back every year or twice a
year has gone away, So we go back a bit
less frequently these days, but the kids certainly love getting
back there, and they certainly identify with the part of
them that's Australian. So let's jump back to advertising. You
started as the advertising CODEBT everything you'd bear the CEO
job like this. I wear my ambition pretty lightly. It's
more of this internal drive, I guess, because where I
(12:36):
started in Melbourne, it was such a small place. So
by twenty four I was running a bunch of accounts.
The guy who ran it, you know, he was only
twenty nine running the operation. So at that point the
gap between me and the top didn't seem that large.
So I was always kind of set on being a CEO.
And then I decided to get to the US because
I just thought Australia are pretty small pond, so I
thought I'd come here. How is it different than you
(12:58):
had imagined it as a kid? I mean, this is marketing.
It was more fun and less corporate than I thought
it would be, maybe because I didn't really know, so
I just had this association with people in business, you know,
wearing tires and being all formal, even in marketing advertising.
I had this idea that it was going to be
quite stiff and formal. In many ways that appealed to me.
I was always more drawn to the establishment and being
(13:19):
anti establishment, and maybe that's because of where I grew up.
I always thought there was this club that I was
trying to get to. So I was actually more navy
than pirate in my sensibilities growing up. So I thought
when I got there, i'd be I'd be joining this club.
And I was quite pleasantly surprised to see how fun
and spirited and as a fun club corporate it was.
What lessons did you learn about marketing from that early
(13:40):
part of your career that's still stick with you today,
And it's sort of a foundational belief you have. At
the heart of it, this is all about making emotional
connections with people and that hasn't changed even with everything
we can do today, with the power of all of
our data and technology and targeting tools and this and this,
and at the end of the day, it's about moving
people and the only way to do that is at
the level of emotional engagement. You have a reputation of
(14:01):
being a change agent, that you see things a different way.
You think that comes from the fact that you were
in this job jack of all trades where you could
do everything and you could see things in a very
fluid way, and that if you had jumped into a
big advertising agency and been put in a very specific job,
you would not have that ability. Or do you think
that's an in needability you have? I think it's probably
(14:22):
bored out of my early drive in my career in
the sense that to me, stasis felt like going backwards.
Also had a bit of a chip on my shoulder
about it, and a healthy kind of disrespect for it
as well. It really came from this kind of inner
drive to constantly be moving forward, evolving and changing. You
went back and forth Australia, US, then you went back
to Australia came back to the US. Why did you
(14:43):
go back to Australia. I got engaged and my wife
is much smarter than I am. On the night I
asked her to marry me, I said, will you marry me, Kristen?
And she said absolutely if we live in America? And
I'm like, wow, I'm talking about a high leverage moment.
She knew it was coming and she was ready for me,
and she had me over barrel. So really the reason
we went back to Australia was because I realized it
was going to be my last chance to live there,
(15:05):
and my parents were getting elderly. My brother who passed
away from AIDS, he was quite sick at the time,
and so he's the window of time working really go
and reconnect the family. So we made the deal that
we go live in Australia for three years and then
come back to New York to start a family. Tim
There's so much more I want to get into, from
your management style to how you convinced all of Australia
to turn off their lights for an hour. But before
(15:27):
we get into any of that, let's take a quick break.
Welcome back to math and magic. We're here today with
Tim Castree, looking at your career and listening to folks
talk about you. The big question is what are you?
Account person, A creative, a technologist, a quant a business person.
(15:49):
How do you think of yourself? I'm a client guy.
Everything else for me, all that other stuff that I've
learned and done is really about increasing my ability to
help clients solve their business problems with the tools that
we have in at w p P in a group.
And but the first door I walked through the way
I identify myself is first and foremost as a client person. Well,
you know, you've got a great reputation, and the first
(16:10):
time I heard about you, you were so of the
spectacular client person. But all this other stuff you've done
didn't make you a different client person than they had
seen from other places. All that other experience gave me
kind of more utility, so I didn't have to go
to everybody to help understand clients out of self problems.
I'd still bring in specialists and experts, but I knew
a lot more directly myself about a lot of parts
(16:30):
of the business, so that was really helpful. The other
thing that's helped me here is the culture of Australian business,
the directness, the way I've run my career. I'm trying
to be Australian. You know, there's a there's a strength
and I think the egalitarian style of Australia which has
really helped me here. But only two thousand six you
became CEO of Leo Burnett Sydney. The agency was named
(16:51):
Australia's Agency of the Year. That heavy stuff. I mean,
here's somebody who didn't go to college started shoveling manure
and now you're the CEO of Leo Burnett and you're
wrecking as the agency of the year. Wow. It was
awesome because it was my first CEO job and it
was also the company where I started, you know, the
company where Melinda gave me that little training program and
I was back, you know, still working with me Linda.
It was a very very proud moment for me. Did
(17:13):
it change your view of you? It didn't change my
idea of me. But it was the time when I
worked most on my mindset and thinking around my right
to be in the leadership job, starting to realize that
this is legit. I've earned this and it's not that
somebody's gonna wake up tomorrow and figure out that I
fooled him and I got here, but I really deserve
to be here. The doors must have opened at that
time to agency of the year, away goes, who is
(17:34):
this guy? How old were you at the time, early
thirties maybe thirty three? Did any doors open or surprises
as to what opportunities came your way as a result
of that? Not directly. I have this m O two.
I don't. I don't answer the phone when it rings.
When I commit to a job, I say I'm going
to do this for three years, and I'm going to
do it for three years, and I'm not going to
think about anything else. And then maybe two and a
(17:55):
half years, I'll think is this working for me? And
if it's still working for me, I really recommit to
the next three years. Talk about creativity in this period
and Leo Burnett get an example. The best campaign I've
ever worked on. One of the reasons I moved to
media was after we'd made this campaign, I don't what
bell was left was a cinical moment, and that was
the formation of a campaign called Earth Hour. The World
(18:17):
Wildlife Fund came to Leo Bannett and said, we want
a campaign about climate change. The chairman at the time
a great man named Nigel Marsh who's become a dear friend.
He said, well, let's not make you some mad, Let's
make a movement. Let's convince everybody in Sydney to turn
off their lights for an hour and make a symbolic gesture.
So this idea of Earth Hour was born. But not
only did Nigel do that, he worked with the w
(18:38):
w F and he took it to the Sydney Morning
Herald with the editorial desk and said, look, if we
launch this, will you get behind it from an editorial standpoint,
because we want to convince everybody in sne you to
turn out their lights. Everybody this started thinking like this
is an impossible thing. But then by the time we
got thousands of businesses, millions of people, We saw the
central Business district of Sydney go dark and it was
such a powerful symbol and statement and the earned media
(19:01):
and everything that came off of that was phenomenal. And
then it expanded. So Earth Hour is still going and
at last count, about seven thousand cities around the world
take part in Earth Hour every year. It's the single
biggest movement of its kind that has ever been created,
and it was really about our agency, the Sydney Morning
Herald and the World Wildlife Fund coming together and flipping
the brief on its head and say, let's do this
(19:22):
a little bit differently. Hundreds of millions, perhaps you know
more than a billion people around the world have been
influenced by that campaign since it launched out of our
little old office of Leo Benette, Sydney ten or twelve
years ago. Well, congratulations, So what was your first real
management job? Then? When I came to the US. My
first job working at foot Cone and Belding as an
account director. It was more formal, and I had a
(19:44):
team and there were kind of set ways of work
and I had to fit into a bit more of
a structure. What was your management style? Equal parts cheerleader
and tough taskmaster. So we've always tried to give a
lot of support for the people that have worked with
me and around me, but I also have really high
expectations of them as well as I do with myself.
It's not you to be my boss either, you know.
I have high expectations of my boss, and I have
high expectations of myself and have high expectations of the
(20:05):
people that work for me. They're always trying to do
that with a lot of love and compassion and fun.
But at the end of the day, the standards won't move,
you know, they're fixed. A lot of people probably listening
today who are new managers, what do you wish somebody
had told you and you stepped in that job? Managing
yourself is the most important thing. It's more important than
how you manage other people. And I think a lot
of people come into management jobs and they think, like
(20:27):
the field general is how they manage the troops, But
it's actually more than anything. It's the role modeling and
the behaviors and expectations you have of yourself that I
think the most important and influential management is seventy how
you manage yourself, your focus, and how you manage others.
What I really want is to encourage the people that
I managed to also manage themselves very effectively and have
(20:49):
high standards for themselves. And if everybody operates that way,
then collectively the company will keep doing better. You're known
among people who know you well for being calm and
handlings for us well. That related to yoga. Yoga helps, yeah,
and having a great wife and partner at home. You know,
I do stay pretty calm and then I do my
(21:10):
freaking out when I closed the door at night. How
often is that? Not too often happen? Yoga yoga certainly
helps a lot. So how does that pit in your
management style? I try and keep people calm and help
them to reframe things. When they're in a crisis or
having an emergency. I help them to rethink and reframe it.
Let's not talk about what's happened to get us to
this point. I hate the blame culture that exists in business.
(21:30):
Let's just think about the situation we're in and what's
the best course of action to take from here. There's
a great sense of urgency, sometimes emergency and crisis that
can get generated in companies every single day. We also
work in a service business where clients have high expectations
of us and can be very, very demanding. So I
actually find it's not about these big moments. It's actually
(21:51):
about how do we stay calm and focused on what's
next in the day to day based on the dozens
and hundreds of things that get thrown at us. Take
a second about how you think about mystiques, how do
you think about risk descent? My job is really to
define the problem clearly and what we're trying to accomplish,
and then bring the right team together to solve that
problem and empower them to get it wrong. And it's
(22:12):
not that I don't have answers. Sometimes I know what
the answer is going to be or needs to be.
But the way you build consensus and alignment around that.
There's a quote one of my coaches told me once,
which is people will tolerate your conclusions, but they'll only
act on their own conclusions. So how do we lead
a team to really get them to draw the right
set of conclusions that will enable them to act and
move more quickly to solve the various challenges and opportunities
(22:35):
that we have. Really, that's what I'm trying to do
is create that setting for success where teams can come together,
collaborate and solve problems they're going to help move the
company forward. I've also found as I've gotten more senior
in my career, I tend to get more and more
and more of the problems coming to me that others
don't know what to do with or can't solve. So
by definition, my job has become a problem solving job
because if it's easy, it doesn't get to me. It's
(22:57):
solved before it reaches me. That's one of the surprises
I think for people to step into the CEO job
is nothing's fun, it's problems. So let's pass forward a
bit to your CEO days at Media vest Us, you
had huge clients, hard That Monderly's, Coke, Microsoft, Sprint. What
did you learn from them? Were great, great companies. I
mean I learned something different from all of them. You
(23:19):
know Laura Desmond right, I worked met Laura. Laura was amazing.
What I learned from Laura about really how to manage
these large clients with complex stakeholder environments, and how to
really get align with them and how to move them forward.
I mean each of them the context was slightly different.
But what I loved about all those clients was they
were all sophisticated, They all had a lot of ambition,
(23:40):
and it was all about how do we partner more
closely together to help these clients get where they're going
to reach their objectives and how do we align the
agency around that. Laura was really the master of thinking
in those turns. What is the secret of that. It's
quite simple, but it's really about understanding the higher order needs,
benefits and strategic priorities of those companies. How do we
link what we're trying to accomplish through the lens of
(24:00):
media back into those higher order strategic needs and objectives
that exist in the company more broadly. And that sounds easy,
it's sometimes hard to do, but that's really the art
of bringing really good partnership and alignment to these big
client companies. Another switch in a difficult position, but are
there are two or three cmos that you've worked with
that just really stand out as changing your life or
(24:22):
your view or learning something from them. There's two, once
from Australia and one from the US. The CMO of
Hines in Australia, he became a great friend and he
was the person I go to for advice. He was
an amazing CMO. And then I loved Chris Capasella at Microsoft.
Microsoft is a company that really got under my skin.
I'm still very very passionate about that business to this day,
(24:42):
and a lot of that was to do with my
time working on Microsoft and engaging with Chris Capasella and
the whole marketing team there. I thought they were fantastic.
Two thousand and fourteen, you veer off to go to Videology,
a video ad tech platform, sort of a departure from
your career. Why and how. The impetus for it was
that when I CEO of Media VS, I was technically
in charge of our programmatic offering and services and I
(25:06):
didn't know shit about it. I didn't know anything. This
we saw as being the future, and I thought I
have no right to be leading this part of our
business at the moment. We had great people in it,
but I felt like what was going on in the
world of technology and data was going to bring about
such tectonic change that I needed to go into it
to really learn it. And that was really what precipitated
(25:26):
the decision to leave agencies for a while and go
and work at Videology, as I wanted to work in
a product company where that's all they did every day
and understand it from the level of not just the services,
but really the technology and the products around that. So
go into work in a technology and product company was
really my m b A and ad tech and to
this day it was the equal best decision I ever made.
The first was making the move from creative to media,
(25:47):
and then the second was dipping out of media for
a while to go and learn the ad tech space deeply.
It was a great much did you learn about the technology?
Was a more product or was it more technology or both?
I learned a lot about both. I also learned about
how a product come and he's operate different from service companies.
When you've got to scale a platform and make that
work for thousands of end users, that's very different than
delivering service to clients in our business. Now, what a
(26:09):
media agency looks like today and needs to operate a
lot more like a product company and not just a
service company. So it was very very helpful experience. People
forget sometimes to give enough credit to the agencies and
how much change they've absorbed. But the rate of change
in the next team years needs to pick up. If
we only change at the rate we did in the
last five, we'll be going backwards. A lot of managers,
(26:30):
your friends, my friends are talking about the silos. How
do you rethink an organization that's not based on silos?
The challenge that I think a lot of companies have had,
and I think we're falling into this mistake as well.
A group them in the past is thinking that it's
a structural solution to our silo problems, because that's the
way it looks on an ORC chart. It looks like
silos P and l's individual leadership. And I do think
(26:53):
the structural work is important, but there are six, seven, eight, nine,
ten other levels that you've got to pull in order
to break down those internal silos. The way we think
about incentives, the way we build culture, the types of
leaders we choose, the values we have as a company.
Structures really the bricks, but what's the mortar that's going
to hold that all together and help you to be
more cohesive as a company. And sometimes if I go
(27:15):
to work in group or a team, I give them
a challenge. I say, go help us solve this problem
and come back to me with some recommendations. Very often
part of that brief will be you have to think
about every other level you want to pull to fix
this problem before you give me a structural solution. Will
do structure last? So in many ways I kind of
take that away to force them to think more deeply
about how are we going to drive some change here
(27:35):
that isn't just about shifting stuff around. On the ORC chart,
do you find people in the organization are looking for
the new organization or are they afraid of the change
that it might bring to them? Probably both, And it
might depend on where you are generationally and how much
as an individual in your career the silos or power
structures might serve the manager individually. But I'd say on
(27:56):
the whole people inside Group AM are hungering for us
to continue to evolve. There is so much intelligence and
talent in the company and such a desire for us
to pick up the rate of change that I'm pushing
on a lot of open doors, and that's been probably
the biggest surprise coming into my job is the volume
of people into a group them that are excited to
keep reinventing our company so we can be more relevant
(28:16):
in the future. You really care about clients known for that,
and you care about your clients brands as much as
they do. What are the dangerous to day to brands
that we didn't have and how are you addressing that?
I think the biggest danger to brands is in a
world where there's now infinite shelves. You know, there's no
constraints in terms of the store shelf anymore, and an
(28:39):
infinite number of ways to connect with them. I think
it's very very easy for disruptors to come in and
get their business up to a certain size, and that's
where a lot of these DTC businesses are coming in
and really reinventing these kind of value propositions and taking
a slice off a traditional, big client base. And I
think it's very hard for these DTC companies to come
in and break through to the scale had a lot
(29:00):
of our clients are operating that, but it's not as
hard to get to thirty fifty hundred a hundred and
fifty two hundred million dollars of sales. And when that
happens across a number of fronts, you know, that's really
starting to take a slice off a lot of the
business that our traditional clients have had. And so I
think it's the aggregation of a lot of these DTC
competitors that are the biggest threat two brands. I look
(29:20):
at Mark Pritchard, who I'm a big fan of, and
look at the successes he's had recently where he really
rethought the marketing process and media and partners, and look
for more efficiencies and effectiveness. And I think he just
had his third or fourth quarter of record results. Do
you think that's a model Others are looking at Marcus
being a pioneer, and I think he was the first
(29:40):
serious big CMO leader to use his pulpit to call
bullshit on a lot of the received wisdom that had
started to grow up around digital marketing in the digital ecosystem.
He was the first to say, you know, I'm not
sure that watching this digital video ad with the sound
off for a nanosecond of three pixels in view is
really going to help move the needle on my business.
So he started to take a much more balanced view
(30:01):
in terms of the relationship between traditional media and new media. Obviously,
digital marketing is really important, but you know, it's not
the panaceater everything, and we still need scale. We still
need to engage with people emotionally. We're a big business,
so we need a law of large numbers. We can't
target our way through every business problem and challenge that
we've got, and some of these ad products that exist
in the digital ecosystem aren't as good as some of
(30:24):
the traditional ones. There was a while where there's a
lot of pressure on marketers to feel and look more digital.
There was a little bit of a sense that, hang on,
if I'm recommending radio and out of home and other
more traditional medias and not as much of this new
digital stuff, am I going to look like a dinosaur?
And I think that's sometimes led a lot of marketers
to overreach into new things before they really understood the
impact they could have at scale. So Mark has been
(30:45):
a great leader in that way. Radio business. We love
it because he went back and discovered radio and billboards
and things like that as well. Talk to me a
little bit about the overall decline and TV because that
used to be the foundation of the reach of any
campaign and now it doesn't have that. So how do
you think that changes the world of right? And I'm
a traditional broadcast media is getting older. Video is very
(31:05):
much alive, but there's been a lot of fragmentation from
traditional television into a multitude of IP addressable and over
the top places. Even much of it doesn't carry ADS,
and then the bits that do haven't had a measurement
standard around them and targeting standards around them, so we
can accrue audiences in those places with the same level
of predictability and measurement that we have had in traditional television,
(31:26):
and I think it's forcing us to reevaluate the concept
of video reach. Having primacy alone, video was the top
of the stack because it represented site sounded motion. But
as I say, if that's now a digital video with
the sound off for a fraction of a second, we
know that's not equivalent to a thirty second television ad.
So that's opened the door for us to really rethink
how we do reach planning, not just for television or
(31:47):
video first, and then we add on the other channels later,
but let's really understand the impact and roll that all
channels can play across our display, audio and video formats.
And then how do we want to rebuild plans to
maximize the combination of reach and engagement that we know
we need to move the needle privacy and data double
edged swords. How are you thinking about it for your clients?
(32:10):
These will be the defining issue for the next ten years,
and it's a defining issue now. So we are playing
our role in the industry to really try and lead
the way when it comes to brand safety, when it
comes to viewability and performance standards, when it comes to
driving consistent measurement. These things are really important. The biggest
client response we're seeing to the threat and the challenges
(32:31):
around your potential privacy regulation is the importance of direct
customer relationships and first party data. There's not a market
out there that is not looking to build more direct
customer relationships, to buy DTCs sts and to have that
direct permission and pipe into their customer basis so they
can really both market directly without that mediation, but then
(32:52):
also to have a rich data set that they can
use to optimize the performance of a lot of other
work they're doing a cross channels let's talk about data.
Is it the new team all stakes? And are you
expecting every media partner to bring those capabilities? It's absolutely
table stakes, and it's important that the agencies, the clients themselves,
and the media owners are all making the investments that
(33:13):
they need to make to set us up for a
world of audience driven optimization and audience driven targeting and
getting beyond this age demo tradition that has really drove
the media for the first a hundred years of its existence.
So let's change subjects a minute. You're committed to making
the world better. You're a co founder you and your
wife actively involved in A Place at the Table. Tell
(33:34):
us little bit about the mission and a little bit
of history of how that gets going and the impact.
A Place at the Table with the name of a
movie it's some friends of yours developed. Tom Colikio was
that executive producer and Laurie Silverbush was the director of
that film. I saw that film and the same time
I've been talking to Christen and thinking about I do
need to start to use my relationships and talents to help.
We made the decision to focus on hunger because that
(33:57):
was a big part of my childhood, was insecurity around
food and hovedy in general. I was discussing this another
total coincidence. My life is full of them, with those
lifting weights with a personal trainer. One morning I was
describing to Jesse this revelation I've had, and she said, oh, well,
Laurie is a good friend of mine. Let me connect
with Laurie. Just total coincidence. You happened to make that movie,
and so Jesse connected me with Laurie in my head
(34:17):
lunch one day and said, look, I loved your movie.
What you've done with the movie is really persuasive. The
problem is that's a documentary and so the people who
see it will already be moved by the issue, and
not many people will see it anyway, So why don't
we take the concepts and the themes you've built into
the movie and then think like a marketer and package
those themes up for more mass consumption so we can
(34:37):
start to move hearts and minds around the issue of hunger.
And that's really where A Place at the Table was born.
It was the idea of taking the themes and concepts
in the movie and turn it into an ongoing campaign
and marketing program aimed at changing the way people think
about the hunger issue in America. Talk to me about
the progress and how you measure the progress. We've made
really good progress. This is a small organization. We don't
(34:58):
raise very much money. We think there's so much great
work happening in the establishment that exists around anti poverty
and anti hunger organizations. What we're trying to do is
to help fuel them to communicate more effectively. And so
the biggest thing we've been doing in the last twelve
months is doing a lot of work with an organization
called Frameworks, which is really teaching us how to talk
(35:19):
about hunger that motivates and moves people away from the
stereotypes and into a different mindset around what solutions the
stereotypes are, What the stereotypes are that you need to
solve it with charity. People need to pull themselves up
by their bootstraps. They've done it to themselves. There's not
a lot of empathy around the issue, and so we're
trying to help people understand that there are structural and
(35:41):
systemic things that are driving the issue of hunger, such
as the gap between rich and poor, the way we
think about wages and minimum wage, the lack of equal
access to opportunity that's really now determined by where you're born,
the color of your skin, other things like that. Systemic
barrier is the number of people who are hungry where
(36:02):
there's a working parent in the household. This is not
about unemployment. There's a lot of hunger in working homes,
and so helping people understand the full nature and to
mention of the problem has been the first step. And
then also helping people to understand how do we talk
about this issue differently so they don't default to these
unconscious stereotypes that they have about hungry people which can
(36:22):
get in the way of treating the empathy that they
need to have for people who are hungry that will
ultimately move them to more action. More congratulations on the
work there. I know it's rewarding but also impressive. You
were once quoted as saying, I can share you a sheep,
cook you a pretty good meal. So that's sum you up.
There's certainly two truths. I can't cook you a good
meal and I can't share a sheep. Any other harbies
(36:45):
or passions. Yoga is a big passion, and really I'm
just so focused on my family at the moment. Honestly,
there's nothing I can imagine I want to do more
than spend an afternoon together as a family. You're a
smart man and a lucky man. Let's end with math
and magic. Where we began from Australia to the u
US and all the international work you've done. You've seen
Greek folks, the analytical ones and the creative ones and
(37:06):
everybody in between. All the people you've seen. Who's the
best mathematician? You know that analytical tape. My favorite mathematician,
Scott Ferber, who's the CEO and founder of Videology, The
thing I love about Scott is he had an understanding
and a model and a concept for how to use
data to optimize advertising that was very, very different. I
(37:28):
think he's right about his thesis, which is it's not
about bidding and in real time, it's about yield management.
How you think about the problem in the context of yields, So,
how do we think about optimization of advertising in the
way that UPS thinks about filling trucks or American Airlines
thinks about yield management for an airplane versus auction based
dynamics has had a massive influence on me. So Scott
(37:50):
Furber is my number one favorite mathematician I've worked with.
Of all time magician working in creative agencies, I've worked
with many. My favorite is John Haggerty, who is uh
you know, an old time When I was running account
management at bb H in New York, John was still
the active credit director and chairman, and so to work
directly with John on campaigns and to see how close
(38:10):
how he applies his craft, I learned so much from
John in such a short period of time. He deserves
the statue he has in the industry. Tim, Thank you,
Thank you very much. Bob here's three lessons I take
away from this episode with Tim Castrey. One, regardless of
all the new digital tools we have now, the bottom
line is make emotional connections with people. To remember that
(38:33):
just as important as managing your team is managing yourself.
And three, if your job feels glamorous, you're probably not
doing it the right way. Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman.
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio.
(38:54):
The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling are Wonderful talent is
no small feat Nikkiatore for pulling research, Bill Plax and
Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
(39:14):
next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production I heart Radio.
You're sitting atop the legendary group. I'm the CEO. Which
of the jobs you've had best prepared you for this job?
Probably in shoveling Manua when I was when I was
twelve years old, I searched you well for a lot
(00:23):
of jobs. It has I mean, I'm only how being sarcastic.
I mean, I think you've got to get in These
are not glamorous jobs, at least they shouldn't be. If
you're running a company like this and you feel like
your job is glamorous, then you're probably not doing the
right things. I love rolling my sleeves up, getting in
there and doing the hard things, and sometimes that is
akin to shoveling. But that's just what you've got to do.
(00:48):
I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to Math and Magic. Stories
from the Frontiers and Marketing. We explore the analytical and
creative side of marketing, and our guests covered the spectrum,
from anyone who uses or touches marketing to people who
claim it in their job title. Today's guest is Tim Castree,
who has a fascinating story and actually split his career
between the US and his native Australia. He'll hear that
(01:11):
accent in a minute. Tim is the relatively new North
America CEO of Group M, the WPP parent company that
owns and operates some of the best known names in advertising,
mind Share of Media com, WaveMaker, Essence, and Saxas. Tim
was born in Melbourne, Australia, traded shoveling manure for riding
(01:32):
lessons at age twelve. Is that right? That's probably the
first indication of his incredible deal making skills. He did
not go to college. Insteady started as an advertising cadet,
whatever the hell that is, and we're gonna explore that soon.
He went on to an amazing career in advertising that
had him ping ponging between the US and Australia across
a wide range of jobs and agencies. CEO LEO Bernetta
(01:54):
and Sydney from George Patterson Partners, CEO of Media Vest
in the US, Managing director of Video Bology, CEO of
m E, c CEO of wave Runner, all that, and
he's only what years old? Three? What a career And
we want to dig into and I'm dying to know
about that Advertising cadet deal. But first we want to
get you in sixties seconds, So just give us the
(02:16):
first thing that comes to your mind. Cats or dogs, dogs,
hands down, puzzles or board games, puzzles, Instagram or Twitter Instagram,
kangaroos or koalas, oceans or lakes, oceans New York or Sydney,
New York, Melbourne or Sydney Melbourne. Sunrise or sunsets from sunrise.
Libraries are museums, u museums. Riding horses are doing yoga. Yreka. Now,
(02:42):
smartest person you know g I worked with this guy
and Evan Handling had group M. I think he got
a six hundred and he now he's at your strategy office.
It sounds like the whey he got for the chief strategy.
Childhood hero Batman, first job delivering newspapers. Craziest thing you
did for love, Craziest thing I did for love? Oh boy,
(03:03):
what have I done for love? I've done a lot
for love. I don't think they're crazy, They're mostly desperate.
I think more than crazy. Okay, we'll give you a
passold that historical idle. Probably jesus proudest career achievement, getting
my first job proudest personal achievement choosing my wife quote
to live by Life's too short. Worst fashion trend you've
(03:26):
participated in, Oh, facid washed jeans were pretty tragic. They're
coming back. I know they're coming back. Hang on to
You'll get to make our own mistakes, my generation to
the next. What would be the title of your memoir? Fuldham? Okay,
let's jump into it. You had decided on a career
in advertising it as I understand it, age fifteen, you
(03:46):
did a paper or project in school and that's such
on this path. What on earth was that project? It
was a one day event where they brought in three
or four business leaders. They organized a competition where we
had to launch a business. We got put into teams
and I was the leader of our team. We decided
we were going to import these T shirts from Hong Kong.
We had to source them and market them in our
(04:07):
little high school business plan, and I just loved it.
One of those business leaders that was in he worked
for Done in Bradstreet and he said come in and
I'll show you around now. So I remember taking the
train into Melbourne. There's an hour away on the train,
and I spent a day with him, and I got
home that night and said to my mom, I'm going
to work in marketing or advertising, and it just it's stuck. Well,
it's a great story. So you started as the advertising cadet.
(04:29):
What is an advertising cadet? I think I was the
first and only ever advertising cadet. This wasn't a long
line of cadet ships, but it was basically a way
to give a break to a high school kid who
was in a family situation where he couldn't afford to
go to college. Moment said, look, you need to go
to work for a few years. That's what the family needs.
So I was working in a supermarket after school. I
thought the girl who worked in the Delhi was kind
(04:50):
of cute, and I was showing off to her juggling
watermelons in the supermarket. Two watermelons, not free, and this
area manager came around and she said, what the hell
are you doing? And get back to work, And and
about an hour later, I was on my lunch break
and she came and talked to me and she said,
I was sorry, I'm so hard on you. I said, no,
no problem, I shouldn't have been juggling watermelons. And we
got talking and we hit it off. Her name was
Margaret Kim, and she said, well, you're about to graduate
(05:11):
high school. What are you doing? I said, I don't know,
and I explained my situation how I needed to go
out and work, and she said, what do you want
to do? I said, I really want to work in
marketing and advertising, and she said, well, you know, we
have an advertising department here at Safe Way. Why don't
I make some phone calls and see if there's anything
they could do for you? Lo and behold. He called
me back three days later and said, you know what,
They've just decided to launch this first ever cadet ship program,
and why don't you apply for that and I'll see
(05:32):
if I can help you. And sure enough, I applied
and I was given this cadet ship, which was basically
working in the internal advertising department of Safeway Supermarkets and
loved it. About a year into it, the internal advertising
department got absorbed into Leo Barnett, So I moved from
Safeway into Leo Barnett about a year after I started,
(05:53):
which is a whole other story. And you want to
hear that, Yes, I do. I do want to hear that.
So I was in this cadet ship and they were
waiting to give the contract to Leobennett. A bunch of
folks they took into the agency, A bunch they let
go and moved into other departments, and I was the
last person they hadn't resolved. My story is basically a
long litany of people who gave me breaks. And there
was a guy who ran advertising. His name was John Simon,
(06:14):
and John was saying to the CEO of Leobennett, you've
got to take this guy to him. He's fantastic. He's
a young guy. And they said, look, we just we
don't know what to do with the advertising cadet and
so we don't need him. John was adamant about it,
and they went back and forth on this for weeks
while they were negotiating the contract. We got to the
final day where John was about to sign the contract
to give them the account. It was still unresolved, and
he said, look, I'm not sign until you give him
(06:35):
a job. And he held the pen and he sat
and waited. Took him about ninety seconds after that, I said, fine, fine,
we'll give the kid a job. And then he signed
the contract. And that's how I was what was their
j Well, they basically brought me in a similar capacity
in Leo Bannett. So they said, we'll take him on
for two years and we'll move him around to all
the various departments from production to creative to account management
(06:55):
and media. They didn't have programs like that at the time.
But my boss there was still of my best friends
to this day, a woman named Melinda Gertz. She went
to Northwestern and they've transferred to the Melbourne office of
Leo Burnett from the Chicago office. Melinda just said, well,
I'll take him and I'll redesign what we used to
do at Leo Benett and Chicago. I'll just make a
little training program for one and so that was where
they designed this kind of program to put me around
(07:17):
in each of the departments and learned the ropes of advertising. Well,
you did really well, So you must have impressed somebody.
What did you do in that advertising codat job that
so impressed them that you began to move up in
the world. I had a real work ethic. When you
grow up in a working poor family. I mean a
lot of people who have that experience, they burn, you know,
they really burn with ambition and a drive, and I
(07:37):
had that as well. You know, a lot of fuel
from my childhood circumstances really pushed me forward. So I'd
say it was a real combination of work ethic God
gifted me with a good brain, the gray matters always
worked pretty well, and also real willingness to take risks
and put myself out there. I'd be constantly making proposals
and recommendations that were far beyond my pay grade, far
beyond what I knew. But I really tried hard to
(07:58):
make a difference and to have an impact. And I
think they noticed that. Did growing up in those circumstances
really drive you into your success? Absolutely did for the
first ten or fifteen years of my career, and also
because I hadn't gone to university, a ton of insecurity
that came with it. If you'd asked a lot of
people who knew me at that time, if I was
in any way an insecure person, they would be stunned
to learn how deeply insecure I was. You skip college
(08:20):
that bought you four years earlier starting your career. Did
that turn out to be a competitive advantage to be
there before your peers were there? It turned out to
be an advantage in the end. Yes, I think it
wouldn't happen today. I graduated high school and the idea
that you would get into a white college job without
university was already a pretty far fetched idea. Because Australia
(08:40):
is such a small market. Melbourne was such a small market,
you had to do so much, so I would work
across departments on dozens and dozens of ad campaigns. When
I first moved to the US, I would work for
a year and a half on one television ad for Spaghettios.
How do you work eighteen months on trying to make
one Spaghettios television add I don't know. But the US
have been a great one, arguable. But the year before
(09:02):
I've done thirty there was a lot of volume, and
I think a lot of that volume helped me to
learn the ropes pretty quickly. Do you find in the
US that it meant less that you hadn't gone to college.
I feel it meant more. I was quite and secure
about for a while, and it was really only in
my middle thirties that I really wrestled the insecurity to
the mat and really started to find that deep sense
of confidence and to give a greater sense of permanence,
(09:22):
Like I was always worried, you know, that someone was
going to take it away. They'd find out where I
was from and find out how I'd gotten here and
take it all away. And it was only in my
mid thirties that I really transcended that. So when you
look at someone today and they didn't go to college,
do you go a while I need to give them
a chance they're gonna work harder, or do you say
you should go to college. I have a very strong
ethic around education, and I'm quite adamant that my kids
are going to go to college. Statistically, you see where
(09:44):
the outcomes are. I think the real challenge we're dealing
with at the moment is the amount of debt that
kids are coming out of school with, and it's really
questionable how valuable it is. So when I think about
my own kids, I want them to go to college.
And I opened their five two nines on the day
before each of them were born. That's been the ethic
I've had around it. But when I think of our
group M and what we're doing, we are increasingly looking
at alternative ways to get kids into jobs that don't
(10:06):
require four year degrees. There's a lot that happens in
the world of advertising and media that shouldn't require a
four year degree, and certainly no point in enforcing kids
and saddling kids with all of that debt in order
to get there. So as we think about increasing the
diversity at group M how we think about those kind
of entry level roles is a big part of we
think how we're going to solve the longer term diversity
(10:27):
challenges we're having in the industry. They'll have it around
a long time and there's a big club of us
who didn't finish college, some that didn't go to college.
My great boss and mentor at Warner Communications, Steve Ross,
I think he went for two weeks and there was
once of job posting that came down and said college
degree required for some very low level jobs. So I
call it the HR department just tweak a little bit. You're,
(10:48):
you know, our chairman, so you know I didn't go
to college. Here thinking he's not qualified to do this job.
So they center banks to college degree preferred. So let's
go back to Australia a little bit. Talk about your childhood.
You said you really couldn't afford to go to college,
needed to go to work. What was the family life
like and how did that shape You'm from a working
poor family. My dad was a school teacher in school principal,
(11:09):
and my mom was a stay at home moment we
had five kids on a teacher. Sorry, when we lived
in rural Australia at that point was always pretty precarious.
Then when dad left the family home at twelve, and
really he left, I mean he was gone, you know,
and mom had never worked a day in her life,
so she was pretty much left to figure out how
to provide for five kids. It was very challenging time.
We really were living in the margins financially, but at
the same time just an incredible spirit and sense of
(11:33):
love that filled the home. It was very fun filled
and love filled home. And so that, more than the
economic circumstances, is what shape who I am as a person.
You grew up in a loving but tough childhood. What
lessons do you repeat to your kids about that? The
main thesis of the way we parents is having love
and compassion for everybody. They're certainly showing that seven and
(11:55):
nine years old. They blow me away sometime. Do you
go back to Australia lot. Does the family go back
they feel rooted or just you rooted there. No, my
kids are they're very American. I mean, they sound like
they're from Brooklyn and they've got really thick, little New
York accents. But they loved being half Australian and so
they've really connected to that part of their identity. Both
of my parents have passed away, so a lot of
(12:15):
the impetus to go back every year or twice a
year has gone away, So we go back a bit
less frequently these days, but the kids certainly love getting
back there, and they certainly identify with the part of
them that's Australian. So let's jump back to advertising. You
started as the advertising CODEBT everything you'd bear the CEO
job like this. I wear my ambition pretty lightly. It's
more of this internal drive, I guess, because where I
(12:36):
started in Melbourne, it was such a small place. So
by twenty four I was running a bunch of accounts.
The guy who ran it, you know, he was only
twenty nine running the operation. So at that point the
gap between me and the top didn't seem that large.
So I was always kind of set on being a CEO.
And then I decided to get to the US because
I just thought Australia are pretty small pond, so I
thought I'd come here. How is it different than you
(12:58):
had imagined it as a kid? I mean, this is marketing.
It was more fun and less corporate than I thought
it would be, maybe because I didn't really know, so
I just had this association with people in business, you know,
wearing tires and being all formal, even in marketing advertising.
I had this idea that it was going to be
quite stiff and formal. In many ways that appealed to me.
I was always more drawn to the establishment and being
(13:19):
anti establishment, and maybe that's because of where I grew up.
I always thought there was this club that I was
trying to get to. So I was actually more navy
than pirate in my sensibilities growing up. So I thought
when I got there, i'd be I'd be joining this club.
And I was quite pleasantly surprised to see how fun
and spirited and as a fun club corporate it was.
What lessons did you learn about marketing from that early
(13:40):
part of your career that's still stick with you today,
And it's sort of a foundational belief you have. At
the heart of it, this is all about making emotional
connections with people and that hasn't changed even with everything
we can do today, with the power of all of
our data and technology and targeting tools and this and this,
and at the end of the day, it's about moving
people and the only way to do that is at
the level of emotional engagement. You have a reputation of
(14:01):
being a change agent, that you see things a different way.
You think that comes from the fact that you were
in this job jack of all trades where you could
do everything and you could see things in a very
fluid way, and that if you had jumped into a
big advertising agency and been put in a very specific job,
you would not have that ability. Or do you think
that's an in needability you have? I think it's probably
(14:22):
bored out of my early drive in my career in
the sense that to me, stasis felt like going backwards.
Also had a bit of a chip on my shoulder
about it, and a healthy kind of disrespect for it
as well. It really came from this kind of inner
drive to constantly be moving forward, evolving and changing. You
went back and forth Australia, US, then you went back
to Australia came back to the US. Why did you
(14:43):
go back to Australia. I got engaged and my wife
is much smarter than I am. On the night I
asked her to marry me, I said, will you marry me, Kristen?
And she said absolutely if we live in America? And
I'm like, wow, I'm talking about a high leverage moment.
She knew it was coming and she was ready for me,
and she had me over barrel. So really the reason
we went back to Australia was because I realized it
was going to be my last chance to live there,
(15:05):
and my parents were getting elderly. My brother who passed
away from AIDS, he was quite sick at the time,
and so he's the window of time working really go
and reconnect the family. So we made the deal that
we go live in Australia for three years and then
come back to New York to start a family. Tim
There's so much more I want to get into, from
your management style to how you convinced all of Australia
to turn off their lights for an hour. But before
(15:27):
we get into any of that, let's take a quick break.
Welcome back to math and magic. We're here today with
Tim Castree, looking at your career and listening to folks
talk about you. The big question is what are you?
Account person, A creative, a technologist, a quant a business person.
(15:49):
How do you think of yourself? I'm a client guy.
Everything else for me, all that other stuff that I've
learned and done is really about increasing my ability to
help clients solve their business problems with the tools that
we have in at w p P in a group.
And but the first door I walked through the way
I identify myself is first and foremost as a client person. Well,
you know, you've got a great reputation, and the first
(16:10):
time I heard about you, you were so of the
spectacular client person. But all this other stuff you've done
didn't make you a different client person than they had
seen from other places. All that other experience gave me
kind of more utility, so I didn't have to go
to everybody to help understand clients out of self problems.
I'd still bring in specialists and experts, but I knew
a lot more directly myself about a lot of parts
(16:30):
of the business, so that was really helpful. The other
thing that's helped me here is the culture of Australian business,
the directness, the way I've run my career. I'm trying
to be Australian. You know, there's a there's a strength
and I think the egalitarian style of Australia which has
really helped me here. But only two thousand six you
became CEO of Leo Burnett Sydney. The agency was named
(16:51):
Australia's Agency of the Year. That heavy stuff. I mean,
here's somebody who didn't go to college started shoveling manure
and now you're the CEO of Leo Burnett and you're
wrecking as the agency of the year. Wow. It was
awesome because it was my first CEO job and it
was also the company where I started, you know, the
company where Melinda gave me that little training program and
I was back, you know, still working with me Linda.
It was a very very proud moment for me. Did
(17:13):
it change your view of you? It didn't change my
idea of me. But it was the time when I
worked most on my mindset and thinking around my right
to be in the leadership job, starting to realize that
this is legit. I've earned this and it's not that
somebody's gonna wake up tomorrow and figure out that I
fooled him and I got here, but I really deserve
to be here. The doors must have opened at that
time to agency of the year, away goes, who is
(17:34):
this guy? How old were you at the time, early
thirties maybe thirty three? Did any doors open or surprises
as to what opportunities came your way as a result
of that? Not directly. I have this m O two.
I don't. I don't answer the phone when it rings.
When I commit to a job, I say I'm going
to do this for three years, and I'm going to
do it for three years, and I'm not going to
think about anything else. And then maybe two and a
(17:55):
half years, I'll think is this working for me? And
if it's still working for me, I really recommit to
the next three years. Talk about creativity in this period
and Leo Burnett get an example. The best campaign I've
ever worked on. One of the reasons I moved to
media was after we'd made this campaign, I don't what
bell was left was a cinical moment, and that was
the formation of a campaign called Earth Hour. The World
(18:17):
Wildlife Fund came to Leo Bannett and said, we want
a campaign about climate change. The chairman at the time
a great man named Nigel Marsh who's become a dear friend.
He said, well, let's not make you some mad, Let's
make a movement. Let's convince everybody in Sydney to turn
off their lights for an hour and make a symbolic gesture.
So this idea of Earth Hour was born. But not
only did Nigel do that, he worked with the w
(18:38):
w F and he took it to the Sydney Morning
Herald with the editorial desk and said, look, if we
launch this, will you get behind it from an editorial standpoint,
because we want to convince everybody in sne you to
turn out their lights. Everybody this started thinking like this
is an impossible thing. But then by the time we
got thousands of businesses, millions of people, We saw the
central Business district of Sydney go dark and it was
such a powerful symbol and statement and the earned media
(19:01):
and everything that came off of that was phenomenal. And
then it expanded. So Earth Hour is still going and
at last count, about seven thousand cities around the world
take part in Earth Hour every year. It's the single
biggest movement of its kind that has ever been created,
and it was really about our agency, the Sydney Morning
Herald and the World Wildlife Fund coming together and flipping
the brief on its head and say, let's do this
(19:22):
a little bit differently. Hundreds of millions, perhaps you know
more than a billion people around the world have been
influenced by that campaign since it launched out of our
little old office of Leo Benette, Sydney ten or twelve
years ago. Well, congratulations, So what was your first real
management job? Then? When I came to the US. My
first job working at foot Cone and Belding as an
account director. It was more formal, and I had a
(19:44):
team and there were kind of set ways of work
and I had to fit into a bit more of
a structure. What was your management style? Equal parts cheerleader
and tough taskmaster. So we've always tried to give a
lot of support for the people that have worked with
me and around me, but I also have really high
expectations of them as well as I do with myself.
It's not you to be my boss either, you know.
I have high expectations of my boss, and I have
high expectations of myself and have high expectations of the
(20:05):
people that work for me. They're always trying to do
that with a lot of love and compassion and fun.
But at the end of the day, the standards won't move,
you know, they're fixed. A lot of people probably listening
today who are new managers, what do you wish somebody
had told you and you stepped in that job? Managing
yourself is the most important thing. It's more important than
how you manage other people. And I think a lot
of people come into management jobs and they think, like
(20:27):
the field general is how they manage the troops, But
it's actually more than anything. It's the role modeling and
the behaviors and expectations you have of yourself that I
think the most important and influential management is seventy how
you manage yourself, your focus, and how you manage others.
What I really want is to encourage the people that
I managed to also manage themselves very effectively and have
(20:49):
high standards for themselves. And if everybody operates that way,
then collectively the company will keep doing better. You're known
among people who know you well for being calm and
handlings for us well. That related to yoga. Yoga helps, yeah,
and having a great wife and partner at home. You know,
I do stay pretty calm and then I do my
(21:10):
freaking out when I closed the door at night. How
often is that? Not too often happen? Yoga yoga certainly
helps a lot. So how does that pit in your
management style? I try and keep people calm and help
them to reframe things. When they're in a crisis or
having an emergency. I help them to rethink and reframe it.
Let's not talk about what's happened to get us to
this point. I hate the blame culture that exists in business.
(21:30):
Let's just think about the situation we're in and what's
the best course of action to take from here. There's
a great sense of urgency, sometimes emergency and crisis that
can get generated in companies every single day. We also
work in a service business where clients have high expectations
of us and can be very, very demanding. So I
actually find it's not about these big moments. It's actually
(21:51):
about how do we stay calm and focused on what's
next in the day to day based on the dozens
and hundreds of things that get thrown at us. Take
a second about how you think about mystiques, how do
you think about risk descent? My job is really to
define the problem clearly and what we're trying to accomplish,
and then bring the right team together to solve that
problem and empower them to get it wrong. And it's
(22:12):
not that I don't have answers. Sometimes I know what
the answer is going to be or needs to be.
But the way you build consensus and alignment around that.
There's a quote one of my coaches told me once,
which is people will tolerate your conclusions, but they'll only
act on their own conclusions. So how do we lead
a team to really get them to draw the right
set of conclusions that will enable them to act and
move more quickly to solve the various challenges and opportunities
(22:35):
that we have. Really, that's what I'm trying to do
is create that setting for success where teams can come together,
collaborate and solve problems they're going to help move the
company forward. I've also found as I've gotten more senior
in my career, I tend to get more and more
and more of the problems coming to me that others
don't know what to do with or can't solve. So
by definition, my job has become a problem solving job
because if it's easy, it doesn't get to me. It's
(22:57):
solved before it reaches me. That's one of the surprises
I think for people to step into the CEO job
is nothing's fun, it's problems. So let's pass forward a
bit to your CEO days at Media vest Us, you
had huge clients, hard That Monderly's, Coke, Microsoft, Sprint. What
did you learn from them? Were great, great companies. I
mean I learned something different from all of them. You
(23:19):
know Laura Desmond right, I worked met Laura. Laura was amazing.
What I learned from Laura about really how to manage
these large clients with complex stakeholder environments, and how to
really get align with them and how to move them forward.
I mean each of them the context was slightly different.
But what I loved about all those clients was they
were all sophisticated, They all had a lot of ambition,
(23:40):
and it was all about how do we partner more
closely together to help these clients get where they're going
to reach their objectives and how do we align the
agency around that. Laura was really the master of thinking
in those turns. What is the secret of that. It's
quite simple, but it's really about understanding the higher order needs,
benefits and strategic priorities of those companies. How do we
link what we're trying to accomplish through the lens of
(24:00):
media back into those higher order strategic needs and objectives
that exist in the company more broadly. And that sounds easy,
it's sometimes hard to do, but that's really the art
of bringing really good partnership and alignment to these big
client companies. Another switch in a difficult position, but are
there are two or three cmos that you've worked with
that just really stand out as changing your life or
(24:22):
your view or learning something from them. There's two, once
from Australia and one from the US. The CMO of
Hines in Australia, he became a great friend and he
was the person I go to for advice. He was
an amazing CMO. And then I loved Chris Capasella at Microsoft.
Microsoft is a company that really got under my skin.
I'm still very very passionate about that business to this day,
(24:42):
and a lot of that was to do with my
time working on Microsoft and engaging with Chris Capasella and
the whole marketing team there. I thought they were fantastic.
Two thousand and fourteen, you veer off to go to Videology,
a video ad tech platform, sort of a departure from
your career. Why and how. The impetus for it was
that when I CEO of Media VS, I was technically
in charge of our programmatic offering and services and I
(25:06):
didn't know shit about it. I didn't know anything. This
we saw as being the future, and I thought I
have no right to be leading this part of our
business at the moment. We had great people in it,
but I felt like what was going on in the
world of technology and data was going to bring about
such tectonic change that I needed to go into it
to really learn it. And that was really what precipitated
(25:26):
the decision to leave agencies for a while and go
and work at Videology, as I wanted to work in
a product company where that's all they did every day
and understand it from the level of not just the services,
but really the technology and the products around that. So
go into work in a technology and product company was
really my m b A and ad tech and to
this day it was the equal best decision I ever made.
The first was making the move from creative to media,
(25:47):
and then the second was dipping out of media for
a while to go and learn the ad tech space deeply.
It was a great much did you learn about the technology?
Was a more product or was it more technology or both?
I learned a lot about both. I also learned about
how a product come and he's operate different from service companies.
When you've got to scale a platform and make that
work for thousands of end users, that's very different than
delivering service to clients in our business. Now, what a
(26:09):
media agency looks like today and needs to operate a
lot more like a product company and not just a
service company. So it was very very helpful experience. People
forget sometimes to give enough credit to the agencies and
how much change they've absorbed. But the rate of change
in the next team years needs to pick up. If
we only change at the rate we did in the
last five, we'll be going backwards. A lot of managers,
(26:30):
your friends, my friends are talking about the silos. How
do you rethink an organization that's not based on silos?
The challenge that I think a lot of companies have had,
and I think we're falling into this mistake as well.
A group them in the past is thinking that it's
a structural solution to our silo problems, because that's the
way it looks on an ORC chart. It looks like
silos P and l's individual leadership. And I do think
(26:53):
the structural work is important, but there are six, seven, eight, nine,
ten other levels that you've got to pull in order
to break down those internal silos. The way we think
about incentives, the way we build culture, the types of
leaders we choose, the values we have as a company.
Structures really the bricks, but what's the mortar that's going
to hold that all together and help you to be
more cohesive as a company. And sometimes if I go
(27:15):
to work in group or a team, I give them
a challenge. I say, go help us solve this problem
and come back to me with some recommendations. Very often
part of that brief will be you have to think
about every other level you want to pull to fix
this problem before you give me a structural solution. Will
do structure last? So in many ways I kind of
take that away to force them to think more deeply
about how are we going to drive some change here
(27:35):
that isn't just about shifting stuff around. On the ORC chart,
do you find people in the organization are looking for
the new organization or are they afraid of the change
that it might bring to them? Probably both, And it
might depend on where you are generationally and how much
as an individual in your career the silos or power
structures might serve the manager individually. But I'd say on
(27:56):
the whole people inside Group AM are hungering for us
to continue to evolve. There is so much intelligence and
talent in the company and such a desire for us
to pick up the rate of change that I'm pushing
on a lot of open doors, and that's been probably
the biggest surprise coming into my job is the volume
of people into a group them that are excited to
keep reinventing our company so we can be more relevant
(28:16):
in the future. You really care about clients known for that,
and you care about your clients brands as much as
they do. What are the dangerous to day to brands
that we didn't have and how are you addressing that?
I think the biggest danger to brands is in a
world where there's now infinite shelves. You know, there's no
constraints in terms of the store shelf anymore, and an
(28:39):
infinite number of ways to connect with them. I think
it's very very easy for disruptors to come in and
get their business up to a certain size, and that's
where a lot of these DTC businesses are coming in
and really reinventing these kind of value propositions and taking
a slice off a traditional, big client base. And I
think it's very hard for these DTC companies to come
in and break through to the scale had a lot
(29:00):
of our clients are operating that, but it's not as
hard to get to thirty fifty hundred a hundred and
fifty two hundred million dollars of sales. And when that
happens across a number of fronts, you know, that's really
starting to take a slice off a lot of the
business that our traditional clients have had. And so I
think it's the aggregation of a lot of these DTC
competitors that are the biggest threat two brands. I look
(29:20):
at Mark Pritchard, who I'm a big fan of, and
look at the successes he's had recently where he really
rethought the marketing process and media and partners, and look
for more efficiencies and effectiveness. And I think he just
had his third or fourth quarter of record results. Do
you think that's a model Others are looking at Marcus
being a pioneer, and I think he was the first
(29:40):
serious big CMO leader to use his pulpit to call
bullshit on a lot of the received wisdom that had
started to grow up around digital marketing in the digital ecosystem.
He was the first to say, you know, I'm not
sure that watching this digital video ad with the sound
off for a nanosecond of three pixels in view is
really going to help move the needle on my business.
So he started to take a much more balanced view
(30:01):
in terms of the relationship between traditional media and new media. Obviously,
digital marketing is really important, but you know, it's not
the panaceater everything, and we still need scale. We still
need to engage with people emotionally. We're a big business,
so we need a law of large numbers. We can't
target our way through every business problem and challenge that
we've got, and some of these ad products that exist
in the digital ecosystem aren't as good as some of
(30:24):
the traditional ones. There was a while where there's a
lot of pressure on marketers to feel and look more digital.
There was a little bit of a sense that, hang on,
if I'm recommending radio and out of home and other
more traditional medias and not as much of this new
digital stuff, am I going to look like a dinosaur?
And I think that's sometimes led a lot of marketers
to overreach into new things before they really understood the
impact they could have at scale. So Mark has been
(30:45):
a great leader in that way. Radio business. We love
it because he went back and discovered radio and billboards
and things like that as well. Talk to me a
little bit about the overall decline and TV because that
used to be the foundation of the reach of any
campaign and now it doesn't have that. So how do
you think that changes the world of right? And I'm
a traditional broadcast media is getting older. Video is very
(31:05):
much alive, but there's been a lot of fragmentation from
traditional television into a multitude of IP addressable and over
the top places. Even much of it doesn't carry ADS,
and then the bits that do haven't had a measurement
standard around them and targeting standards around them, so we
can accrue audiences in those places with the same level
of predictability and measurement that we have had in traditional television,
(31:26):
and I think it's forcing us to reevaluate the concept
of video reach. Having primacy alone, video was the top
of the stack because it represented site sounded motion. But
as I say, if that's now a digital video with
the sound off for a fraction of a second, we
know that's not equivalent to a thirty second television ad.
So that's opened the door for us to really rethink
how we do reach planning, not just for television or
(31:47):
video first, and then we add on the other channels later,
but let's really understand the impact and roll that all
channels can play across our display, audio and video formats.
And then how do we want to rebuild plans to
maximize the combination of reach and engagement that we know
we need to move the needle privacy and data double
edged swords. How are you thinking about it for your clients?
(32:10):
These will be the defining issue for the next ten years,
and it's a defining issue now. So we are playing
our role in the industry to really try and lead
the way when it comes to brand safety, when it
comes to viewability and performance standards, when it comes to
driving consistent measurement. These things are really important. The biggest
client response we're seeing to the threat and the challenges
(32:31):
around your potential privacy regulation is the importance of direct
customer relationships and first party data. There's not a market
out there that is not looking to build more direct
customer relationships, to buy DTCs sts and to have that
direct permission and pipe into their customer basis so they
can really both market directly without that mediation, but then
(32:52):
also to have a rich data set that they can
use to optimize the performance of a lot of other
work they're doing a cross channels let's talk about data.
Is it the new team all stakes? And are you
expecting every media partner to bring those capabilities? It's absolutely
table stakes, and it's important that the agencies, the clients themselves,
and the media owners are all making the investments that
(33:13):
they need to make to set us up for a
world of audience driven optimization and audience driven targeting and
getting beyond this age demo tradition that has really drove
the media for the first a hundred years of its existence.
So let's change subjects a minute. You're committed to making
the world better. You're a co founder you and your
wife actively involved in A Place at the Table. Tell
(33:34):
us little bit about the mission and a little bit
of history of how that gets going and the impact.
A Place at the Table with the name of a
movie it's some friends of yours developed. Tom Colikio was
that executive producer and Laurie Silverbush was the director of
that film. I saw that film and the same time
I've been talking to Christen and thinking about I do
need to start to use my relationships and talents to help.
We made the decision to focus on hunger because that
(33:57):
was a big part of my childhood, was insecurity around
food and hovedy in general. I was discussing this another
total coincidence. My life is full of them, with those
lifting weights with a personal trainer. One morning I was
describing to Jesse this revelation I've had, and she said, oh, well,
Laurie is a good friend of mine. Let me connect
with Laurie. Just total coincidence. You happened to make that movie,
and so Jesse connected me with Laurie in my head
(34:17):
lunch one day and said, look, I loved your movie.
What you've done with the movie is really persuasive. The
problem is that's a documentary and so the people who
see it will already be moved by the issue, and
not many people will see it anyway, So why don't
we take the concepts and the themes you've built into
the movie and then think like a marketer and package
those themes up for more mass consumption so we can
(34:37):
start to move hearts and minds around the issue of hunger.
And that's really where A Place at the Table was born.
It was the idea of taking the themes and concepts
in the movie and turn it into an ongoing campaign
and marketing program aimed at changing the way people think
about the hunger issue in America. Talk to me about
the progress and how you measure the progress. We've made
really good progress. This is a small organization. We don't
(34:58):
raise very much money. We think there's so much great
work happening in the establishment that exists around anti poverty
and anti hunger organizations. What we're trying to do is
to help fuel them to communicate more effectively. And so
the biggest thing we've been doing in the last twelve
months is doing a lot of work with an organization
called Frameworks, which is really teaching us how to talk
(35:19):
about hunger that motivates and moves people away from the
stereotypes and into a different mindset around what solutions the
stereotypes are, What the stereotypes are that you need to
solve it with charity. People need to pull themselves up
by their bootstraps. They've done it to themselves. There's not
a lot of empathy around the issue, and so we're
trying to help people understand that there are structural and
(35:41):
systemic things that are driving the issue of hunger, such
as the gap between rich and poor, the way we
think about wages and minimum wage, the lack of equal
access to opportunity that's really now determined by where you're born,
the color of your skin, other things like that. Systemic
barrier is the number of people who are hungry where
(36:02):
there's a working parent in the household. This is not
about unemployment. There's a lot of hunger in working homes,
and so helping people understand the full nature and to
mention of the problem has been the first step. And
then also helping people to understand how do we talk
about this issue differently so they don't default to these
unconscious stereotypes that they have about hungry people which can
(36:22):
get in the way of treating the empathy that they
need to have for people who are hungry that will
ultimately move them to more action. More congratulations on the
work there. I know it's rewarding but also impressive. You
were once quoted as saying, I can share you a sheep,
cook you a pretty good meal. So that's sum you up.
There's certainly two truths. I can't cook you a good
meal and I can't share a sheep. Any other harbies
(36:45):
or passions. Yoga is a big passion, and really I'm
just so focused on my family at the moment. Honestly,
there's nothing I can imagine I want to do more
than spend an afternoon together as a family. You're a
smart man and a lucky man. Let's end with math
and magic. Where we began from Australia to the u
US and all the international work you've done. You've seen
Greek folks, the analytical ones and the creative ones and
(37:06):
everybody in between. All the people you've seen. Who's the
best mathematician? You know that analytical tape. My favorite mathematician,
Scott Ferber, who's the CEO and founder of Videology, The
thing I love about Scott is he had an understanding
and a model and a concept for how to use
data to optimize advertising that was very, very different. I
(37:28):
think he's right about his thesis, which is it's not
about bidding and in real time, it's about yield management.
How you think about the problem in the context of yields, So,
how do we think about optimization of advertising in the
way that UPS thinks about filling trucks or American Airlines
thinks about yield management for an airplane versus auction based
dynamics has had a massive influence on me. So Scott
(37:50):
Furber is my number one favorite mathematician I've worked with.
Of all time magician working in creative agencies, I've worked
with many. My favorite is John Haggerty, who is uh
you know, an old time When I was running account
management at bb H in New York, John was still
the active credit director and chairman, and so to work
directly with John on campaigns and to see how close
(38:10):
how he applies his craft, I learned so much from
John in such a short period of time. He deserves
the statue he has in the industry. Tim, Thank you,
Thank you very much. Bob here's three lessons I take
away from this episode with Tim Castrey. One, regardless of
all the new digital tools we have now, the bottom
line is make emotional connections with people. To remember that
(38:33):
just as important as managing your team is managing yourself.
And three, if your job feels glamorous, you're probably not
doing it the right way. Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman.
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio.
(38:54):
The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling are Wonderful talent is
no small feat Nikkiatore for pulling research, Bill Plax and
Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
(39:14):
next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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