Question: What inspired you to write “Seducing the Boys Club?”

Transcript: Well I wrote the book because I wanted to reach more women with women are very frustrated when they can’t get where they want to go over if they feel they have being bored in the work place and I wrote the book so I couldn’t reach more women, more frustrated women and try and keep them in the work force. I don’t really want to convince women to not to stay home and take care of their families of that’s what they wanted to do. I applaud them for that, but I also applaud the women who are trying to both who are trying to have a family and also get as far as they want to go and their jobs and I thought the book would help them. I thought writing here with the sense of humor would help them, get through it and keeping like a swift page turning read would be better for them and I tried not to not make it ponder is work of do’s and don’ts because an advertising I learn that if you have to entertain people in order to get them to remember, what you want them to remember and that’s how I tried to write the book and that’s why you see phrases in there like the art of and flirting with integrity is not much of that but that’s what pops out, there is a lot of information and there about how women and men can work better with each other so, I mean I just thought it was time to for somebody to write a book like that.

Question: What would you like this book to do?

Transcript: I think the big take away for me is and I try to do this daily is to have the men get more in touch with their female side, and the women to get more in touch with their male side without losing each other in the process and I say that to the men in their. They say funny things like oh if I had a female side, I would be touching it all the time, I got that’s that what I mean, so you know we used to laugh at that, but pretty funny, but that’s what you are up against when you are dealing with boys stuffs.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: Well, I always from most of my career I always wanted to be seen as a client advocate of in the person who could really understand the value of a brand into make a brand worthwhile, but legally I have kind of switched over to what I want to work what I want to be remembered for and I think I would rather be remembered now for a champion of women, that’s why I wrote this book is …. women are always coming to me for advise when they are having the difficult time not just but remember with people who are in general in the office and I have always tried to council them, and I wrote this book to kind of get a lot of those things in print so that I could reach a wider audience and also when I am not available anymore and that there is some place for somebody to do to kind of figure out what to do next. So I would like to continue to do the job that on doing from McCann Erickson, but I would also like to continue my role as a mentor to women who are frustrated that not getting as far as they have like to go in the boys clubs so any other industry really. And if I could do that for the next 15 or 20 years I would be happy.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: Well is all job to sell the clients brand in the clients products but its also our job to help client to the right thing and I think the really good relationships between the client organizations and the advertiser and the agency organizations is that we are as partners we decide, what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing to do and I don’t think we are not like puppets. We don’t just get an assignment comes out and we just jerk our strings then we just do it, I think we are in partnership with our clients and we together decide is that packaging good. Is that messaging good? Is this product the right thing to go forward with and I think when advertising agencies work with their clients in that capacity everybody wins. And I am sure there are clients that are dictatorial, just say sell this, its crap. It’s sold anyway and most agencies are unable to do that. They usually find a way to make it powered about and to make it worthwhile because once you lose your integrity you don’t really have much house and we all have to draw that in mind and same some place and that the client respects your ability and he respects your mind and you are thinking. They won’t respect that line in the same does well.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: I don’t really its kind of hard for me to associate myself with other brands because I am in the business of making brand successful but the question is do I … am I a brand. I don’t understand how a person who is in the business like advertising could be a brand and because my whole reason for being is to not sell myself but to so things on behalf of my clients. So I don’t really I don’t understand to help people can just try to position themselves as a brand in the market place. I think brands belong to the people. Brands a people own the brand, the consumer owns coca cola. The consumer knows when coca cola is going off track. The consumer knows when MasterCard is not on track and they will be very vocal about it, now they have lots of platforms to be vocal about it but the best way to be vocal about it is to stop using the product. If they think that the advertising has lost the heart and soul of the brand, they will stop buying the brand and that’s the biggest aha.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: Well I think that return on the investment is something that the clients are of most concerned about obviously, they are spending a lot of money to advertise to the right audiences. The package groups clients, the clients that have universal messages and that are mass marketed in appeal to mass audiences there have a pretty effective way of measuring the effectiveness of their commercials. The big question there is just do we start creating commercials that will test well and not commercials that are bright and clever and engage the consumer and then the really good creative people are the ones who can do both. It’s very hard to test a branding commercial, commercials that are not selling a specific service or product that are just trying to enhance on brand because there is no way, what we do have ways of measuring a brand’s success, we have this tons tons of marketing companies that do these tracking studies so that we know where there are brand, where a brand lies in the minds of the consumer. So there is always ways of measuring things and the clients who are spending some much money on their messaging are not going to spend money if they are not relatively sure that the messaging they are using is effective and its reaching their goal. So I don’t know how anybody can think that advertising is not measurable. The vein of our existence is creative people is that its constantly being measured and we are rewarded based on our ability to reach these consumers and motivate them and change their behavior and make the brand their brand, and make the products their products. So that’s what the business is about that’s what the whole business is about, is measuring the effectiveness of our ideas.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: I think of the ad messaging is good, if its worthwhile if its serves the purpose and if its engaging and interesting. I think its ok, I think its a lot of bad advertising I would say, lets ban the bad advertising and just find somebody who can go through with the red pencil and just kill all the bad ads but we can’t do that. I don’t think that, I think that the bad advertising gets filtered out by the consumer, they just don’t they don’t buy things that they don’t need and they don’t pay attention to ads that are not directed towards them, don’t answer that the most important question in the English language, which is what’s enough for me. I mean if that if what we do doesn’t answer that question that we don’t win, whether we are selling something or in the work place. We don’t win, unless we can answer, what’s in it for you, so I don’t think that and we are certainly a consumer driven economy and listen to America we are I don’t know that’s good I have tried to temper on consumerism personally, but that’s what makes our economy work, and that’s what makes jobs for people, and that’s what makes us a successful country. So I don’t know how much you want to tamper with that, advertising is the big part of capitalism and what makes this country powerful so...

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: I don’t think that you can sell somebody something that they don’t want. I know that mean when I go around speak to universities, I still get the question of do is the subliminal advertising, I said why knew how to do that I would do it, because I think it would will be cool, but I have never heard that anybody subliminal, having subliminal messages in the advertising that would be use long, and I don’t think you can sell somebody, you can make a brand more attractive but there has to be some substance there. You can make a product desirable but if you don’t need the product, here with the product this in good one, you can’t make a product, survive if its not worthy and you can’t make people buy things if they don’t want. You can open up their eyes to the possibilities of a new way of doing things or a new way of having luxury around you but you can’t really force them to buy something they don’t want. So I don’t really think that advertising is manipulative. We do have strong powers of persuasion, this is one of the reasons why I have person never worked on a political campaign because I do have strong powers of persuasion. I have talents that allow me to be persuasive. And I don’t want to persuade somebody to vote for someone, I want the candidate to do that. I don’t really believe that people who are brilliant persuaders. So do something that is on ethical, I don’t think that’s unethical to do advertising for political people. I mean make that sound by go everywhere, but you have to be careful. I didn’t want a I was always very careful to be really good at what I did, so I didn’t have to work on products that I didn’t personally believe and I don’t want to say what those products are, but I in my entire career, I never had to work on something that I did not think was the right thing to do, I didn’t sell things to children that children shouldn’t have and I didn’t do things that I thought were bad, but you have to make that decision yourself as a creative person, and you have to good enough that you crap so when you say I don’t want to work on bla bla bla they don’t fire you...

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: I think of what happened yesterday or just recently on face book, where are they developed away to capitalize on that fact that people are sharing information with 50 million people other people who are of a like mind and they are go in to attach advertising to these messages and I think you have to really careful that the advertising doesn’t become so intrusive that its greeted in a hostel environment. I remember a many years ago like 10 or 15 years ago, there was an idea to put advertising on the runways where the baggage was being the baggage runways in the airports, so that while you are standing there, wondering if your baggage was actually going to come through the door. You could be looking at advertising on the rubber strips and I don’t know if that was ever done. I don’t know some airports may have actually done that and that was an interesting idea to try so somebody something well they were board, was terrified but luggage wasn’t going to show up. I don’t know that was ever done in great numbers I certainly don’t remember seeing in the travels I have done, but you have to be careful when you surround the consumer with advertising messaging that you don’t you irritate them in the process, and that means that you have to be entertaining. You have to make them, you have to be appealing, you have to make them want to watch what you are saying you are messaging you have to be across. So a lot of the user generated advertising might be interesting now and I think its fun to think about it, and so get this actually pretty good. I think it still an art form, advertising in the creative end of advertising still needs RSS, craftsman, and people who are good at story telling and creating imagery and making things beautiful and interesting to watch. So I don’t know that the user generated commercials are going to take over of there kind of interesting now. I like them I think its fun, but there is always it’s like the mosaic, now there is a place for everything.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: Well big clients go to big agencies that doesn’t mean that the smaller digital shops are seductive in their ability to get the client’s attention but most clients are big enough where they have need a really strong partner and the advertising agencies like McCann and something other big advertising agencies in the business are best equipped to being them board in this area, no body thinks of the big agencies as being nimble but the big agency has the resources to do exactly that and the idea of doing digital advertising or advertising on the web or whatever it takes to reach the consumer is what an advertising agency like McCann Erickson really on the big agencies is best equipped to do, and they kind of track the talent they can pay for the talent, they can they have the ability to do, whatever that client needs and is the clients needs are not just one dimensional. They are multilayered right now we are so fascinated with the idea of doing social advertising or advertising to the interested. So instead of running a commercial on the super ball or the academy awards but we certainly doing grade numbers, we can also reach to the person who is very interested in something in different media like the phone or PDA or the computer, or the web, but there is an awful lot of people who are still watching television. There is a lot of consumers who are getting their information from magazines and newspapers and media broadcast media so, its kind of pre-matured to say that mass media is dead, its certainly not dead, the younger people are easier to reach in different avenues for sure, but there is still a lot of women who are home, ironing, taking care of their kids watching television and getting their information from the television set. So I would say that people change because they have to change and really good agency would be as nimble as that anybody else?

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: Well effective advertising is advertising that changes the behavior of the consumer of that one thing and also effective advertising, is advertising that makes people feel a certain way about a brand mean it’s all about the brand and how people allow that brand to influence their lives, effective advertising is there is a lot of ways to measure advertising these days and we do a lot of testing and we do a lot of marketing research and things like that, but the over view of what makes an add effective is to people remember and they motivated by is it to the …. Does it help them feel a certain way about the product or the brand that you are trying to advertise. It’s really I know I have done that down, but that’s kind of this bottom line what we are trying to do with effective advertising, that’s why it was happening now in the advertising its kind of interesting. How much become a consumer, the content of is so consumer driven its kind of interesting about how you maintain the Stewardship of a brand, when somebody everybody is doing so much of their own kind of advertising.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: I mean I don’t really feel that I mean a position to say what kind of President Hillary would be or Barack Obama would be, I am so delighted that the democratic party has this contest between a woman and an African American and I think that makes as a great country even if nobody believed it before we are a great country and I think that they would both be very good presidents. I think I don’t think that anybody who is currently running for that office would be a bad person, I think that you have too many people helping you its too much. There are too many people whispering in your ear, the question is are you the kind of person who is going to listen to those? Are you going to be, you are going to be unilateral in your decision making. No question that she is bright and experienced and would be a great leader, the question is not that. The question is who is the country willing through out, that presidents all of things being equal begin to vote for the person that they care about the most, so they have an emotional connection to. Right now it looks like Barack Obama is getting most of that emotional connection because he is one type with his female side and she is in that kind of compassion in that kind of norms that he exudes is very, it’s a very appealing to people, that’s what they you don’t remember because the audience out there who is watching this will not remember but when John F Kennedy went for the presidency in 1960, he was a junior senator from Massachusetts, nobody knew him. He didn’t have any experience but he captured the imagination of the American people and he won the election. Its kind of what’s happening now I think in a way.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: I had the biggest half for me as a women working in boys clubs was that I couldn’t, even though I was angry be an equity of the business or I would be angry at the way a man would treat me or other women, I couldn’t really show that and if I got angry if they saw my anger, they would just close down and not listen to me and not really regard me. I have to learn my big epiphany was to try and find something that I really loved about the men, something really enduring and concentrate on that, so that I could manipulate the situation. Men will respond to kindness and affection and praise much quicker then they will respond to yelling at them and telling them that they did something wrong and I kind of learn this when I was really young. My first husband, who was an actor, was a Sicilian and he couldn’t help her around the house, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, is that he was the first born Sicilian son and he couldn’t do the dishes or clean up so, I work the full time job and I cleaned and I marketed and I cooked and I cleaned up after dinner and I was exhausted and one day I bought a really heavy duty vacuum cleaner and use it for David, so then I said “you know what I am returning this vacuum cleaner, its too much for me, I cannot even wheel it around” and he said “I will do it,” he said “I will do it,” that because it was a manly thing, so he takes a right and for two years he did all the vacuuming and I thought it was fabulous, because he was helping me, he was the man doing the vacuum clean, I positioned it differently and I did not even know it at that time, that I was manipulating him, in a charming way, but because every time vacuumed I really gushed all over him and twice he actually cook dinner, he took a roast out of the refrigerator and he could not meal them, which he was not cooking dinner, I didn’t divorce him anyway, because the dinner did not work out, actually he broke up with me, in an elevator. That is the first page of the book, how he broke up with me in an elevator of the cad, but that’s kind of what I did, I am not a dictatorial person, I was not a good dictator. I knew that I wasn’t going to able to order people around, it was in my nature and I am a women, women don’t do that, its not accepted when a women is a dictator. So, I had to find other ways to get people to do the things that I wanted them to do, so that charming seduction and manipulation was a good way for me to do that.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: Only people that I learn from are my clients or the people who I work with in the agency, and because in the last 20 years or so, I have been in the position of being the mentors to other people. My responsibilities are slightly different now. People look up to me as shocking as it is, they look up to me as a guide and try and find out how I would do it something, so that they can learn how to be in control of their environment. Anybody wants to do is to be in fact control of the environment. So, the people that I learned things from mostly the men in the office, because though I never worked for a women, and I have watched how they solve problems and how they handled crisis and they are very brave in a lot of ways and maybe because they have to be brave, its not manly not to be brave, but whatever the reason is they do have certain characteristics that I admire and those of characteristics that I try it to emulate.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Question: Can women be manly?

Transcript: Well, I try to think like a man, I think that’s one of the things that allowed me to get as far as I did get in my profession, but I never forgot that I was a women. So, I would always ask a man like this that disaster situation will end, I am terrified, I just scare and they would say, “God, yes we are scared, but we are men, we are not going to show it” and I thought “wow, I can pretend that I am scared” and maybe if I act courageous eventually I will be courageous and it little be a self appealing prophesy, and that’s pretty much what happened. You can learn some of the skills that men have and be more like them in a good way, and without loosing the things that make you inherently a strong women and then I think you have got the best of both roles. I think the women are wired to be good leaders, we just don’t use a lot of our skills and we don’t pick up the things that the men are doing really well, and learn some of those skills from them, when the women who do that, are very strong women.

Question: What does it mean to think like a man?

Transcript: Well, I mean if you look at the way then a man is, a man doesn’t know how to multitask, because he is not going to be giving birth to triplets, where multitasking would really be important. So he compartmentalizes his brain is filled with little drawer and he puts everything in these little drawers and he pull outs a drawer when its time to deal with whatever the contents says and when he is finish it he puts drawer back in, he doesn’t get distracted, and so he si focused. A women’s brain is like my chair in my bedroom, when I was going to college. All my cloths and possession where always heaped on this chair, and that’s kind of how women’s brain is, she has everything, is all mixed in, all mixed up and it is all like big big blab of thoughts and in work its probably better to be focused to get a job done and concentrate enough to do a good job with one task and then go on to the other, because if you have 14 balls in the air, and you dropped 12 of them, they are not go to remember. “Oh, he kept two balls in the air, they are going to go,” you dropped 12 balls, and they are broken, where a guy is only juggling one ball, so we get keep that ball going forever and pitch it, get it in the right hands, solve the problem and then get the next ball, and we can learn to do that its hard, it took me many many years to learn to do that, but we can learn that...

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: Well, men are stuff thinkers, they are will go into a meeting with a frequency idea of how that meeting is going to go, because they no they have the goods or they, they are just confident and so what they hear is what they expect to here, they remember what they expect here anything that goes against what their expectation or they kind of forget. So I would say its like bla bla bla good dog bla bla bla they just remember good dog, and they forget what happened before and what happened after. Actually I don’t really see anything wrong with that, all my point is that make sure you have some really strong women in the room too, because while the man is going to very focused, and very determined and very fourth right and get the job done. The woman is reading the room, and she is noticing, they didn’t make eye contact he stared at my collar bone. client isn’t happy, call and so you have to have both those disciplines coming back with a deep breath, otherwise you are only going to get the most optimistic results from a man who is the scuff thinker.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: Well I means its so hard for us to get to the top of the game, but when we get there we probably developed a lot of male skills in the process, because that’s what’s going to elevate us is to be more like the man without loosing the things that make us great as women, but some of the women who make it to the top forget those wonderful female skills of compassion and empathy and intuition and listening and they become too much like men, too combative, too competitive, too decisive because they are not listening to anybody else and they forget what got them there and they become, they develop faith that would be accepted in a man, but are not expected in a women which is kind of a double standard and I think that double standard is ever going to go away. That’s what happens if you forget the skills that got you there as a women, and you just become another man, you are not a man, you are not going to take that from you, and they are going do whatever they can to unseat you.

Recorded on:  2/29/08

Transcript: Well, I talk about several a lot of different layers in the book, but one of the things that everybody go on to is the art of a [Inaudible], because obviously I phrase that into way that would be provocative and what I am really trying to say is that women who are trying to reach man, and get man to help them succeed and whatever level they are at, sometimes we have to do more than just play by the rules and the rules are be smart, be passionate, be work hard, do everything right, don’t have an agenda, get the job done. We do that., women do that, that’s why we are in the business in such great numbers, but in order to get above that middle management level, we have to do some invisible persuasion or manipulation as what I say and then that is to try and get the man too approve your ambition and to give you the advancements that you are looking for in a part of kind of an unorthodox way. I mean people may not wanted use the tactics that I use that work for me and all I am saying to women are when think of your own tactics, everything is not black and white, men are not that hard, they are kind of and they admitted themselves, they are easy, we know how to deal with men in our personal lives. We start with our father, we have brothers, we have husbands, we have boy friends, we have no problem dealing with those men then really going to the workforce and we have men that were in business with, we just kind of loose everything that we know and we become slaves to their set of rules and I am just saying seduction and manipulation, seduction not about sex metaphor, they try manipulate the situation and control the situation you are in the charming way that’s not threatening and in a way that makes people admire you and care about you rather than dismiss you.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Trasncript: I have always worked in boys clubs. All the advertising agencies that I have been in where male dominated and although they where always a lot of women in the company, there weren’t that many women at the higher level than very very few women at the very top of ladder and I think that the business would be more successful if they were more of women at the top of the game, because I think the combination of men and women together is powerful combination, when you only have one kind of person making all the decisions, its kind of not good. So, I have always encourage women to go as far as they can go, its hard for women in male dominated cultures, because the people that you are trying to impress and the people who you need promotion from a men, and they may not for your comfortable with you, you feel what do you to make a man feel more comfortable with you, so that he will see you as somebody he wants on his team.

Recorded on: 2/29/08

Transcript: How can we teach that kind of the leadership, it is a good question, I have always try to do that. I mean part of my job is creative director has always been to nurture other creative people towards that end, I try to, we always try to create new creative directors and not all creative people are creative direct material. You actually have to have two sides of your brain, your keep savvy your right side functioning, you have to have a little bit of you left side and they have to kind of talk to each other, otherwise you cannot be a creative director, but I think you can teach them to do that if they have an inherent desire to have that kind of role, but I always say don’t go down that path unless you really want to, because there is no turning back once you start to be the leader.

Recorded on: 2/29/08