August 1, 2019 • 39 mins
As Global President and CEO of legendary ad firm DDB, Wendy Clark keeps pushing the company to break new ground. (Consider the branded Broadway Show she wrangled for Skittles!) Learn why Wendy believes the best creative campaigns can only come out of trust; how she’s used her perch to create a more diverse workplace, and how her experiences at AT&T, Coca-Cola, and even her early stint as a shift manager at McDonald’s have made her the thoughtful leader she is today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. No client comes to us and says, I
have a data shortage. We have not heard that yet.
Most clients come to say, is I have data overload.
I had so much data. I'm not really sure what
to look at what's compelling. And we spend a lot
of our time actually peeling away a lot of the
(00:22):
layers of things that have become clouding and confusing. Welcome
to Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing.
I'm Bob Pittman, and our guests on this episode is
Wendy Clark, Global President, CEO of the legendary ad giant
(00:44):
d dB, a part of the Omnicom family. Wendy's story
sounds part business textbook and part how to succeed manual.
Born in the UK, came to the US at age eleven,
moved around schools a lot, and had early signs of
leadership as a shift manager McDonald's at age sixteen and
(01:05):
English major in college with a weakness in poetry, and
rose from her receptionist at an agency to where she
is today through stops at A T and T, Coca
Cola and Moore and Hillary Clinton too. She's been a
major force for equality in the workplace and has a
unique take on life work balance. There are a lot
(01:25):
of lessons to learn here, but first we want to
cover her life in sixty seconds. Welcome, by the way,
Thank you, it's great to be here. Here we go, Okay.
Do you prefer phone calls or text? Text? Probably for efficiency?
Cats or dogs, Big Mac or egg McMuffin. Oh, I'm
gonna go Big Mac Atlanta or New York City Atlanta
(01:48):
because that's where my family is. Cardio or Waits, Cardo,
Milky Way or Snickers, Snickers, Sunrise or Sunsets. What's your
favorite city? I think I'm the say istanbul favorite workout, elliptical,
smartest person you know? Hillary Clinton, childhood hero, Princess Diana,
favorite novel cating the Rye. Okay, historical idol, Mother Teresa
(02:12):
quote to live by never be above doing anything. Here's
one that really placed your strength. Favorite poet? Oh, gosh,
don't have fun? Who would play you in a movie?
I get told that I have the same sort of
smile as Hilary Swank, So let's go there. Teeth smile.
(02:33):
Best live concert ever? Many of them you have provided
me so thank you. I went to the I Heart
Concert in Las Vegas with my son who got to
see Logic, who was his hero, and the opportunity that
you gave my son to meet Logic still brings tears
to my eyes. Okay, let's get started. You sit a
top legendary d dB. Does that rich history of advertising
(02:55):
innovation affect the culture and how you do business today? Well,
of course I think, Um, this is a seventy year
old agency with a storied past, as you point out
with Bill burn Back in the name of our agency,
one of the very forefather, if not the godfather of
the practice of advertising today. So there's a tremendous pressure
in there. There's a tremendous responsibility to live into that past,
(03:19):
and I feel that pressure, but I think that that's
what leadership is. Leadership is both a pressure and a privilege.
So bern Bach, he's the father of modern advertising. What
was it before and what did it become? Well, what
he's best known for is the creation of the art director,
copywriter team, which I think almost every agency today practices
in some form of fashion and certainly as digital has emerged,
(03:40):
now we have digital technologists as part of that. So
the pair has now in many cases become sort of triumphant.
But you know, previous to that, copywriters and art directors
worked independently, and uh, I think he manifested a way
of working. That said, if we believe that sites sound
emotion are the best storytelling out there and the magic
of storytelling very much like this podcast, he believed that
(04:02):
there was picture and imagery in that that needed to
be evoked, as well as spoken word and impact of language,
and so I think that is the force that exists today.
The language he had was amazing, like think, small, clever, memorable.
How do you create that today? And what's the sort
of legacy of that that brings it into today's advertising.
I think we are always with our clients trying to
(04:24):
find the most interesting thing they have to say and
saying in an interesting way, in a way that's not
disruptive and not forceful, but a way that is invited.
Advertising ultimately is an uninvited guests that we have to
become invited. So we have to find something interesting to
say and we have to say it in an interesting way,
and I think then you get deserved attention from people
on Globally, we're spending about two hours and twenty minutes
(04:46):
a day on just social media, just social media, think
about that ten percent of your day. It's not that
people aren't willing to give attention, they are very much,
but it needs to be deserved, It needs to be earned.
We can't just force our agenda and what we want
to say on of people. That has to be some
sort of quid pro quo where consumers enjoy this, they
find it useful, interesting, compelling, share worthy. There's some sort
(05:08):
of value that's created through that content, and that's very
much our focus. How do you get that conversation started?
How do you get people to say this is worthy
of me making part of my life. We spent a
lot of time thinking about that, so probably best to
talk about some examples. Skittles one of our clients. They've
been a long time Super Bowl sponsor. Skittles as a
brand is known for doing things not in a predictable way.
(05:30):
How do you become sort of unpredictable, interesting, share worthy,
compelling for the Skittles audience, which obviously tends to be younger.
Two years ago, we made a Super Bowl spot for
just one kid. One sixteen year old only saw the
Super Bowl I've never seen it. The CMO of Mars
Andrew Clark, he's never seen the spot. I mean we
literally the sixteen year old and the creatives who worked
on it are the ones who saw the spot with
(05:52):
David Swimmer. I mean, that was outrageous, an outlantage, but
it became the sort of phenomenon that Skittles fans and
followers and consumers importantly, people want to eat the candy,
loved and followed. In total, they're like sixty seven thousand
people who watched the kid watched the ad on Facebook
during the Super Bowl and watching absolutely nothing but watching
the kid watch the ad type of thing. So I
(06:13):
mean it's but well, I think it's knowing and understanding
what compels and interest that audience. What we spent a
lot of time when we meet with our clients is
truly leaving into the values that you're brand and company.
And that's so right on Skittles. And there are many
other companies and brands who could have done that and
people have been like, that doesn't make any sense at all,
But for Skittles, it was so right. And then of
course this year, sort of doubling down on that, we
(06:35):
did a live Broadway show, which makes again absolutely no
sense at all and why a candy would do a
live Broadway show. But we had theater critics from all
over New York come and review it, and it was
a proper Broadway show. And the important fact behind both
of these is the skittle sales were up during the
period both years. We don't do this because this is
runaway imagination and creative people just aparrently spending money. This
(06:58):
is about creating brand impact. And at the end of
the day, I feel very comfortable sit here saying I'm
a capitalist. I believe in capitalism. I believe in businesses
making money, and I believe that those businesses intern will
create good in the world. It's very much about creating
impact and sales results for skittles, and doing it in
a way that's interesting and sane in an interesting way.
Going back a little bit on DDB, how do you
(07:19):
get something that creates language that everybody adopts for other usage.
I'm thinking about the Quaker Roads Mikey campaign, where gosh,
that went far beyond Quaker Roads. Suddenly they introduced it
to the world and it took off. Those accidents or
do you plan them or do you feed them? Or
what it is about becoming part of culture? Avia sweet,
try harder is another famous DDB line, Oh yes like
(07:41):
a good name or stay farm is there was written
by our chairman Emeritus, Keith Reinhart and Barry Manila. You
know to all beef, patty special sauce letters, cheese, pickles
on tess me see bun. Wow, I'm impressed I did work.
All those have become transcendent advertising and part of culture.
What people don't want is wrapping paper. They don't want
even near They want to know truly who you are.
(08:04):
More and more of these big companies now you're seeing
them really become very transparent with their values, live their
values in the world, and that propagates through their communications
and advertising. And I think that's the best communications and
advertising we can do. We coach our talent here that
you know, you're somebody's best friend, riding in the empty
seat next to him in the car every day. You
have to expose yourself, and it's really hard to expose yourself.
(08:25):
Most people want to put on a veneer of who
they are. It's very hard for people to do. And
I think brands it's gotta be even harder because you've
got a committee of people talking about it. Let's jump
to Needham, Harper and Steers also part of the background. Yes,
what do you think that brought to d dB and
what's the legacy of that? That was the old craft
General Mills and s O for people who remember for
(08:47):
exam mobile would they put a tiger in your tank?
Which also became a cultural phenomenon. Well, quite literally what
it brought to d dB, it's John Wren because John
Wren came from Needham and Keith Reinhard, who's our chair
and emeritus. So two of the probably more iconic people
in our company actually came via a Needum. There were
three companies that came together to for momnicomm in the
(09:07):
early eighties, so it was a need Um d dB
and you've got a new logo which harks back to
those days. What lessons are you trying to evoke from
the past, because it really, I think is important. As
someone who's worked at A T and T and Coke,
I'm a bit of a legacy girl a Coke. I
spent a tremendous amount of time in the archives because
you know, at a hundred and thirty year old company.
(09:29):
You can find a lot of the answers in the past.
Great brands have a foot in the past and a
foot in their future. I'd never want to forget that
our past doesn't hold all of them answers, certainly, but
it is a tremendous advantage at every juncture. So when
you talk to employees about what makes d dB unique
and what they need to remember about the past, that's
(09:50):
sort of a guiding principle of the agency. What is it? Well,
the gift we have, of course is Bill burn Back,
and that he was one of the magic man. I
mean certainly would be high I think on anyone's list
of the magic people. But he was also the CEO.
This was a time when the creative person actually was
the leader of the company, which is unusual. It's certainly
unusual now I think you've seen us sort of drift
(10:10):
away from the creative people being in the top job.
There are notable exceptions, very successful exceptions. But you know,
you have a suit like me generally in the CEO. Also,
when I talk about this, I want to point out
she's not wearing a right So I do think part
of what I try to compel and remind our team
(10:30):
is that creativity is the most powerful force in business.
We believe that it is the biggest, most important, often
levery that you can pull to propel your business, for
to create a brand, to create impact. Our roots and
our genes not only support that, but evidence that there
are moments in our history I would say in the
not too distant past that we've let go of that
(10:51):
and we need to reclaim it. We're talking some about
great advertising. Back then it was print, radio and TV
and some billboards on the side. Today we have so
many consumer touch points. Just on the TV, we've got
four or five ways to get it. Radio today is
on over our company loans and two fifty platforms, not
(11:12):
just that broadcast radio device anymore. France is sort of
morphed into digital. Everything's interconnected. How does that affect advertising?
I mean, you no longer do the great TV ad
and everything else takes care of itself. How do you
get rid of these silos and pull it all together?
So you're thinking about consumer centric so important? I think
we try to be as much as we can platform
(11:34):
agnostic and have a bias on the idea. If our
bias and our fundamental focus is always on the idea.
It's how the idea comes to life, no matter the platform,
and fighting constantly for the purity of the idea is
really important. From a creative perspective, that's how we would
think about it. We obviously want to understand where the
audience is and reach them really well, and there's an
(11:56):
expectation now that you do anyway. You're not clumsy or
ham fisted. But mass advertising is critical for the brands
that we work on. These are very very big brands,
and that notion of mass reach and mass engagement with
something that's compelling is very important, along with of course
one to one and a lot of the narrower platforms
(12:16):
you can use. But just about every branding company is different.
Like I was actually just with a CMO of a
brand last night for dinner, and he was telling me
radio is his number one platform, is the most effective
for his business. For some of our very large brands,
TV is absolutely critical. Still, um, this CMO last night
was suggesting that he's probably overweighted and digital. I think
there has been a little bit of a rush to
(12:37):
do that, and I think there's a little bit of
crowding now and it's harder and harder to break through.
That's not me suggesting it's bad. It's just meaning we
can't be ever lazy. That's why I resist more than
anything is just taking off a list and saying well,
we did that, we did that, and we did that. Obviously,
I see things more through the audio lens than anything
else these days. But we had someone who ran a
(12:58):
spot in the super Bowl. The commercial on Monday morning
on the radio was talking about the spot in the
super Bowl. So that it begins to tie it together.
Are you seeing that each device, every medium has a
place in it that I want people in social to
be doing this and related to the message, I want
the TV to be doing this, I want the radio
to do this, I want the billboard to do this
because of the ponderance of connection points. Now someone has
(13:21):
obviously got to look over all of that and make
that work. But it was funny if we're old enough
now to all know the term matching luggage. In the
nineties and the early two thousand's, we used to say, well,
let's just make it matching luggage. And I reflect on
that now, I think, gosh, that's so lazy. And that
was the goal. That was our stated goal. If it
all matches, it must all be right. This isn't about
matching luggage, and I think that that is a very
(13:42):
lazy way of doing marketing and advertising. This is about
propagation the kernel, this deep, lovely insight and wonderful discovery
that you stumble upon that you then manifest into some
wonderful story and something that's powerful and compelling and interesting
to people, and it goes out into the world. And
I think what we do now, more than anything, is
(14:02):
just nurture, nurture, nurture. We were doing some internal meetings recently.
Very fortunate that DTB or why was a Network of
the Year at the One Show this year, which was
gradually absolute treat, absolute treat. But reflecting on the work
that did well at the One Show, we talk a
lot internally that so many times at work was dead,
and it's so important to tell people that you don't
(14:24):
just rock up with a we're gonna do you know
what do you think? And the client goes great, unlimited money,
unlimited funds, go to every touch point, it'll be great. No, No,
I mean at every stage there's something. There's a legal issue,
or there's a funding issue, there's a production issue, there's
a timing issue, there's some sort of technology hurdle, there
are constant CEO's husband doesn't like it, the CEO's husband
doesn't like it, or children. Usually it's children, my sixteen
(14:47):
year old you. I think that's the reality of these
great campaigns. I think it's so important to actually unpack
the behind the curtain. And I recently I heard that
Nike and Widen we're unpacking Kaepernick a little bit and
some of the hurdles I had to go through, which
I think is so important for us to share all
this because otherwise we create a full s goal of
how this work gets done. It's really really hard work,
(15:09):
and you've really got to love it, and you've really
got to nurture and protect it and stay with it
every step of the way across these channels. Mark Pritchard,
who I'm a great fan of, you know here he
is a P and G and he really unpacks his
entire media plan and looks at everything afresh. I mean,
how many people do that. Besides, as you pointed out
that he was overspending in digital, which he's publicly said,
(15:30):
and you know, move things around and suddenly you know
he's back in radio. He's back in outdoor in a
major way and has had three record quarters of growth.
Do you think that people are beginning to take a
step back now and relook at things. Does the agency
have to push them to do that? Do you think
the client is pushing the agency to do it? Where
is that process at this point? Well? I think that
(15:53):
the one thing that is true is that every client
and every agency are constantly looking at investment now. In
the days when we'd say matching luggage, we were also
looking at our media plans, probably quarterly, and I remember
the big binder on my desk and I'd open it
up and unwind the pages and look at all the
color strips and then wind it back up and put
it up for a quarter. We're looking at our client's
(16:14):
media investment every day. So much of this is measurable.
There's real time performances, data, there's cultural conversations that are
happening that you didn't anticipate that you then suddenly want
to shift money and get behind and start to fuel
a little bit more So. I think media is seen
as very dynamic now rather than static, which is a
fantastic advantage for us as marketers of TV viewers are
(16:37):
doing another electronic media at the same time, so clearly
not watching everything. How on earth do we deal with
that in a world where it's not so clean anymore. Well,
I think arrogance as a marketer, and I can say
that because I was a client for most of my career.
You have to take that down a notch. It used
to be that marketing and how we all learned in
(16:57):
school and everything else. As you prepared your plans, you
put your plans into the world, You watched your plans,
you measured your plans. Six or eight weeks later, you
had some observations, you made adjustments, and you went forward
with your next plan. It was this sort of very
clinical and clean way of working. It looked good, but
it was very arrogant. Right. It just suggests that suddenly
you know all the answers and that you were going
(17:18):
to put something into the world that everyone's going to
stop and engage with. When I was at Coke, we
did a very sort of back of the Napkin type analysis,
but it helped make a point. We looked at YouTube
and all the content on YouTube and how much of
it we had created versus how much consumers are created.
I want to guess what the answer was created by consumers,
(17:39):
not us was done by Coke. We had put the
content into the world of the content, and conversation happening
around Coke had nothing to do with anyone at Coke.
So your opportunity now, to your point, on multi screen
viewing on very busy consumer lives. The average American you know,
is impacted by six thousand brand impressions daily. With that
(17:59):
sort of vironment, your opportunity is to actually be a
little less arrogant, to come into that conversation, to really
observe and see what could be important, powerful, interesting, compelling
to your target audience, and to become part of it.
Not to try to dominate the community, but to act
as a single member of that community. What could you
add to that, How could you make it better? How
(18:20):
could you be an invited guest instead of an uninvited guest.
And I think as long as you get that mindset right,
and the brands and companies get that mindset right, they
just see themselves as one member of that community trying
to contribute and make that target audiences life better. We
think about ratings, which I've lived with my whole life.
The whle days of the facts of the overnights. When
I was in TV, you still hold your breath hoping
(18:42):
they'll be good. Today we have possibilities of looking at
sales attribution, not attribution to clicks, but actually attribution to
how much do we sell? Is this replace ratings? I mean,
are we going to turn the entire media industry upside down?
I don't think it is a replacement of You know,
we've got more measurement to your title of your cast.
We have more math around us than we've ever ever
(19:02):
had before, and it's in more useful timing than it's
ever been. It's it's less delayed, is less reflective, it's
more progressive, it's more predictive, it's more real time. No
client comes to us and says, I have a data shortage.
We have not heard that yet. Most clients come to say,
is I have data overload? I have so much data
I'm not really sure what to look at and what's compelling.
And we spend a lot of our time actually peeling
(19:25):
away a lot of the layers of things that have
become clouding and confusing, rather than the key and core indicators.
I mean, almost every business, every CEO runs a business
off just a handful of indicators that they know are
very germane to their business, and we need to get
back to that. Every company, every human today is at
(19:46):
risk for fake news, things that aren't true being said
but suddenly catch fire and move as if they're a truth.
How do you think about that as someone who is
working with a company to be the brand steward and
really protect the brand. One of the most important things
that I think business leaders can understand is that the
truth is irrelevant. I think there's anything like the truth
(20:08):
because you have your truth and I have my truth,
and there's a brand and company have to go into
the world understanding it's truth. But it's not a truth
or the truth. I mean, I can remember having meetings
at Coke. I mean they were outraged. What do you
mean that this is the truth? This is what the
product is. It doesn't matter. There is a set of
people who think the product is something different. We have
to operate in a world where as brands and companies,
(20:30):
we have to be willing, again without arrogance, to meet
consumers at their truth and work them back to our truth.
There was a saying that used to be above my desk.
When I was in my early twenties, I was a
radio programmer. Reality is what you perceive it to be.
It seems to be preferred today than ever. Just hold
on a second, because we've got so much more to
talk about. We'll be back after a quick break. Welcome
(20:55):
back to math and magic. We're here with Wendy Clark.
Let's go back in time. Okay, you were born in
the UK. You evidently had a very influential while they
were raised. You came to Florida when you were eleven
at the leave the good old I guess you were
the first brexit and uh, you went to five schools
from the fifth to ninth grade. How do you think
(21:16):
that affected Yeah, you know, the funny thing is, honestly,
it was just not something I had carried with myself.
I think I was in my forties when I realized
that I'd gone to five schools in five years on
two different continents. It was really shaping. I Mean what
I say today is I can walk in any room,
I'm never stranger, I don't have problems making friends. Probably
something like that either breaks you or helps you, And uh,
(21:37):
I'd have a certain amount of self confidence to try
it again every year. My mother would have told you
it's character buildings. Hopefully I'm full of character. You are.
You were a manager at McDonald's at sixteen. Now, how
did that happen? Why do you let a sixteen year
old be a shift manager? Manager? And I do love
telling this story because obviously we do work with the
brand today, and I'm a huge champion of the brand
because you know, one in eight Americans have worked at McDonald's.
(22:00):
Is one of those formative places where you can learn
a lot. And I way before I was on the
agency side and and working with McDonald's, I was a
huge champion of that experience. I mean, it's sixteen years
old to be empowered to run a shift of a
restaurant where you're dealing with customer dissatisfaction, cash management, employee
and subordination, product quality. I mean, just think about everything
(22:22):
that's involved in running a restaurant. And at sixteen years old,
it was really formative to be given that kind of
responsibility and it's sort of created a hunger in me.
I like that responsibility, I like that leadership, I like
that pressure and privilege. McDonald's do that with teenagers around
the world. Routinely giving them these opportunities, and I think
this taste of what business can be and leadership can be.
(22:44):
You could easily have a career at McDonald's starting from
not very much, and I love that they believe in
every kid in America to have that potential after college.
By the way, you were a major in English. You
were quoted as being held bent on being in advertising.
What on earth made you think advertising was the place
to be and how did you make that job? Well?
(23:05):
I wanted to write. You know, when you're an English
major to everyone says, what are you gonna do with that?
You're gonna teach? Right, I was like, I don't want
to teach. So I had to come up with an
answer what I was going to do because everyone kept
asking me what I was going to do, and so
I said, I'm gonna be in advertising. That was the
next best thing I could come up with, was that
I would write advertising. So I got my first job.
I was a receptionist and ad agency, which I actually
like talking about a lot, especially today to be able
(23:26):
to say to our lovely agency that I've done just
about every job in between. But I just wanted to
get my foot in the door, and I thought, if
I get in here, I can prove myself. They'll let
me write something, and they did. I started writing press releases.
Turns out writing wasn't necessarily my forte. You know, when
you get the edit back and the last thing that
you wrote was through all the red lines. The only
thing you wrote was the you know, you realize they've
(23:48):
probably not you should go to the account So I
started leading accounts with fun So a woman owned ad
agency in Atlanta named the Denmark Group, still in business today,
Priscilla Jessop as a founder. You know, when you change jobs,
you do that all email and you put everyone in
blind copy to say you know my new number and
my new this. And I mean how many times I've
(24:09):
done that to Priscilla Jessop over the years. I mean
I've changed jobs a lot. And I can remember when
I sent her the Coke one and I got this
lovely response. It's like, oh, honey, I can't believe you're
running marketing at Coke and used to answer my phone.
I learned so much in a couple of years there.
So you're a receptionist. There has to be some takeaway
from that about treating people unnoticed talent. Yeah, you asked
(24:31):
me my in the sixty second thing, the words I
would live by, which is never be above doing anything,
And that was certainly came from being a reception. So
there were people who looked right past me, look over me.
But I felt quite inconsequential. You know, I'm competitive enough
where that just fueled me. So I was like, all right,
look past me. We'll see if you look past me again.
You wound up at Bell South Singular. You left, you
(24:51):
joined an agency in Austin. You were still in your twenties,
and you turned out to be this manager with a
lot of older reports, the young persons. The boss was
how did you handle that? That was twenty nine when
I went to gsdn M, and I was head of
account service and it was at one point two billion
dollar agency. JFM had Southwest Airlines and air Force and
land Rover and some very big accounts, and so I
(25:13):
came in as head of accounts and yes, I think
just about every one of my direct reports was older
than I was, and I until I got into my forties,
it didn't really start to even out. I have bad
news for you. I'm not at a certain point. You
look around and go, wait a minute, the oldest person
and my mother. I'm very clear at DTV im the mother,
but I mean it didn't face me. I think most
of it is am I adding value, my bringing value.
(25:35):
I think if you're so busy worried about that, you're
not worried about the business. And I think as long
as we were having conversations where I felt like I
was additive and appreciative to what they were doing, helping
them do their jobs better, I don't think they worried
about how you think it affected your management style when
you had to manage people older than you so that
they're not going to give you age respect. I'm sure
(25:55):
it did, but it wasn't conscious if it did. I
don't think anyone gets out of bed any morning and says,
you know, I just want to be average, right. I
don't think anyone gets up and comes to it and goes,
I'm just going to hit it right down the middle today,
I'm not really interested. No people get out of bed
every morning to make the effort to go into the
world to make an impact, to make a difference. They
go to their jobs to get things done. And I
(26:15):
think as long as I can be part of that
formula with people. Then I think it doesn't matter what
my ages, or my gender or anything else. We're part
of making an impact. You know, we got out of
bed and we made a difference today. So you left,
you went to a client SPC, which became A T
and T. You were overseeing a two billion dollar marketing
budget and you were in your thirties. How did you
(26:37):
keep that from going to your head at driving you
crazy here becoming an egomaniac? Or did it not even
face you? Ed Whitaker, who is the CEO, his voices
in my mind often and he just had incredible confidence
in me. What I learned from him was his ability
to make decisions and then no referendums. I can remember
when we were doing the name change at AT and
(26:58):
T to the new A T and T. And you know,
we were in San Antonio and we were going to
do this press announced and everything I said to him
and we all caught him. Mr Whittaker, by the way,
only his very direct reports called the mad. So I said,
Mr Whitaker, we've got to We've got to change to
logos on the outside of the building for the announcement.
You can do the press and everything here. We can't
have the old logo. But there was this real secrecy
about what we had named the company, and he said,
(27:20):
I don't want to I don't want to do that.
I don't want to risk it leaking out. And I felt, really,
you know, strongly about it. And I just sort of said,
these images are going to go around the world in
business media. We've got to have this image, right. And
he looked to me, and you know, you get kind
of one press with him, and he said, all right,
but if it gets out, it's on you. And that
was it. Meeting over cut to these poor sign installers
(27:43):
working under black drapes over the weekend and trying to
do it by the dark of night and everything else.
It did not like at this point in your life.
I think you've got three kids by now. My last
one was born on the day of Department of Justice
approval of the Singular merger, so I should have called
him Singular, but I call him Jake. Let's jump now
to life work balance. You've I know, you've got some
(28:06):
points of view on it, and I want you to
tell us about them. Yeah. You know, for the duration
of my career, people have said to me, you know,
you should just balance your work in life. You should
take extra time and you should do your family stuff.
And that sounds good. There's absolutely no way of getting
to work life balance, and so it just became this
false goal that the more people said it to me,
the angrier I got about it. So my little pivot
on it, and yes, it's word play is work life integration.
(28:29):
And I just believe very progressive companies like I Heart,
like DDB, like others out there, allow you to integrate
your work in your life in a way that works
for you. And what works for me probably doesn't work
for you. But you and I will hold our teams
accountable to getting their jobs done in a way that
they can get their jobs done and also function in
their lives. And as long as you have that, then
(28:50):
I think this work life integration thing can work beautifully.
But don't tell me to balance it because balance isn't
an outcome. It's it's neither a goal nor an outcome.
So let's talk about integration and talk about how you
can seamlessly weave your your life and your work together.
You jumped to Coke, you rose to be the president
of Sparkling, brands and strategy marketing in North America, and
then you took a sabbatical for three months to work
(29:13):
on the Hillary Clinton campaign. What drove you to that?
I was Coke okay without and how did you manage it?
The way I approached Coke about it was like I
was having a fourth child, and I just it's like
a maternity leaf. I'm going to go away and have
another baby. They were great, and honestly, it felt like
something that I felt duty bound to do. I really
couldn't imagine not doing it, and it was very difficult personally.
(29:34):
There were lots of trade offs to doing it. Probably
wasn't a great professional decision at Coke, but I just
felt I didn't want to regret not helping. What important
lesson did you learn for business that you got from
working on a campaign. The things that you learn are
the truth around brands and the attachment that consumers can
(29:54):
have to brands and the emotion that you can create
around that, and those enduring truths of functioning from your
values of having something interesting to say, insane in an
interesting and compelling way to the audience you're trying to reach,
and stripping away the veneer and getting as much as
you can away from the optics of something and getting
(30:14):
to the heart of it. All those things are truths,
whether it's a political campaign, whether it's a brand or
a company. Two thousand sixteen, you moved to d dB
thround North America and then you jumped into your current role.
Contrast that client side from the agency side. How does
it feel? They are different? They're very different. I mean
number one, when I was in meetings, I had to
(30:35):
remember that I wasn't in charge, and you know, you
probably go through a meeting with the client and like, great,
so we're gonna do this, this this and this and this,
and I sort of look at the client go, oh wait,
that's you. Role reversal was a little challenging. I do
think that the number one skill I've learned on the
agency side is resilience. By definition, in an agency, if
you're winning thirty or of the pitches that you're in,
(30:57):
you're doing as well as anyone kind of like the
small do you having a banner year, which by definition
means you're losing more than your winning. And that was
a really hard thing for me to get my mind around.
Clients don't lose, I mean we control the variables and
outcomes to make sure that we don't lose, and so
being on the other side of that and feeling the
sense of sort of loss and people not choosing us
(31:19):
or not picking us really was bruising for a while.
So resilience, I think has been the number one thing
I've learned the last year. Such a strong marketer though,
how hard is it to put something out there that
you know as a marketer is absolutely the right thing,
and someone else says, yeah, it's so hard. It is
so hard. I mean, the number one thing in advertising
(31:39):
with clients his trust. I would imagine it's very similar
in your business. When there's trust in a relationship, it's
the only thing that there's nothing we can't do, there's
nothing we won't experiment and do. And I look at
our highest performing relationships John Lewis in London with Adam
and Eve and the the years of epic work. Let's
come out of that. But there's such a huge basis
of trust with that client now that they go there
with us. That's the piece that you can't shortcut. As
(32:02):
a new CEO, I had to show up again and
again and again and again again before I got that
voice and ability to try and persuade. But I was
willing to and I always will. So let's talk about
the essence of you. Everyone who knows you and everyone
who knows about you and knows you have this very
strong moral compass. You've got this strong commitment to women
in the workplace, both directly at DDB and broader as
(32:25):
an advocate, role model and mentor of others. You've done
mandatory unconscious bias training for d DBS. I think for
all two thousand employees, you've got this great line that
says talent has no gender. Talk a little bit about
where that comes from, what you think that responsibility is,
and how you make that fit in your work and
your family. Thank you for that question. My number one
(32:47):
motivation for it is my own children. So I have
two daughters and a son. They have the same genetic makeup,
they have the same education, They've gone to the same school,
and yet I think they look out into the world
and see different ttunity and potential, different outcomes that are
available to them, and that just doesn't sit well with me.
It doesn't compute. Why would that be the case if
(33:09):
everything they have as I launched them into the world
this is the same. What I want to be able
to say to them is my time spent in business
was made trying to equalize that opportunity to you. That
would be the end of the story if I got
to write it the way i'd like to. I think
there's very much an expectation, and rightly so, that women
will help create a wake around them that lifts others
(33:30):
as they go. I think it's probably stronger expectation on
women than men. Sometimes that feels fair, sometimes that doesn't
feel fair. But regardless of that, I'm happy to take
that on and I'm happy to carry that mantle. I
actually wish that men and women shared that equally because
I think we go faster obviously, but that's okay. And
you know, we've come into d dB. We've changed about
(33:51):
the leaders in North America in the last three years.
There CFO in the US as a woman, or CCO
in New York is a woman. We just install a
new head of New York is a woman. All of
that is in service of great outcomes and creating the
impactful work that will move our client's business. I know
that a diverse and inclusive team will arrive at better
solutions than one that isn't that is absolutely proven. Let
(34:13):
me ask you about one other kind of diversity, young people.
Do you make it a point to try and get
a lot of young voices into the organization? Advertising is
a bit of a quote young People's Business. Was jokingly
calling myself mom earlier, but I really am mom. It's
probably last year's number. But I think we're sixty millennial.
(34:34):
So we are a young business, which I love. I
do think though, making sure that we've got those voices
trickling through and shaping the agenda of the company. And
so we're gonna actually expand what we define as our
leadership team to include much more diverse and inclusive set
of voices. It allows those young people and young voices
to shape the direction of our business, which is what
(34:54):
they want to and by the way, it's what our
clients want to. Media and advertising has gone through years
of change. One of the big things that people talk
about are the silos, you know, the advertising a sort
of built silos with media and creative and then we
had radio and TV. And what are you doing to
get rid of the silos and what are you replacing
them with? Any client that comes to us once three things.
(35:15):
They want speed, efficiency, and you know, great work. Silos
just slow you down on at least two of those,
and ultimately that can impact the third. We've had to
move away from running our company. I was to talk
about it vertically. So we were running in verticals and
run to a horizontal now and put best place talent
on best placed opportunity in real time, which is hard
(35:37):
for a company that is spread out, hard for a
company that has contracts that are based on hourly commitments.
So there's a lot of having to evolve the structure
and the infrastructure of our company to do it. But
our talent wants to do at number one. They love
the opportunity on work on different things, and that's important
and it gets to greater outcome. So I talked about
T shaped a lot. I think a lot of people
(35:59):
in our company have a deep vertical expertise. They might
be a radio copywriter that they're really great at, but
they also have a horizontal potential to tap into a
team and do something much more broad than their vertical
And so we really are working in sort of that
T shape brand. Now, if you were some young person
that was held bent on getting into advertising, my advice,
(36:21):
He sort of stays with what it is, which is
just never be above doing anything. I think that work
ethic has served me and continues to serve me well.
My least favorite word is entitlement. I think entitled people
just stymy themselves. I did work incredibly hard. I always
try to add that to the story. I was very lucky,
but I made some trade offs and I worked very,
(36:42):
very hard. But if you're willing to work hard, and
you're willing to come into it with an openness and
not be above doing anything that someone asks you, and
put yourself into it fully, I think you can create
a career and an outcome for yourself that you'll be
really both satisfied and rewarded by and and happy about.
Let's wrap up the way we always do this is
(37:03):
about math and magic. Who's the greatest mathematician? You know,
that person who just knows the math side of marketing
so well that it blows your mind. My mind goes
to a couple of lesbianett at our own agency, which
is a little bit self annointing, But he uh is
an econometrician for us at Adam and Eve. He's published,
He's done a lot of work with I p A
and his his evidence is what we function off. He
(37:24):
wrote a paper called Along and the Short of It,
and if you haven't read it, it is an incredibly
instructive piece of work. So les would be on there.
Aaron Matt's who's at Hearts and Science? Now, who wasn't analyct?
I mean, she's brilliant, She's incredible at Scott Haggard, Orn
Terry Young. Those are some of the people that jumped
through my mind. The greatest of all time is a
very hard one, but those are some of the current
(37:46):
day people call Hall of Fame greatest magicians. Magician. Yeah,
I know it sounds unsurprising. I would have to say
Bill burn Back. It would be surprising if you'd be surprising.
I think it would be shocking if I didn't. And
his contemporaries. I think we are all still as an industry,
very inspired by the Ogilvy's and the Burnetts, and the J.
Walter Thompson's and the which is what makes me a
(38:08):
little sad that some of their names are disappearing, because
I think that they are still legends. I'm not sure
we have the next generation. There are some very legendary
people in our industry at the moment, and I'm sure
future generations will reflect on them the way we reflect
on burned Back and the other spent. He has to
be up there, Thank you, thank you. Here's a couple
of things that take away from our discussion with Wendy Clark. One,
(38:31):
Wendy knows advertising is an uninvited guest, so she works
doubly hard to ensure the consumer finds value in the messaging. Two,
whether it's skittles, Broadway musical where people are screaming the music,
or a tagline about Mikey liking it. For Wendy, the
goal of great ad work isn't just brand left, but
(38:51):
to truly make the brand part of the culture. Three.
Wendy's mantra is never be above anything or LEA favorite
word is entitled, because people who feel entitled were just
stymy their opportunities. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's
(39:12):
it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to
Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This
show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue
Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is
no small feat Nikki Etre for pulling research bill plaques
and Michael Asar for their recording health our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
(39:35):
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. No client comes to us and says, I
have a data shortage. We have not heard that yet.
Most clients come to say, is I have data overload.
I had so much data. I'm not really sure what
to look at what's compelling. And we spend a lot
of our time actually peeling away a lot of the
(00:22):
layers of things that have become clouding and confusing. Welcome
to Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing.
I'm Bob Pittman, and our guests on this episode is
Wendy Clark, Global President, CEO of the legendary ad giant
(00:44):
d dB, a part of the Omnicom family. Wendy's story
sounds part business textbook and part how to succeed manual.
Born in the UK, came to the US at age eleven,
moved around schools a lot, and had early signs of
leadership as a shift manager McDonald's at age sixteen and
(01:05):
English major in college with a weakness in poetry, and
rose from her receptionist at an agency to where she
is today through stops at A T and T, Coca
Cola and Moore and Hillary Clinton too. She's been a
major force for equality in the workplace and has a
unique take on life work balance. There are a lot
(01:25):
of lessons to learn here, but first we want to
cover her life in sixty seconds. Welcome, by the way,
Thank you, it's great to be here. Here we go, Okay.
Do you prefer phone calls or text? Text? Probably for efficiency?
Cats or dogs, Big Mac or egg McMuffin. Oh, I'm
gonna go Big Mac Atlanta or New York City Atlanta
(01:48):
because that's where my family is. Cardio or Waits, Cardo,
Milky Way or Snickers, Snickers, Sunrise or Sunsets. What's your
favorite city? I think I'm the say istanbul favorite workout, elliptical,
smartest person you know? Hillary Clinton, childhood hero, Princess Diana,
favorite novel cating the Rye. Okay, historical idol, Mother Teresa
(02:12):
quote to live by never be above doing anything. Here's
one that really placed your strength. Favorite poet? Oh, gosh,
don't have fun? Who would play you in a movie?
I get told that I have the same sort of
smile as Hilary Swank, So let's go there. Teeth smile.
(02:33):
Best live concert ever? Many of them you have provided
me so thank you. I went to the I Heart
Concert in Las Vegas with my son who got to
see Logic, who was his hero, and the opportunity that
you gave my son to meet Logic still brings tears
to my eyes. Okay, let's get started. You sit a
top legendary d dB. Does that rich history of advertising
(02:55):
innovation affect the culture and how you do business today? Well,
of course I think, Um, this is a seventy year
old agency with a storied past, as you point out
with Bill burn Back in the name of our agency,
one of the very forefather, if not the godfather of
the practice of advertising today. So there's a tremendous pressure
in there. There's a tremendous responsibility to live into that past,
(03:19):
and I feel that pressure, but I think that that's
what leadership is. Leadership is both a pressure and a privilege.
So bern Bach, he's the father of modern advertising. What
was it before and what did it become? Well, what
he's best known for is the creation of the art director,
copywriter team, which I think almost every agency today practices
in some form of fashion and certainly as digital has emerged,
(03:40):
now we have digital technologists as part of that. So
the pair has now in many cases become sort of triumphant.
But you know, previous to that, copywriters and art directors
worked independently, and uh, I think he manifested a way
of working. That said, if we believe that sites sound
emotion are the best storytelling out there and the magic
of storytelling very much like this podcast, he believed that
(04:02):
there was picture and imagery in that that needed to
be evoked, as well as spoken word and impact of language,
and so I think that is the force that exists today.
The language he had was amazing, like think, small, clever, memorable.
How do you create that today? And what's the sort
of legacy of that that brings it into today's advertising.
I think we are always with our clients trying to
(04:24):
find the most interesting thing they have to say and
saying in an interesting way, in a way that's not
disruptive and not forceful, but a way that is invited.
Advertising ultimately is an uninvited guests that we have to
become invited. So we have to find something interesting to
say and we have to say it in an interesting way,
and I think then you get deserved attention from people
on Globally, we're spending about two hours and twenty minutes
(04:46):
a day on just social media, just social media, think
about that ten percent of your day. It's not that
people aren't willing to give attention, they are very much,
but it needs to be deserved, It needs to be earned.
We can't just force our agenda and what we want
to say on of people. That has to be some
sort of quid pro quo where consumers enjoy this, they
find it useful, interesting, compelling, share worthy. There's some sort
(05:08):
of value that's created through that content, and that's very
much our focus. How do you get that conversation started?
How do you get people to say this is worthy
of me making part of my life. We spent a
lot of time thinking about that, so probably best to
talk about some examples. Skittles one of our clients. They've
been a long time Super Bowl sponsor. Skittles as a
brand is known for doing things not in a predictable way.
(05:30):
How do you become sort of unpredictable, interesting, share worthy,
compelling for the Skittles audience, which obviously tends to be younger.
Two years ago, we made a Super Bowl spot for
just one kid. One sixteen year old only saw the
Super Bowl I've never seen it. The CMO of Mars
Andrew Clark, he's never seen the spot. I mean we
literally the sixteen year old and the creatives who worked
on it are the ones who saw the spot with
(05:52):
David Swimmer. I mean, that was outrageous, an outlantage, but
it became the sort of phenomenon that Skittles fans and
followers and consumers importantly, people want to eat the candy,
loved and followed. In total, they're like sixty seven thousand
people who watched the kid watched the ad on Facebook
during the Super Bowl and watching absolutely nothing but watching
the kid watch the ad type of thing. So I
(06:13):
mean it's but well, I think it's knowing and understanding
what compels and interest that audience. What we spent a
lot of time when we meet with our clients is
truly leaving into the values that you're brand and company.
And that's so right on Skittles. And there are many
other companies and brands who could have done that and
people have been like, that doesn't make any sense at all,
But for Skittles, it was so right. And then of
course this year, sort of doubling down on that, we
(06:35):
did a live Broadway show, which makes again absolutely no
sense at all and why a candy would do a
live Broadway show. But we had theater critics from all
over New York come and review it, and it was
a proper Broadway show. And the important fact behind both
of these is the skittle sales were up during the
period both years. We don't do this because this is
runaway imagination and creative people just aparrently spending money. This
(06:58):
is about creating brand impact. And at the end of
the day, I feel very comfortable sit here saying I'm
a capitalist. I believe in capitalism. I believe in businesses
making money, and I believe that those businesses intern will
create good in the world. It's very much about creating
impact and sales results for skittles, and doing it in
a way that's interesting and sane in an interesting way.
Going back a little bit on DDB, how do you
(07:19):
get something that creates language that everybody adopts for other usage.
I'm thinking about the Quaker Roads Mikey campaign, where gosh,
that went far beyond Quaker Roads. Suddenly they introduced it
to the world and it took off. Those accidents or
do you plan them or do you feed them? Or
what it is about becoming part of culture? Avia sweet,
try harder is another famous DDB line, Oh yes like
(07:41):
a good name or stay farm is there was written
by our chairman Emeritus, Keith Reinhart and Barry Manila. You
know to all beef, patty special sauce letters, cheese, pickles
on tess me see bun. Wow, I'm impressed I did work.
All those have become transcendent advertising and part of culture.
What people don't want is wrapping paper. They don't want
even near They want to know truly who you are.
(08:04):
More and more of these big companies now you're seeing
them really become very transparent with their values, live their
values in the world, and that propagates through their communications
and advertising. And I think that's the best communications and
advertising we can do. We coach our talent here that
you know, you're somebody's best friend, riding in the empty
seat next to him in the car every day. You
have to expose yourself, and it's really hard to expose yourself.
(08:25):
Most people want to put on a veneer of who
they are. It's very hard for people to do. And
I think brands it's gotta be even harder because you've
got a committee of people talking about it. Let's jump
to Needham, Harper and Steers also part of the background. Yes,
what do you think that brought to d dB and
what's the legacy of that? That was the old craft
General Mills and s O for people who remember for
(08:47):
exam mobile would they put a tiger in your tank?
Which also became a cultural phenomenon. Well, quite literally what
it brought to d dB, it's John Wren because John
Wren came from Needham and Keith Reinhard, who's our chair
and emeritus. So two of the probably more iconic people
in our company actually came via a Needum. There were
three companies that came together to for momnicomm in the
(09:07):
early eighties, so it was a need Um d dB
and you've got a new logo which harks back to
those days. What lessons are you trying to evoke from
the past, because it really, I think is important. As
someone who's worked at A T and T and Coke,
I'm a bit of a legacy girl a Coke. I
spent a tremendous amount of time in the archives because
you know, at a hundred and thirty year old company.
(09:29):
You can find a lot of the answers in the past.
Great brands have a foot in the past and a
foot in their future. I'd never want to forget that
our past doesn't hold all of them answers, certainly, but
it is a tremendous advantage at every juncture. So when
you talk to employees about what makes d dB unique
and what they need to remember about the past, that's
(09:50):
sort of a guiding principle of the agency. What is it? Well,
the gift we have, of course is Bill burn Back,
and that he was one of the magic man. I
mean certainly would be high I think on anyone's list
of the magic people. But he was also the CEO.
This was a time when the creative person actually was
the leader of the company, which is unusual. It's certainly
unusual now I think you've seen us sort of drift
(10:10):
away from the creative people being in the top job.
There are notable exceptions, very successful exceptions. But you know,
you have a suit like me generally in the CEO. Also,
when I talk about this, I want to point out
she's not wearing a right So I do think part
of what I try to compel and remind our team
(10:30):
is that creativity is the most powerful force in business.
We believe that it is the biggest, most important, often
levery that you can pull to propel your business, for
to create a brand, to create impact. Our roots and
our genes not only support that, but evidence that there
are moments in our history I would say in the
not too distant past that we've let go of that
(10:51):
and we need to reclaim it. We're talking some about
great advertising. Back then it was print, radio and TV
and some billboards on the side. Today we have so
many consumer touch points. Just on the TV, we've got
four or five ways to get it. Radio today is
on over our company loans and two fifty platforms, not
(11:12):
just that broadcast radio device anymore. France is sort of
morphed into digital. Everything's interconnected. How does that affect advertising?
I mean, you no longer do the great TV ad
and everything else takes care of itself. How do you
get rid of these silos and pull it all together?
So you're thinking about consumer centric so important? I think
we try to be as much as we can platform
(11:34):
agnostic and have a bias on the idea. If our
bias and our fundamental focus is always on the idea.
It's how the idea comes to life, no matter the platform,
and fighting constantly for the purity of the idea is
really important. From a creative perspective, that's how we would
think about it. We obviously want to understand where the
audience is and reach them really well, and there's an
(11:56):
expectation now that you do anyway. You're not clumsy or
ham fisted. But mass advertising is critical for the brands
that we work on. These are very very big brands,
and that notion of mass reach and mass engagement with
something that's compelling is very important, along with of course
one to one and a lot of the narrower platforms
(12:16):
you can use. But just about every branding company is different.
Like I was actually just with a CMO of a
brand last night for dinner, and he was telling me
radio is his number one platform, is the most effective
for his business. For some of our very large brands,
TV is absolutely critical. Still, um, this CMO last night
was suggesting that he's probably overweighted and digital. I think
there has been a little bit of a rush to
(12:37):
do that, and I think there's a little bit of
crowding now and it's harder and harder to break through.
That's not me suggesting it's bad. It's just meaning we
can't be ever lazy. That's why I resist more than
anything is just taking off a list and saying well,
we did that, we did that, and we did that. Obviously,
I see things more through the audio lens than anything
else these days. But we had someone who ran a
(12:58):
spot in the super Bowl. The commercial on Monday morning
on the radio was talking about the spot in the
super Bowl. So that it begins to tie it together.
Are you seeing that each device, every medium has a
place in it that I want people in social to
be doing this and related to the message, I want
the TV to be doing this, I want the radio
to do this, I want the billboard to do this
because of the ponderance of connection points. Now someone has
(13:21):
obviously got to look over all of that and make
that work. But it was funny if we're old enough
now to all know the term matching luggage. In the
nineties and the early two thousand's, we used to say, well,
let's just make it matching luggage. And I reflect on
that now, I think, gosh, that's so lazy. And that
was the goal. That was our stated goal. If it
all matches, it must all be right. This isn't about
matching luggage, and I think that that is a very
(13:42):
lazy way of doing marketing and advertising. This is about
propagation the kernel, this deep, lovely insight and wonderful discovery
that you stumble upon that you then manifest into some
wonderful story and something that's powerful and compelling and interesting
to people, and it goes out into the world. And
I think what we do now, more than anything, is
(14:02):
just nurture, nurture, nurture. We were doing some internal meetings recently.
Very fortunate that DTB or why was a Network of
the Year at the One Show this year, which was
gradually absolute treat, absolute treat. But reflecting on the work
that did well at the One Show, we talk a
lot internally that so many times at work was dead,
and it's so important to tell people that you don't
(14:24):
just rock up with a we're gonna do you know
what do you think? And the client goes great, unlimited money,
unlimited funds, go to every touch point, it'll be great. No, No,
I mean at every stage there's something. There's a legal issue,
or there's a funding issue, there's a production issue, there's
a timing issue, there's some sort of technology hurdle, there
are constant CEO's husband doesn't like it, the CEO's husband
doesn't like it, or children. Usually it's children, my sixteen
(14:47):
year old you. I think that's the reality of these
great campaigns. I think it's so important to actually unpack
the behind the curtain. And I recently I heard that
Nike and Widen we're unpacking Kaepernick a little bit and
some of the hurdles I had to go through, which
I think is so important for us to share all
this because otherwise we create a full s goal of
how this work gets done. It's really really hard work,
(15:09):
and you've really got to love it, and you've really
got to nurture and protect it and stay with it
every step of the way across these channels. Mark Pritchard,
who I'm a great fan of, you know here he
is a P and G and he really unpacks his
entire media plan and looks at everything afresh. I mean,
how many people do that. Besides, as you pointed out
that he was overspending in digital, which he's publicly said,
(15:30):
and you know, move things around and suddenly you know
he's back in radio. He's back in outdoor in a
major way and has had three record quarters of growth.
Do you think that people are beginning to take a
step back now and relook at things. Does the agency
have to push them to do that? Do you think
the client is pushing the agency to do it? Where
is that process at this point? Well? I think that
(15:53):
the one thing that is true is that every client
and every agency are constantly looking at investment now. In
the days when we'd say matching luggage, we were also
looking at our media plans, probably quarterly, and I remember
the big binder on my desk and I'd open it
up and unwind the pages and look at all the
color strips and then wind it back up and put
it up for a quarter. We're looking at our client's
(16:14):
media investment every day. So much of this is measurable.
There's real time performances, data, there's cultural conversations that are
happening that you didn't anticipate that you then suddenly want
to shift money and get behind and start to fuel
a little bit more So. I think media is seen
as very dynamic now rather than static, which is a
fantastic advantage for us as marketers of TV viewers are
(16:37):
doing another electronic media at the same time, so clearly
not watching everything. How on earth do we deal with
that in a world where it's not so clean anymore. Well,
I think arrogance as a marketer, and I can say
that because I was a client for most of my career.
You have to take that down a notch. It used
to be that marketing and how we all learned in
(16:57):
school and everything else. As you prepared your plans, you
put your plans into the world, You watched your plans,
you measured your plans. Six or eight weeks later, you
had some observations, you made adjustments, and you went forward
with your next plan. It was this sort of very
clinical and clean way of working. It looked good, but
it was very arrogant. Right. It just suggests that suddenly
you know all the answers and that you were going
(17:18):
to put something into the world that everyone's going to
stop and engage with. When I was at Coke, we
did a very sort of back of the Napkin type analysis,
but it helped make a point. We looked at YouTube
and all the content on YouTube and how much of
it we had created versus how much consumers are created.
I want to guess what the answer was created by consumers,
(17:39):
not us was done by Coke. We had put the
content into the world of the content, and conversation happening
around Coke had nothing to do with anyone at Coke.
So your opportunity now, to your point, on multi screen
viewing on very busy consumer lives. The average American you know,
is impacted by six thousand brand impressions daily. With that
(17:59):
sort of vironment, your opportunity is to actually be a
little less arrogant, to come into that conversation, to really
observe and see what could be important, powerful, interesting, compelling
to your target audience, and to become part of it.
Not to try to dominate the community, but to act
as a single member of that community. What could you
add to that, How could you make it better? How
(18:20):
could you be an invited guest instead of an uninvited guest.
And I think as long as you get that mindset right,
and the brands and companies get that mindset right, they
just see themselves as one member of that community trying
to contribute and make that target audiences life better. We
think about ratings, which I've lived with my whole life.
The whle days of the facts of the overnights. When
I was in TV, you still hold your breath hoping
(18:42):
they'll be good. Today we have possibilities of looking at
sales attribution, not attribution to clicks, but actually attribution to
how much do we sell? Is this replace ratings? I mean,
are we going to turn the entire media industry upside down?
I don't think it is a replacement of You know,
we've got more measurement to your title of your cast.
We have more math around us than we've ever ever
(19:02):
had before, and it's in more useful timing than it's
ever been. It's it's less delayed, is less reflective, it's
more progressive, it's more predictive, it's more real time. No
client comes to us and says, I have a data shortage.
We have not heard that yet. Most clients come to say,
is I have data overload? I have so much data
I'm not really sure what to look at and what's compelling.
And we spend a lot of our time actually peeling
(19:25):
away a lot of the layers of things that have
become clouding and confusing, rather than the key and core indicators.
I mean, almost every business, every CEO runs a business
off just a handful of indicators that they know are
very germane to their business, and we need to get
back to that. Every company, every human today is at
(19:46):
risk for fake news, things that aren't true being said
but suddenly catch fire and move as if they're a truth.
How do you think about that as someone who is
working with a company to be the brand steward and
really protect the brand. One of the most important things
that I think business leaders can understand is that the
truth is irrelevant. I think there's anything like the truth
(20:08):
because you have your truth and I have my truth,
and there's a brand and company have to go into
the world understanding it's truth. But it's not a truth
or the truth. I mean, I can remember having meetings
at Coke. I mean they were outraged. What do you
mean that this is the truth? This is what the
product is. It doesn't matter. There is a set of
people who think the product is something different. We have
to operate in a world where as brands and companies,
(20:30):
we have to be willing, again without arrogance, to meet
consumers at their truth and work them back to our truth.
There was a saying that used to be above my desk.
When I was in my early twenties, I was a
radio programmer. Reality is what you perceive it to be.
It seems to be preferred today than ever. Just hold
on a second, because we've got so much more to
talk about. We'll be back after a quick break. Welcome
(20:55):
back to math and magic. We're here with Wendy Clark.
Let's go back in time. Okay, you were born in
the UK. You evidently had a very influential while they
were raised. You came to Florida when you were eleven
at the leave the good old I guess you were
the first brexit and uh, you went to five schools
from the fifth to ninth grade. How do you think
(21:16):
that affected Yeah, you know, the funny thing is, honestly,
it was just not something I had carried with myself.
I think I was in my forties when I realized
that I'd gone to five schools in five years on
two different continents. It was really shaping. I Mean what
I say today is I can walk in any room,
I'm never stranger, I don't have problems making friends. Probably
something like that either breaks you or helps you, And uh,
(21:37):
I'd have a certain amount of self confidence to try
it again every year. My mother would have told you
it's character buildings. Hopefully I'm full of character. You are.
You were a manager at McDonald's at sixteen. Now, how
did that happen? Why do you let a sixteen year
old be a shift manager? Manager? And I do love
telling this story because obviously we do work with the
brand today, and I'm a huge champion of the brand
because you know, one in eight Americans have worked at McDonald's.
(22:00):
Is one of those formative places where you can learn
a lot. And I way before I was on the
agency side and and working with McDonald's, I was a
huge champion of that experience. I mean, it's sixteen years
old to be empowered to run a shift of a
restaurant where you're dealing with customer dissatisfaction, cash management, employee
and subordination, product quality. I mean, just think about everything
(22:22):
that's involved in running a restaurant. And at sixteen years old,
it was really formative to be given that kind of
responsibility and it's sort of created a hunger in me.
I like that responsibility, I like that leadership, I like
that pressure and privilege. McDonald's do that with teenagers around
the world. Routinely giving them these opportunities, and I think
this taste of what business can be and leadership can be.
(22:44):
You could easily have a career at McDonald's starting from
not very much, and I love that they believe in
every kid in America to have that potential after college.
By the way, you were a major in English. You
were quoted as being held bent on being in advertising.
What on earth made you think advertising was the place
to be and how did you make that job? Well?
(23:05):
I wanted to write. You know, when you're an English
major to everyone says, what are you gonna do with that?
You're gonna teach? Right, I was like, I don't want
to teach. So I had to come up with an
answer what I was going to do because everyone kept
asking me what I was going to do, and so
I said, I'm gonna be in advertising. That was the
next best thing I could come up with, was that
I would write advertising. So I got my first job.
I was a receptionist and ad agency, which I actually
like talking about a lot, especially today to be able
(23:26):
to say to our lovely agency that I've done just
about every job in between. But I just wanted to
get my foot in the door, and I thought, if
I get in here, I can prove myself. They'll let
me write something, and they did. I started writing press releases.
Turns out writing wasn't necessarily my forte. You know, when
you get the edit back and the last thing that
you wrote was through all the red lines. The only
thing you wrote was the you know, you realize they've
(23:48):
probably not you should go to the account So I
started leading accounts with fun So a woman owned ad
agency in Atlanta named the Denmark Group, still in business today,
Priscilla Jessop as a founder. You know, when you change jobs,
you do that all email and you put everyone in
blind copy to say you know my new number and
my new this. And I mean how many times I've
(24:09):
done that to Priscilla Jessop over the years. I mean
I've changed jobs a lot. And I can remember when
I sent her the Coke one and I got this
lovely response. It's like, oh, honey, I can't believe you're
running marketing at Coke and used to answer my phone.
I learned so much in a couple of years there.
So you're a receptionist. There has to be some takeaway
from that about treating people unnoticed talent. Yeah, you asked
(24:31):
me my in the sixty second thing, the words I
would live by, which is never be above doing anything,
And that was certainly came from being a reception. So
there were people who looked right past me, look over me.
But I felt quite inconsequential. You know, I'm competitive enough
where that just fueled me. So I was like, all right,
look past me. We'll see if you look past me again.
You wound up at Bell South Singular. You left, you
(24:51):
joined an agency in Austin. You were still in your twenties,
and you turned out to be this manager with a
lot of older reports, the young persons. The boss was
how did you handle that? That was twenty nine when
I went to gsdn M, and I was head of
account service and it was at one point two billion
dollar agency. JFM had Southwest Airlines and air Force and
land Rover and some very big accounts, and so I
(25:13):
came in as head of accounts and yes, I think
just about every one of my direct reports was older
than I was, and I until I got into my forties,
it didn't really start to even out. I have bad
news for you. I'm not at a certain point. You
look around and go, wait a minute, the oldest person
and my mother. I'm very clear at DTV im the mother,
but I mean it didn't face me. I think most
of it is am I adding value, my bringing value.
(25:35):
I think if you're so busy worried about that, you're
not worried about the business. And I think as long
as we were having conversations where I felt like I
was additive and appreciative to what they were doing, helping
them do their jobs better, I don't think they worried
about how you think it affected your management style when
you had to manage people older than you so that
they're not going to give you age respect. I'm sure
(25:55):
it did, but it wasn't conscious if it did. I
don't think anyone gets out of bed any morning and says,
you know, I just want to be average, right. I
don't think anyone gets up and comes to it and goes,
I'm just going to hit it right down the middle today,
I'm not really interested. No people get out of bed
every morning to make the effort to go into the
world to make an impact, to make a difference. They
go to their jobs to get things done. And I
(26:15):
think as long as I can be part of that
formula with people. Then I think it doesn't matter what
my ages, or my gender or anything else. We're part
of making an impact. You know, we got out of
bed and we made a difference today. So you left,
you went to a client SPC, which became A T
and T. You were overseeing a two billion dollar marketing
budget and you were in your thirties. How did you
(26:37):
keep that from going to your head at driving you
crazy here becoming an egomaniac? Or did it not even
face you? Ed Whitaker, who is the CEO, his voices
in my mind often and he just had incredible confidence
in me. What I learned from him was his ability
to make decisions and then no referendums. I can remember
when we were doing the name change at AT and
(26:58):
T to the new A T and T. And you know,
we were in San Antonio and we were going to
do this press announced and everything I said to him
and we all caught him. Mr Whittaker, by the way,
only his very direct reports called the mad. So I said,
Mr Whitaker, we've got to We've got to change to
logos on the outside of the building for the announcement.
You can do the press and everything here. We can't
have the old logo. But there was this real secrecy
about what we had named the company, and he said,
(27:20):
I don't want to I don't want to do that.
I don't want to risk it leaking out. And I felt, really,
you know, strongly about it. And I just sort of said,
these images are going to go around the world in
business media. We've got to have this image, right. And
he looked to me, and you know, you get kind
of one press with him, and he said, all right,
but if it gets out, it's on you. And that
was it. Meeting over cut to these poor sign installers
(27:43):
working under black drapes over the weekend and trying to
do it by the dark of night and everything else.
It did not like at this point in your life.
I think you've got three kids by now. My last
one was born on the day of Department of Justice
approval of the Singular merger, so I should have called
him Singular, but I call him Jake. Let's jump now
to life work balance. You've I know, you've got some
(28:06):
points of view on it, and I want you to
tell us about them. Yeah. You know, for the duration
of my career, people have said to me, you know,
you should just balance your work in life. You should
take extra time and you should do your family stuff.
And that sounds good. There's absolutely no way of getting
to work life balance, and so it just became this
false goal that the more people said it to me,
the angrier I got about it. So my little pivot
on it, and yes, it's word play is work life integration.
(28:29):
And I just believe very progressive companies like I Heart,
like DDB, like others out there, allow you to integrate
your work in your life in a way that works
for you. And what works for me probably doesn't work
for you. But you and I will hold our teams
accountable to getting their jobs done in a way that
they can get their jobs done and also function in
their lives. And as long as you have that, then
(28:50):
I think this work life integration thing can work beautifully.
But don't tell me to balance it because balance isn't
an outcome. It's it's neither a goal nor an outcome.
So let's talk about integration and talk about how you
can seamlessly weave your your life and your work together.
You jumped to Coke, you rose to be the president
of Sparkling, brands and strategy marketing in North America, and
then you took a sabbatical for three months to work
(29:13):
on the Hillary Clinton campaign. What drove you to that?
I was Coke okay without and how did you manage it?
The way I approached Coke about it was like I
was having a fourth child, and I just it's like
a maternity leaf. I'm going to go away and have
another baby. They were great, and honestly, it felt like
something that I felt duty bound to do. I really
couldn't imagine not doing it, and it was very difficult personally.
(29:34):
There were lots of trade offs to doing it. Probably
wasn't a great professional decision at Coke, but I just
felt I didn't want to regret not helping. What important
lesson did you learn for business that you got from
working on a campaign. The things that you learn are
the truth around brands and the attachment that consumers can
(29:54):
have to brands and the emotion that you can create
around that, and those enduring truths of functioning from your
values of having something interesting to say, insane in an
interesting and compelling way to the audience you're trying to reach,
and stripping away the veneer and getting as much as
you can away from the optics of something and getting
(30:14):
to the heart of it. All those things are truths,
whether it's a political campaign, whether it's a brand or
a company. Two thousand sixteen, you moved to d dB
thround North America and then you jumped into your current role.
Contrast that client side from the agency side. How does
it feel? They are different? They're very different. I mean
number one, when I was in meetings, I had to
(30:35):
remember that I wasn't in charge, and you know, you
probably go through a meeting with the client and like, great,
so we're gonna do this, this this and this and this,
and I sort of look at the client go, oh wait,
that's you. Role reversal was a little challenging. I do
think that the number one skill I've learned on the
agency side is resilience. By definition, in an agency, if
you're winning thirty or of the pitches that you're in,
(30:57):
you're doing as well as anyone kind of like the
small do you having a banner year, which by definition
means you're losing more than your winning. And that was
a really hard thing for me to get my mind around.
Clients don't lose, I mean we control the variables and
outcomes to make sure that we don't lose, and so
being on the other side of that and feeling the
sense of sort of loss and people not choosing us
(31:19):
or not picking us really was bruising for a while.
So resilience, I think has been the number one thing
I've learned the last year. Such a strong marketer though,
how hard is it to put something out there that
you know as a marketer is absolutely the right thing,
and someone else says, yeah, it's so hard. It is
so hard. I mean, the number one thing in advertising
(31:39):
with clients his trust. I would imagine it's very similar
in your business. When there's trust in a relationship, it's
the only thing that there's nothing we can't do, there's
nothing we won't experiment and do. And I look at
our highest performing relationships John Lewis in London with Adam
and Eve and the the years of epic work. Let's
come out of that. But there's such a huge basis
of trust with that client now that they go there
with us. That's the piece that you can't shortcut. As
(32:02):
a new CEO, I had to show up again and
again and again and again again before I got that
voice and ability to try and persuade. But I was
willing to and I always will. So let's talk about
the essence of you. Everyone who knows you and everyone
who knows about you and knows you have this very
strong moral compass. You've got this strong commitment to women
in the workplace, both directly at DDB and broader as
(32:25):
an advocate, role model and mentor of others. You've done
mandatory unconscious bias training for d DBS. I think for
all two thousand employees, you've got this great line that
says talent has no gender. Talk a little bit about
where that comes from, what you think that responsibility is,
and how you make that fit in your work and
your family. Thank you for that question. My number one
(32:47):
motivation for it is my own children. So I have
two daughters and a son. They have the same genetic makeup,
they have the same education, They've gone to the same school,
and yet I think they look out into the world
and see different ttunity and potential, different outcomes that are
available to them, and that just doesn't sit well with me.
It doesn't compute. Why would that be the case if
(33:09):
everything they have as I launched them into the world
this is the same. What I want to be able
to say to them is my time spent in business
was made trying to equalize that opportunity to you. That
would be the end of the story if I got
to write it the way i'd like to. I think
there's very much an expectation, and rightly so, that women
will help create a wake around them that lifts others
(33:30):
as they go. I think it's probably stronger expectation on
women than men. Sometimes that feels fair, sometimes that doesn't
feel fair. But regardless of that, I'm happy to take
that on and I'm happy to carry that mantle. I
actually wish that men and women shared that equally because
I think we go faster obviously, but that's okay. And
you know, we've come into d dB. We've changed about
(33:51):
the leaders in North America in the last three years.
There CFO in the US as a woman, or CCO
in New York is a woman. We just install a
new head of New York is a woman. All of
that is in service of great outcomes and creating the
impactful work that will move our client's business. I know
that a diverse and inclusive team will arrive at better
solutions than one that isn't that is absolutely proven. Let
(34:13):
me ask you about one other kind of diversity, young people.
Do you make it a point to try and get
a lot of young voices into the organization? Advertising is
a bit of a quote young People's Business. Was jokingly
calling myself mom earlier, but I really am mom. It's
probably last year's number. But I think we're sixty millennial.
(34:34):
So we are a young business, which I love. I
do think though, making sure that we've got those voices
trickling through and shaping the agenda of the company. And
so we're gonna actually expand what we define as our
leadership team to include much more diverse and inclusive set
of voices. It allows those young people and young voices
to shape the direction of our business, which is what
(34:54):
they want to and by the way, it's what our
clients want to. Media and advertising has gone through years
of change. One of the big things that people talk
about are the silos, you know, the advertising a sort
of built silos with media and creative and then we
had radio and TV. And what are you doing to
get rid of the silos and what are you replacing
them with? Any client that comes to us once three things.
(35:15):
They want speed, efficiency, and you know, great work. Silos
just slow you down on at least two of those,
and ultimately that can impact the third. We've had to
move away from running our company. I was to talk
about it vertically. So we were running in verticals and
run to a horizontal now and put best place talent
on best placed opportunity in real time, which is hard
(35:37):
for a company that is spread out, hard for a
company that has contracts that are based on hourly commitments.
So there's a lot of having to evolve the structure
and the infrastructure of our company to do it. But
our talent wants to do at number one. They love
the opportunity on work on different things, and that's important
and it gets to greater outcome. So I talked about
T shaped a lot. I think a lot of people
(35:59):
in our company have a deep vertical expertise. They might
be a radio copywriter that they're really great at, but
they also have a horizontal potential to tap into a
team and do something much more broad than their vertical
And so we really are working in sort of that
T shape brand. Now, if you were some young person
that was held bent on getting into advertising, my advice,
(36:21):
He sort of stays with what it is, which is
just never be above doing anything. I think that work
ethic has served me and continues to serve me well.
My least favorite word is entitlement. I think entitled people
just stymy themselves. I did work incredibly hard. I always
try to add that to the story. I was very lucky,
but I made some trade offs and I worked very,
(36:42):
very hard. But if you're willing to work hard, and
you're willing to come into it with an openness and
not be above doing anything that someone asks you, and
put yourself into it fully, I think you can create
a career and an outcome for yourself that you'll be
really both satisfied and rewarded by and and happy about.
Let's wrap up the way we always do this is
(37:03):
about math and magic. Who's the greatest mathematician? You know,
that person who just knows the math side of marketing
so well that it blows your mind. My mind goes
to a couple of lesbianett at our own agency, which
is a little bit self annointing, But he uh is
an econometrician for us at Adam and Eve. He's published,
He's done a lot of work with I p A
and his his evidence is what we function off. He
(37:24):
wrote a paper called Along and the Short of It,
and if you haven't read it, it is an incredibly
instructive piece of work. So les would be on there.
Aaron Matt's who's at Hearts and Science? Now, who wasn't analyct?
I mean, she's brilliant, She's incredible at Scott Haggard, Orn
Terry Young. Those are some of the people that jumped
through my mind. The greatest of all time is a
very hard one, but those are some of the current
(37:46):
day people call Hall of Fame greatest magicians. Magician. Yeah,
I know it sounds unsurprising. I would have to say
Bill burn Back. It would be surprising if you'd be surprising.
I think it would be shocking if I didn't. And
his contemporaries. I think we are all still as an industry,
very inspired by the Ogilvy's and the Burnetts, and the J.
Walter Thompson's and the which is what makes me a
(38:08):
little sad that some of their names are disappearing, because
I think that they are still legends. I'm not sure
we have the next generation. There are some very legendary
people in our industry at the moment, and I'm sure
future generations will reflect on them the way we reflect
on burned Back and the other spent. He has to
be up there, Thank you, thank you. Here's a couple
of things that take away from our discussion with Wendy Clark. One,
(38:31):
Wendy knows advertising is an uninvited guest, so she works
doubly hard to ensure the consumer finds value in the messaging. Two,
whether it's skittles, Broadway musical where people are screaming the music,
or a tagline about Mikey liking it. For Wendy, the
goal of great ad work isn't just brand left, but
(38:51):
to truly make the brand part of the culture. Three.
Wendy's mantra is never be above anything or LEA favorite
word is entitled, because people who feel entitled were just
stymy their opportunities. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's
(39:12):
it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to
Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio. This
show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue
Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is
no small feat Nikki Etre for pulling research bill plaques
and Michael Asar for their recording health our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
(39:35):
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
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