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I hear our clients and our agencies have done the same, and so I think it's a very different conversation. You see cmos becoming growth officers. You see cmos taking on sales and taking on a datascope far broader than what they used to have, and I think that speaks to.
Marketing as a growth driver.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, and welcome to Math and Magic. Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. Our guest today is someone who's covered the waterfront of media and advertising USA today, Bloomberg, Yahoo, Media Brands, and now the CEO of the Americas and global Chief Client Officer of the advertising giant Densu. It's Jackie Kelly. Most folks who know her in our business think of her as some of this very sophisticated, urbane person. They might not guess that she's from a fifth generation
cattle ranching family. She was a member of four h who raised steers to show at the county fair and sold them to pay for her first year of college. She was there for the transition of newspapers to digital and the handoff of web portals. To social and search, and has worked with high powered personalities like Mike Bloomberg and Martha Stewart. She's brought that range to her work in advertising, helping clients navigate the rough waters of change.
She's also got a big heart along with her brilliance and her drive to make a real difference in the world. Jackie, Welcome, Thank you, Bob.
It's great to be here.
So before we jump in, we got a lot to talk about. I want to do you in sixty seconds to set the context. Ready to go, excellent, Ready to go? Do you prefer cats or dogs?
Cats?
Are you an early riser or night out?
Early riser? Definitely?
La or New York, LA, city or country country, winter or summer?
Winter, salty or sweet salty.
Farmers or ranchers, ranchers, beach.
Or mountains, mountains always mountains.
Pop music or country country? USA Today or New York Times.
Oh, I gotta go with USA Today.
Cooker, read out, cook vacation with family or friends, family chat, GPT or Google Search, still, Google Search, smartest person you know? Mike Blimberg, childhood hero, my parents? And finally, what's something you can't without?
My faith?
Great? Okay, let's jump in. Let's start with a big topic in marketing today. As marketers, we got spoiled in the eighties, nineties, and oughts because Middle America was fascinated by the coastal elites and wanted to emulate them. But in the last decade that began to change. Consumers in America don't necessarily look up to the coastal elites as the cool kids anymore. There's a different mindset for real America, Middle America, or flyover America, whatever you want to call it.
You're from rural Colorado and have a special understanding and connection to this world. So here's the question. How do we put something like Uber and TikTok and perspective. I mean Uber, which I think everyone thinks is universal, that only has ninety million active users in the US, and TikTok reaches less than thirty percent of the American population,
not what you would think of. How do we keep that from swaying our own judgment as it influences our creativity and our decisions we make every day.
Well, I think it starts with each of us as individuals. Personally, I work really hard to watch and listen to things that I wouldn't normally watch and listen to just to see the other point of view. Right, if you're an individual that only watches Fox News, you should turn on MSNBC every now and again because you get the contrast. You hear and understand what the other side is saying,
and it doesn't always have political Right. If you normally listen to pop rock, turn on country every now and again, just make yourself, as an individual be more curious about how others experience the world. Travel to places that you wouldn't normally choose to go to, and be present when
you're there. I think that's one when I bring it into the context that you're speaking of with you know, professionals designing product or in our case, really understanding consumers of products, whether that be current consumers or those that our brands want a conquest. We spend a ton of time really diving into what is unique about those individuals,
what do they have in common, what is different. We still do ethnographies to really go deep and understand the psyche of those consumers so that we can be more specific in how we communicate with them. It takes a ton of energy, but again it's all about relevance. It's all about individuals feeling like you know them, like you understand them. It is about that deep understanding and the
channels that they rely on. Your point about TikTok, while that is significantly growing, How people use it, why they use it, the role that plays in their life is significantly different than the other channels that we would be advocating for brands, they all might play a role, and they.
Play very connected roles.
So really understanding how consumers are using different channels and how those channels can come together in powerful ways is very, very valuable. I also think the other thing that's changing in our organizations to different degrees depending on the companies we work with, but I'll use DENSU as my example.
One thing COVID taught us is that people can work from anywhere.
We are hiring people from all over, so we now have thousands.
Of people that sit in the middle of the country.
To your earlier point about it being so skewed by the coasts and potentially being in a bubble, let's jump to AI.
Couldn't be a hotter topic right now?
Couldn't be a hotter topic.
How will it change advertising and the work you do for your clients.
There is not a meeting I go to where AI is not a topic, if not the first topic.
And I think there's so many layers we have to work through.
If I start with us as an enterprise, we use AI today, we will continue to use it to make the work we do more efficient, faster, the quality of it being potentially better done by computers, so we can reframe our human capital against things that only people can do.
There's many places where we're using it where it's still human.
Assisted because it requires some oversight to make sure that it is indeed giving us the best decision. Some of that is around how do you quickly scroll through a lot of resumes? We still want human assistance in that to make sure that there's not bias. It's being integrated into the system by virtue of AI. But I think the enterprise business application, we're just beginning to fully understand that. I think that's pretty game changing for agency holding companies.
When I turn to how we're using it with brands, I'll give you two examples. One of them is for Intel, which has incredible technology to help remove fake content. So the campaign is called deep fake, and through their facial recognition. Using AI, they can identify very quickly on a computer screen who is a real talking head and advocate or pundent and who is fake. And that is now being applied to governments and companies and media owners to make sure that we get fake content out of the realm.
So that's one example of a client that's using AI to really drive good in the world. Another is something we've just launched with a brand called Europharma that is using AI technology deeply in a scrolling sense on your phone where it helps those with Parkinson's do their daily exercises to make sure that they don't lose their facial expression, which is a very sad consequence of Parkinson's. So there's game changing ways to use it to make our work
far more powerful. The final point I'll make that I think we have to be careful about is there's just as many probably downsides to it if we're not careful. And I am an advocate for proactive regulation and I'm excited about some of the groups that are driving this, but I think there's lots of ways in which it can go wrong if we're not very very astute and hold hands as an industry and are very careful about it.
Hot topic right now. The economics slowdown. Historically advertisers go, oh, economics, slow down, quick, take money out of advertising. Save that money, We'll throw it to the bottom line, or let's hold it and see what happens. There were some important lessons learned from twenty twenty. I think one of them was that people found that when they started spending again, it cost them a lot more money than if they had
kept spending through the downturn. What do you see happening now and what do you what are your thoughts on at tizer spending in times like this.
I think there's so many case studies in history.
Even if you go back to nineteen eighty two, another moment where there was a recession, you had some of the best brands launched during that time or grew during that time as a result of their spending into it. So I think over history we have seen that continue
to be the case. What I see most with marketers right now, which gives me a ton of optimism, is there has been a focus certainly on performance right, performance and ROI and all of that has definitely come even more into focus in the last i'd say eighteen months.
We have some clients that are probably trading off some of their brand spend and brand effort in preference of performance right now, but not exclusively, and most are really trying to figure out how you work up and down that spectrum in order to ensure that you've got brand love at the top, which naturally begins to drive performance
at the bottom of that fine. Well, the other thing that gives me a ton of hope is I hear our clients and our CEOs especially talk about marketing as an investment, as a growth driver, not as a cost. And I think that is to the credit of the cmos who have embraced data. They've embraced the importance of proving the value of every dollar we spend. Agencies have done the same, and so I think it's a very
different conversation. You see cmos becoming growth officers. You see cmos taking on sales and taking on a data scope far broader than what they used to have, and I think that speaks to marketing as a growth driver, not as a cost.
I want to dig into topics we're talking about, but I want to first get a little context on you. I want to go back in time when you look at the Dutton family of Yellowstone, anything there that reminds you of your fifth generation Ranching family in rural Colorado.
Oh my god. I love Yellowstone largely for that reason. Did not look like Yellowstone, So I want to be perfectly clear. And we never branded each other, only the cattle. And I wish I was as crazy and as fun as Beth, but I'm not. I wouldn't trade my upbringing for anything because it was simple, right, it was, And I don't I mean that as in the best way, right. I grew up in a very rural area, a little
town called Franktown in Colorado. I think at the time there was probably twenty three hundred people in Frankown.
There's probably not that much more now.
My graduating class in high school was two hundred and probably bigger than most would think in a rural town like that. And I walked into third grade and met my best friends. There's seven of us, so we met in third grade. We still celebrate every birthday and every high and low of life. And I think that that connectedness and that family and friends and faith first has
always stuck with me. You know. We sat around the dinner every night together and talked about our day, and somebody had to cook, somebody had to clean the dishes. I just the routine of that and the consistency of that, I think served me well as a human. I hope it has helped me raise children in a similar way, although never raised with that level of ruralness that I had.
So what influence did your family in that environment have on you that's still with you today? That makes you, in essence who you are.
I had the gift of parents that believed anything was possible, and they allowed us to do what we wanted to do. They never placed their points of view or their desires on us. When I was deciding where to go to college, everybody in my family had gone to a university in Colorado, and for me, I felt I had four years to live somewhere else, and everybody comes back to Colorado my family and I raised it to my dad and he said, sure, honey, you try, you.
Go anywhere you want. You can do anything.
And you know, I guess whether or not I believe that the fact that somebody else believed that in me mattered a lot.
Four h I told that story raising Steers. I'll bet many of our listeners don't even know what four H is. Can you explain real quickly what four H is?
Yeah?
So four H is an organization where youth take on different projects and those projects range from agriculture, which is what I did, as well as home economics so cooking and sewing, and I also did that. But it also now has a lot of technology projects. They have archery. The span of what they do now is far different than it was when I participated, and it is across the United States. Plenty of people in rural New York
do it and they teach horticulturalism and different things. It's about giving your heart and your hands and your health to better living and to really learn different projects. And then you display those projects.
So in my case.
Is where I showed my steers, and then you sell them and that money which I did for gosh, I did that for twelve years. The money that I had saved selling cattle helped pay for my first year of college, as you mentioned. And it teaches you responsibility at a really young age. Right, You're up at five thirty in the morning to feed your animals. You have to walk them, you have to show them, you have to bathe them.
All of that is happening when you're nine years old, So it's a really good way to teach young leaders at a.
Young age.
Moral math and magic. Right after this quick break, welcome back to math and magic. Let's hear more from my conversation with Jackie Kelly. Let's get your career how and why USA Today when you join, newspapers are still in full swing and over time. Of course, we know what happened to the newspaper and they made the transition to digital and other kinds of businesses. What did you see in USA today that initially excited you and then how did you navigate that change?
I joined USA Today when they had just turned five in nineteen eighty eight, and I joined as an intern, and my initial reason for joining was it was opportunistic, right, I wanted to learn something. I was interested in broadcast journalism. Obviously that wasn't broadcast journalism, but it was the opportunity to get into a journalistic organization. And USA Today at the time, I love the innovation of that product. At the time, there was no color newspapers, there was no
nationally distributed newspaper. There was no newspaper that could have the sports scores from the game ends at eleven o'clock, and it's in that morning paper. That was by virtue of the satellite technology of printing that USA Today was using at the time. So USA Today was breaking every rule in newspapers, and I thought that was incredibly exciting. So I joined as an intern. Learned a ton That was a company that gave me the opportunity. That was
a company that grew leaders. They would bring people in young, they would teach them and train them and give them lots of different opportunities. And so I left eighteen years later. I liked to joke that I was the longest living intern. I had spent nine years in circulation and I spent nine years in advertising. So you know, the distribution side of a company like USA Today is just as critical
as the advertising. In the case of USA Today, we had just as much revenue, sometimes far more in circulation than we did in advertising, especially in the early days, as we were convincing advertisers that this was a viable product.
So I loved it because it was innovative.
You went on to Yahoo, you did a stint with Martha Stewart, and then you crossed the fence to the agency side running media brands. What made you jump the fence?
This is kind of a fun story, and I give credit to people that can identify talent and then encourage us to do something that would not be obvious to us. Case I had left USA, I had gone to Yahoo and worked for Wyndam Millard. Wynda Millard is an incredible mentor for me and convinced me to come to Yahoo. But it wasn't that hard to convince me because I knew newspapers were changing. I knew I needed to get
a much better digital education. I wanted to go to the deep end, and at the time, Yahoo or Google were your two choices, and Yahoo was teaching brands how to build a brand on the web, so that was obvious for me. And then followed Wenda to Martha Stewart to fully integrate Martha's organization. It was post her being in what she calls the clink clink, and we were building her brand back and consumers never left her, advertisers had, so there was a lot of work to do around
integrating her organization. I'd love that challenge. It was in that moment that Wenda actually had heard about an opportunity through a friend of hers that was running UM globally, a gentleman named Matt Siler, and she said, you should look at this because it would be a next phase of your career. And I had wanted to be at the agency side. I'd been on a panel at Advertising Week and famously referred to agencies as a barrier to my progress as a media owner, which did not go overwhell.
But I believed that agencies were failing clients and media owners because they were not giving us the gift of time and transparency. Those were the two things that I really wanted from an agency, and I just couldn't get anyway. Long story short, Matt saw what I saw. Matt saw the opportunity to leverage media owners as real content partners in the work that media brands and UM specifically was doing for clients. And it was the first time that I saw an agency executive see what I saw as
the opportunity to partner differently with media owners. And it was one of those moments in life where you can keep complaining and pointing the finger and wishing it was different, or you can jump to the other side and help make that so. And then I got bit right then. I just loved the agency side. It's such an incredible place to operate in our industry. But that's how I got there, great people that told me I should.
Well, you jumped the fence again, back when you went with Michael Bloomberg when he had just come out of his twelve years as probably the most spectacular in New York City mayor ever, and you joined just as he was re entering the private world. Tell us what was so great about that that caused you to go, Wait a minute, I'm in the ad world, but now I'm going back.
So I'm one of those people, and this is probably not a good thing to share, but I keep my head down and I don't really look for new opportunities, but then something will get into my line of sight and I get excited about it. And that's what happened with Bloomberg. Mike was coming back to the organization, but it was assumed he'd come back into the foundation. I don't think anybody assumed he'd come back and be the
CEO of the company again. And the leadership at the time was going to take the twenty six hundred journalists of Bloomberg, which is at the time was more than CNN,
New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal combined. It was a for Milis still is a formidable journalism team, and again going back to my love of journalism and the importance of that and being in a newsroom, I missed that aspect, and so the intention was to take that incredible journalistic team and really create a competitor to CNN. So it was broad in the aperture, from financial news to broader general news as well. That's what got me
in there. And it was integrated right. They had broadcasts, they had print, they have the terminal, they have incredible digital property, and so the ability to run that and have some oversight of editorial was super interesting to me.
We talked a little bit about den Sue. You obviously came back to DENSU. You've had a spectacular impact in advertising again through DENSU. I want to talk a little bit about corporate culture. People have said our corporate cultures and our values is our operating system, and just like in technology, if you don't get that right, none of the other programs work well. Had DENSU you got the
far flung organization. We've talked about people working remotely. Now and wyoming in places like that, how do you get buy in, especially post pandemic, the new work environment.
I will say post pandemic, it's harder. I think it's harder because we do not have people coming together in the way they used to, which means as leaders, we need to work harder at it. First and foremost, my executive team and I work really hard on making sure
that we are embodying those cultures. We spend a lot of time becoming as productive as we can as a collective unit and operating system ourselves, and we're really candid with one another when one of us is acting in a way that may suggest that we're not living into those values. So that's one holding one another accountable. I think the other is peer to peer platform. We have to create visible ways where our culture is displayed. One of our values is around making society better. So it's
not just about the work we do. We want the work we do for brands to actually make it impact in the world and to improve society. Our global CEO kiro Igarashisan talks about being business to business to society and that society piece being so important that is really in the fabric of our culture. So when we have a piece of work, the intel piece of work around deep fake is an example of this, we really celebrate that because that is an example of us actually making
the world a better and safer place. So I think to put a fine point on it behaving that way as individuals, and then when you have a piece of work or a client example, making sure the network can celebrate that and we.
Make it visible.
You've had a charmed career and I know giving back is very important to you. You're the board chair of the Egg Council. You've been on the boards of a number of organizations, but one of the most important clauses for you is foster care. I think a foster family for over twenty children. Can you tell us a little bit about foster care in the US why we should all get involved in what touched you about it?
Now?
Thank you for asking that question, Bob, because I have been accused of recruiting foster parents whenever I can, so I will take this opportunity for all your listeners to do that. I got involved because my family, through our church, had been able to be camp counselors at a camp for foster children one summer and through that experience, I
learned two stats that stunned me. One was that fifty percent of the homeless in the US were at some point in the foster system, and seventy percent of those that are incarcerated were at some point in the foster system. So it struck me that if you fix the foster system, you might actually fix a lot of things that our country then struggles with long term. And more importantly, how unfair that these kids never had the chance to live
up to their full potential. That's what bothered me most is the fact that by virtue of their circumstances, which is not their fault, they were compromised it to homelessness and incarceration all these other things. So it really struck
me that we could actually make a difference. And I mentioned it to my husband coming back from camp that week, and I'd had the eleven year old girls, my own daughter, Ashley was eleven at the time, and he had the eleven year old boys, And as we were driving back, I said, I think we should do this, and he hesitated because he was with the eleven year old boys. His week was not quite as kumbaya as mine was. And then he came back two weeks later and said,
I think you're right. I think we can make a difference, and we got licensed. We've now had twenty six foster children and we adopted our twenty fifth, which is Little Nova, which we adopted last summer, and it is game changing. I encourage anyone who has room in their home and in their heart to consider it.
And there's many different ways. You don't have to be in it forever.
You can do respe care where you take kids for a weekend as they find a more permanent foster placement for them.
But there's a lot of good that.
Can come from you just showing love and affection and routine to a child at a time when their whole world has turned upside down.
So I highly recommend it.
Well, you're doing a lot for them. What do they do for you? What insights in the humanity in the world have you gotten as a result of being a foster parent?
Like all things in life, you get so much more than you give. They have fulfilled us as a family in a really different way. They have taught me a different level of resilience because these kids have seen things, Bob, that you and I have never seen, and yet they have come out on the other side optimistic and playful and hopeful, so they remind you of the importance of resilience. I've also learned a lot about the system and our government and in many ways where it.
Can be fixed.
It's made me more interested in public policy. It has taught our family a lot about diversity, right, a lot about how different cultures to your earliest point about how do we become less polarizing and more integrated. It has taught us that because we've had children of all different nationalities, and as a result of that, we do our best to bring that culture into our home, which has been incredibly educational.
Let's jump to some advice a couple of points before we wind up today. You've been through a lot of careers. If someone's thinking about changing jobs, what should they consider? What advice can you give them?
The advice I always give people is to pick people. I think exceptional leaders can make a mediocre company exceptional, and less exceptional leaders can make a great company less great. And so I always say, pick people. You will learn so much and the opportunities will be so much richer. First and foremost, and then the other I would say is to not be afraid to zig and zag. I think we've gotten very focused as professionals on climbing the ladder.
I think there's a lot more benefit if you're willing to go to a horizontal opportunity in order to expand your own learning. It will give you an opportunity to leap forward in a very different way.
We end each episode of Math and Magic with a shout out to the greats or the influences on our guests from the two polls of great marketing, the math those whose brilliance is in the analytics finding the insights that make a difference in who see the world through data, and the magic those who add the spark, those who excite the consumer or others with their sheer creativity. I'm going to ask you for a shout out. Who are your two shout outs on the math side and on the magic side.
On the math side, I would give a big shout out to David Williams, who's the founder of Merkel. I mentioned Merkle earlier in terms of its importance to our capability at DENSU, but David acquired Merkel when it was twenty five people and five million dollars in revenue as a really direct mail company and built it into a robust performance marketing and personalization engine with identity at the core.
It's incredible what he built.
And what I loved about David is not only was he a mathematician in terms of understanding the power of that going forward, but he reinforced for me the value of what I call balcony to basement, like being able to really understand the guts of the organization but also lift up and be really.
Inspiring with your vision.
And he knew when to pivot and to see something coming and get ahead of it, and he did that.
Brilliantly for Markle Magic.
For Magic, I'm going to shout out to a book that I've recently just finished by Sally Sessman. And Sally is an exceptional executive and communication leader.
She's been at Amex S D.
Lauder and now she's advisor, and she's recently written a book called Breaking Through. And the magic of this book is it is a reminder and an incredible guide on the importance of communication. And she has ten power principles or tenants in there that really speak two executives. So I give Sally the shout out for magic and highly recommend the book for everyone.
Jackie, You've had an amazing career in life. You've still got so much ahead of you. I'm not trying to make you sound like you're anywhere near the end of that. Congrats. Thanks for sharing these insights and experiences with us today.
Thank you for inviting me, Bob, I appreciate it.
Here are a few things I picked up from my conversation with Jackie. One, stay curious. If you want to appeal to customers with different demographics, it's important to venture outside your bubble, listen to a different kind of music than you're used to, or turn on a different news channel. When you stay open minded, your products and your life experiences will be better for it. Two. Choose people over companies. A brilliant leader can make any company better, and less
worthy leaders can drag a company down. When you trust and admire the people you work for, you'll learn more and you'll be more fulfilled overall. Three, don't be afraid to change direction. People often get hung up on climbing the ladder in one company or industry, but when you make a horizontal move to a place you wouldn't have expected or climbed to the other side of the fence. It may give you an opportunity to leap forward in exciting new ways. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sidney Rosenbloom for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Our editor Emily Meronoff, our engineers Jessica Crinchitch and Baheid Fraser, our executive producers Nikki Etoor and Ali Perry, and of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel Noel and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,