Men are from Mars, women run media agencies

As the gender debate kicks into overdrive, Dominic Mills – with the help of some industry contacts – examines why women do so well in media agencies, and what we can learn from this.

It’s a columnist’s job to follow the zeitgeist and, thanks to the holy trinity of May, Clinton and Roberts (Kevin, that is) we all know where the zeitgeist is currently at: gender issues.

Normally the zeitgeist moves on every week, but not when it’s August and mid-summer torpor sets in.

There’s no need to revisit the whole sordid Roberts saga per se – been there, done that. But anyone looking at the gender issue in adland, and it seems to me that this is one area that Roberts didn’t do his homework properly (actually, I don’t think ‘homework’ – in the sense of checking your facts before you open your mouth – is a concept Roberts does), would do well to look at the UK’s media agencies.

For there you will find, at the very top, an extraordinarily high representation of women.

Let’s start with the women in his own group. Belinda Rowe is UK chair of Zenith; Pippa Glucklich is co-CEO of Starcom UK. Add in the US, and you have Laura Desmond, on sabbatical between leaving her role as CEO of Starcom Mediavest and starting a new one as Publicis’ chief revenue officer.

Hmm, maybe in Roberts Country, media agencies just don’t count for anything.

Moving to WPP, there’s a long tradition of women at the top of MediaCom, with Karen Blackett following in Jane Ratcliffe’s footsteps, and ably supported at the top by Sue Unerman and Claudine Collins. Mindshare UK is run by Helen McRae, while at Maxus Lindsay Pattison is the global CEO.

The same holds true of Omnicom’s UK media operations: Philippa Brown runs the UK operation, and Nikki Mendonca is president of OMD EMEA. Frances Ralston-Good is OMD UK’s chief strategy officer.
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And no, I haven’t forgotten Tracy de Groose, who runs all of Dentsu Aegis (not just the media bits) in the UK and Ireland, or the likes of Jenny Biggam (the7Stars) and Catherine Becker (VCCP Media), running challenger independents.

Doing some rough maths, I reckon these women run the entities that buy around 80% of the UK’s £20bn adspend. If that sounds like a typically male, willy-waving, way of putting it, I apologise. It is merely one way to quantify the extent or span of their status and influence. The same figure for creative agencies might be 20-25%. It’s crude, I know, and if there’s a better way, please let me know.

On one level, people may be surprised by this. After all, compared to areas like PR and research, media agencies were traditionally seen as the province of rutting males, outdoing rivals and terrifying media owners with pure testosterone. In fact, they were as testosterone-driven, albeit in different ways, as creative departments where women have long struggled to flourish.

Yet if you go back 20 or so years, UK and European media agencies were among the first to be run by women. They were certainly miles ahead of their creative agency peers.

In the UK, Zenith’s Christine Walker was matched by Marie-Jose Forissier at Initiative Worldwide. The path opened up by Walker was followed by Tess Alps and Morag Blazey at PHD, Trista Grant at Vizeum and Mandy Pooler at Mindshare.

But that’s enough name-checking. If I’ve missed out other leading lights, current or past, forgive me.

Let’s think about now. Why do women do so well in media agencies, and what can the rest of the industry – or at least those who don’t believe the gender debate is, as dear old Kevin would like to think, so “fucking over” – learn?

I asked a number of men and women in the industry. Here, paraphrased and mixed in with my own, are some of their thoughts. The order is random. You may disagree. Please feel free to do so.

Role models: It’s clear that a whole cohort has been inspired by the likes of Walker and Alps, and they in turn have brought on other women. Just look at the dynasty at MediaCom, or the PHD diaspora (Alps, Blazey, Ralston-Good, Pattison) and the way, under Philippa Brown, both PHD and OMD have female managing directors.

Support networks: Admen have their clubs (Solus Club, Thirty Club and so on), but they are about boozing, business and buggery (sorry, golf). WACL, by contrast, is purposeful, and is focused on support and mentoring.

Weight of numbers: If you separate out media owners and media agencies from the rest of the ad industry, women are better represented proportionately than in creative or digital agencies. Media owners have always staffed up on women, perhaps because of the way they approach negotiations.

The flow across the two is pretty fluid. Alps started in TV sales; more recently, Jane Wolfson (from Initiative to head up commercial operations at Hearst) and Sacha Bunatyan (ex COO of Aegis trading desk Amnet, now global marketing director at the FT) have moved the other way.

Emotional intelligence: Ok, we can frame this two ways. One, media agencies are by default more objective and rational in the way they approach things. They want people who are logical, clear and organised. Men who are like this are nerds, and best left in the basement to get on with it. Women who are like that are human.

The second way to frame it is this: Media agencies want objective thinking. To succeed in this, unconscious bias has to be put to one side. Women are better at this (I call it EI).

Business-model evolution: The business model of media agencies has evolved faster and in different ways from other agencies. Competitive advantage is less about buying power (subsumed into the holding companies) and more about softer skills – negotiation, co-operation, partnership, strategy, planning, analysis – all of which suit women better.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Creative thinking and ideas matter more in media agencies than before. Women are good at sharing ideas. Men like to own them.

Speed of market change: Change in the media eco-system has been so rapid that media agencies have had to adapt fast, so fast that there was no time for anything other than the talent to rise. Since the talent comprised a significant number of women, so they have risen to the top.

Talent management: As ‘quantitative’ environments, media agencies measure performance in rational and factual ways. So there’s less room for unconscious bias to creep into how a manager judges someone’s performance.

So where in another environment judgements might unconsciously be biased by managers’ in-built preconceptions about gender, race and culture, in media there’s more factual evidence of an individual’s performance and that may be what’s helping women rise to the top.

Anyone interested in this subject, including women who want to get ahead or men who want to learn to think differently, might be well advised to buy a copy of The Glass Wall when it is published in a couple of weeks’ time. It is by MediaCom’s Sue Unerman and Kathryn Jacob of Pearl and Dean (and ex-Virgin Radio and IPC).

So, there we have it. I may be completely wrong about this, having brought my white, middle-class, middle-aged, biases to the table, consciously and/or unconsciously. Over to you.

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