FCB Global

But Michael, for you then, what drew you to Dentsu? You said in another article, probably on the ad trades, that you get the chance to build.

After FCB and BBDO, what can you build at Dentsu that you can't build anywhere else?

I, that's a great question.

And it's the, it's, it's the first question.

I think there's a lot of really good.

And I think if there wasn't, I'd be, that'd be really difficult.

I liken Dentsu now to what FCB was when I first went there, which was had all these great ingredients and all these really great things.

And a lot of it was working.

Pringles offers one diehard fan a final resting place in a branded urn.

This is done by BBDO New York, who inherited the project, uh, who inherited the brand from FCB.

They've done the Super Bowl commercials.

Remember the Sabrina Carpenter, uh, her dream man-

And so when we were thinking about like, what is the best way for us to reach media buyers, we're like, well, they're spending all of their time, yes, on Spotify, but also in spreadsheets.

And so we partnered with our agency, um, now BBDO, formerly known as FCB, and, uh, we partnered with them on actually adapting a media plan within an Excel spreadsheet.

And when the media buyer opened their plan, which by the way we emailed to them, so we leveraged the exact same channels in which our sales team was already communicating with these agencies and media buyers.

They opened up the media plan, and that Excel spreadsheet turned into the first ever music video created inside a spreadsheet.

I wasn't at Grey.

I was at Foote, Cone & Belding, all kinds of different agencies, and we live off of our creativity, our innovation, and I know that you bring that to your current role here as CMO, and we're gonna get into that and learn a lot more about that today.

But you have also just an interesting relationship with aerospace because you met your husband on an airplane.

You had a long distance relationship, that you were on airplanes all the time.

shake out.

But I do think it's interesting that, you know, I mean, FCB was like, there was just this really splashy feature in Adweek, like semi recently talking about its 100 year anniversary.

I mean, like, this is like, the example of the storied agency brand.

And with all of this change, and now Emma leaving, I think it's interesting to see that dissolve a little bit more.

For sure.

All this in the context here, Michael and Emma were on the FCB side of things pre-merger here.

So when they brought FCB, folded it into BBDO, they kept them on there.

Emma had a transformation title as well before the, that, the CEO title.

I, I mean, I think that everyone kinda saw it's an inevitable situation whenever you're bringing together two massive agencies.

With FCB going into BBDO, there's too much, there's too much leadership.

Yeah.

There's too many layers.

So the first half of my career, I always say in the 20th century, I spent the first 20 years of my career making ads, making advertising.

That was primarily on the agency side for a number of very, very fine agencies, including Leo Burnett Company, including FCB, Footcone and Belding, and then later with McCann Ericsson Worldwide in New York.

So a lot of very large global agency brands I started as a copywriter.

I went to two journalism schools out of college, both here in the United States, the most notable of which was the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where I'm currently an adjunct professor and teaching in their integrated marketing communications program.

I was lucky enough though to get onto kind of a graduate scheme in a big American ad agency that had offices in London.

called Draft FCB.

And they had a kind of management acceleration program for grads.

And I was lucky to get onto that program and it really moved you around the different departments, exposed you to advertising and the principles of advertising.

It was still really one of those agencies which was very into the craft of advertising and the history, the heritage of it, really very creative-led.

So yeah, was exposed to lots of different departments there and really stayed in the industry right the way through to 2014, 2015, working around a number of different ad agencies, AKQA, Wunderman, Isobar, back to FCB, where I actually took the role of digital director running the digital UK business.

So it was a nice story because I went from being a grad to coming back and running that digital business.

Wow, that's really cool.