Cindy Gallop

Welcome to season two of the Talking to ourselves podcast. I'm Omeet Farhang CCO at Momentum. My guest today, Cindy Gallup, Businesswoman, Public Speaker, Social Media Influencer, and Feminist Icon. Cindy joined the London Office of BBH in 1989, running accounts like Coke, Rayban, and Polaroid. In 1988, she founded the US branch of BBH and served as Chairman and President for seven years. In 2006, she founded her own brand and business consultancy, Cindy Gallup LLC. Three years later, at the TED conference, Cindy launched the company Make Love Not Porn, a video sharing site designed to make real world sex socially acceptable and socially shareable. In addition to the TED conference, she's spoken at South by Southwest, the 3% conference, the Forbes Summit, and many more. She's been covered in a wide range of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, TechCrunch, Teen Vogue, and The Guardian. She is a powerful voice for diversity, gender equality, and ageism in our industry. This is Cindy Gallup and I, Talking to ourselves. Where are you from? And what did your parents do? There isn't a short answer to where I'm from. So I am half English, half Chinese. My father is English. My mother is Malaysian Chinese. And I was born in the UK, but when I was six, my parents moved to Brunei in Borneo. So I grew up in Brunei. I came back to the UK for school university, worked there for a number of years, worked in Singapore. I've spent the past 20 or 20 years here in the US, and so essentially I'm a global citizen. I am a British citizen, but I think of myself as from anywhere and everywhere. My parents were both teachers. Both teachers, yeah. What did 12-year-old Cindy Gallup want to be when she grew up? Well, funny enough. 12-year-old Cindy Gallup wanted to be enough, I'm saying. Really? You knew then? Well, only in the sense that I found ads fascinating even as a child. And so I did an entire school project about ads and how they worked. So to some extent, yeah. Were you getting a lot of reinforcement as a child that you were a great salesman and a great performer? No, no, not in the slightest. Interesting. Well, congratulations. A lot of times people will say astronaut or cartoon artist, and you ended up just selecting your profession at 12 and seeing it through. In 1998, you opened the US branch of BBH. This is a turning point in this podcast because up until now, we've mostly interviewed CCOs and sort of gotten into the mind and the creative process and the management style of CCOs. And as we expand the repertoire of the podcast, I'm really happy to have you here today. But I did want to start by asking you about your creative partner at BBH New York, John Haggerty, and sort of what are some of your prevailing memories of John Haggerty and his creative style? Sure. Well, I should say, I mean, that the thing that sprang to mind immediately is you just gave that little piece of exposition about who you'd interviewed today. It was that the wonderful thing about John Haggerty is that he was very fond of saying at BBH, there's no such thing as the creative department. We expect everybody to be creative. And that was absolutely how he approached all of us, including my background, which is account management. So when BBH decided to open up their first office in America, and I put my bid in to do that years ago, and so it was wonderful to have that dream realised, but the partners felt that the US was such an important market for BBH that one of them needed to be out there at the get-go to help set up the office. And none of them really wanted to, they all had families, they didn't want to uproot themselves. But again, because the market was so important, it was decided that John Haggerty, the creative partner obviously in BBH, should be the one to come out. And first of all, I was just enormously appreciative of that because John came and spent the first two years of BBH New York out here partnering with me and the team that we built to make it a success. But secondly, I absolutely could not have had a better role model and mentor and champion than John Haggerty. And especially because the wonderful thing about John is that we were a start-up. It was all about down in the trenches, get your hands dirty, everybody does everything. And I remember when we moved into our first proper office back in 1999, up until then we had taken temporary officers in the Tribeca Film Centre downtown. And I found an office space on 22nd Street in Chelsea. And it was a loft space, the building had been manufacturing of something. So it was pretty old, it was what we could afford at the time. And a lot of stuff didn't work. And one of the things that didn't work were the toilets in the men's restroom. So every so often one of the toilets would flood and it was just a fact of life and we had plumbers in, just kept breaking down. And so there was a mop there. And the deal was, whoever was in the men's restroom when it flooded just got them up and went well. So Neil Simpson, who was an account director from BBH London, was over for a visit. I remember him coming up to me one day, like white face. He went, "Oh my God, Cindy, Cindy!" And I'm thinking Jesus, we've lost an account, somebody's collapsed somewhere. I went, "Neil, what's happening?" He said, "I've just been in the men's restroom and John Heggertee is mopping the floor in the men's restroom." And I went, "Oh yeah, he does it all the time, it's great, he brings us coffee." But literally that was John. The men's restroom flooded, he got a mop like the rest of them and he just went to work. You know, that is a powerful symbol though. I grew up with a father whose tagline was, "Don't do what I do, do what I say." And I think that was the sort of prevailing parenting wisdom of the 70s and 80s. And now as I have kids of my own and sort of explore parenting styles, what occurs to me is that the person you want your children to be, you have to model that behavior and essentially be that person. And so the message he's sending, even if unwittingly is, "If I can mop the toilet and if I'm writing the lines at midnight, then nothing is beneath anyone here." And that's a really good baseline. No, absolutely right. I mean, and another one of mine during Memories is, so I set up VBH New York in 1998. And then, as you may recall, the dot com bubble happened. So I mean, I was very cautious. I was determined that at any one time, during that period, only 25% of my revenue would come from dot com companies. And so we came out of that a lot better than a number of other agencies who chased the bubble in very unfortunate ways. But what it did mean to be frank was that we worked with a number of dot com companies that were immature and utterly exasperating. And by the way, I felt very sorry for a number of our clients in this context because they were writing this wave and things were accelerating dramatically. And often what you were looking at was extreme fear and nervousness because they had no idea where they were going. But I have to tell you that in that scenario, I sat in meetings where I saw John Heggity spoken to by a client, like he had not been spoken to by a client in decades. And the wonderful thing about John was that he is one of the nicest people in this industry he will ever meet. He stayed calm. He was unfailingly polite. He never stood on ceremony or status as he entirely potentially deserved to. And he absolutely was. He was writing lines at midnight at the capricious whims of these completely inexperienced clients. And he never lost his temper. He never got frustrated. He never threw a fit. He was an absolute calm at the eye of the storm for all of us through those very turbulent initial start-up years. I was just phenomenally privileged to have him as my partner doing that. And the other great thing about that start-up mentality is that people with specialties are quickly pulled out of their silos, out of necessity. And it seems like that helped define the next chapter of your career where it's hard to pinpoint the right title to place on you, entrepreneur and businesswoman, and fundamentally, as you look at what you've done since you've left BBA, you're an ideas person. And so it seems like that was cultivated through a long career of, I think, at the best agencies that the Juryddy Little Secret is that the best creative people are also secretly some of the best strategists and the best account people. And some of the best account people are great partners to creatives because they have great creative taste and they have ideas of their own that they're not afraid to communicate. No, absolutely. I mean, alongside what I said earlier about John Heggert's point that everyone at BBA is creative, what was also the prevailing philosophy was that the best account planners could also be great accountmen and the best accountmen could also be great planners. And there was an enormously collaborative working mentality for all of us that was part of what made it such an absolute pleasure to be at that agency, which is why I ended up staying there for 16 years. Yeah, yeah. What was true then is true now. And in the same way that many agencies screwed it up then, many agencies continue to screw that up now. And you sort of see a turf form mentality between departments and sort of don't tread on my expertise. And then you listen to, you know, part of one of the great educations of this podcast, to leaders at places like Wyden Kennedy and BBDO. It was actually one of their governing principles, is to break down those barriers. Shortly after being named global CMO of BBH, you left the agency in 2005. What was the main impetus to leave? - Sure, so I basically had my very own personal midlife crisis. In the sense that I turned 45 in 2005, and I'd always thought of 45 as kind of a midlife point. Obviously, by the way, the happiest assumption one of us to be 90, fingers crossed. But in the couple of years running up to my 45th birthday, I'd always gone, on one's 45th birthday is the moment when you should pause, take stock, reflect and review, where am I being, where am I going? So on February 1, 2005, I duly did that. And that was the point in which I went, oh my God, I've just worked 16 years for the same advertising agency. Now, as we've been saying, amazing agency, love BBH adeeth, I cannot say enough nice things about them. Honestly, everything that they did for me went over and above the call of duty. But that was the point in which I went, heavens above, I mean, the time at any flown bar, I'd worked for them in London, Singapore and New York. I went, maybe it's time to do something else. And then the problem was, I hadn't the faintest idea what. So vast amounts of thought and angsting ensued. And eventually I went, if I want to review every possible option open to me, for what is effectively the second half of my life. Maybe the best thing to do is to put myself in the market, very publicly and go, okay guys, here I am, what you got and see what comes to me. So I took a massive leap into the unknown. I resigned as chairman of BBH New York in the summer of 2005 without a job to go to. And quite honestly, it was the best bloody thing I've ever did in my life. And as a result, I am now evangelical about working for yourself, which is what I believe everybody should ultimately be striving for and get to do. - Yeah, I'm assuming there was a lot of people, well-meaning people who loved you, who told you that this decision was quite foolish. - Well, I think a lot of people were absolutely staggered because obviously I've been a BBH devotee for so long. And again, this is something I've talked to many people about since, people who are at a crossroads, you know, not quite sure what they want to do. It really isn't until you put yourself out, publicly as being available, that all of these things come to you, that, I mean, you know, 95% of the office I've got were from places and companies and to do things I would never have thought of myself. You know, and that was the fascination. And by the way, so I am, you know, my feeling then, you know, and I was very lucky to have all these things coming to me. I went, okay, I still don't know what I wanted to do. I'm gonna talk to everybody. I'm gonna take every phone call. I'm gonna do every meeting. No preconceived notions. There were some things where I went, "Ooh, don't know about, you know, that cup." No, no, no, no, no, no, go in there and do it. And so I embarked on this fascinating exploratory, which was as good for telling me what I didn't want to do as what I did want to do because I would come out of an interviewer or a meeting and I'd go, okay. So now I know in 50 million years, no one did that. - Yeah. - And that was actually a very good experience to go through, to kind of really crystallize in my mind what I wanted to be in place whatever I did next. - Yeah, and since that time you've worn many hats and we'll get into that, but one of the real inflection points after you left BBH was when you took to the TED stage in 2009 and introduced this idea of make love not porn. How do you describe that idea? And where is that idea 10 years since you've launched it? - Sure. So first of all, that idea was a complete and total accident. And it's emblematic of the fact that everything in my life and careers happened by accident. I've never conscious intention planned anything. So make love not porn came out of my direct personal experience dating younger men and realizing, and this would have been 11 or 12 years ago now, realizing through dating younger men that I was encountering an issue that would honestly never have crossed my mind if I had not encountered it so very directly in person. I realized I was experiencing what happens when two things converge. And I stress the dual convergence, I mean, because most people think it's only one thing. I realized I was experiencing what happens when today's total freedom of access to porn online meets our societies equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. When those two things converge, porn becomes by default sex education in not a good way. So I found myself encountering a number of sexual behavioral memes in bed. I went, whoa, I know where that's coming from. I thought, gosh, if I'm experiencing this, other people must be as well. I didn't know that because 11 or 12 years ago no one was talking about this, no one's writing about it. This was me and I solution, being a naturally action-oriented person going, I wanted to do something about this. So 10 years ago, I put up this tiny clunky website at makelovenotporn.com that in its original iteration was just "Porn World vs. Real World." You know, here's what happens in the porn world, here's what really happens in the real world. It was just words and graphics. I launched it TED in 2009, became the only TED speaker to say the words, come on my face on the TED stage six times. The talk went viral instantly as a result. And it drew this extraordinary global response to my tiny website that quite honestly I had never anticipated. And I realized I'd uncovered this huge global social issue. So I got thousands of emails from all around the world, male and female, straight and gay, young and old. And that made me feel a huge personal responsibility to take makelovenotporn forwards in a way that would make it much more far reaching, helpful and effective. I also saw an opportunity, and I believe in very strongly, which is that the future of business is doing good and making money simultaneously. I saw the opportunity for a big business solution to this huge untapped need. And I used the word big advisedly, because even then back in 2009, it concept stage, I knew if I wanted to counter the global impact of porn as default sex said, I was gonna have to come up with something that had the potential one day to be just as mass, just as mainstream and just as all pervasive in our society as porn currently is. So I was thinking big right from the get-go. So turn makelovenotporn.com into makelovenotporn.tv into a business. And today makelovenotporn.tv is the world's first and only, entirely user-generated social sex video sharing platform that celebrates real world sex as a counterpoint to porn. We are socializing sex to make it easier to talk about. We are what Facebook would be if Facebook allowed you to socially, sexually, self-express and self-identify, which they don't. And the aim of that fundamentally, with a single mad mission of making easier to talk about sex, is to be able to openly promote good sexual values and good sexual behavior. We have a revenue sharing business model. Anyone can share their real world sex or makelovenotporn. Our members pay to subscribe, rent, and stream social sex videos, half the income goes to our contributors or as we call them our makelovenotporn stars. We call ourselves the social sex revolution. The revenue part is not the sex, it's the social. - And as you turn this into a business and sought investors, was the discomfort of investors to talk about sex significant barrier? Did you have to sort of create a language that was your trademark directness, but that also didn't overly make people blush? - Right, oh my god, I would have done that if I could have even gotten across the threshold. So what I discovered was, you know, basically I operate in Silicon Valley's final investment frontier. My biggest obstacle raising funding and funding investors is the social dynamic that I call fear of what other people will think. Because it is never about the person I'm talking to thinks. When you understand what we're doing and why we're doing a makelovenotporn, no one can argue with it. The business case is clear, by the way. It's always their fear of what other people will think which operates around sex unlike in other area. So, and by the way, I mean in all of this, you know, I've brought to bear my over 30 years worth of experience in brand building, marketing, communication, advertising, because I need to apply it to everything I'm doing in this area. So when I set out four years ago to try and raise funding to scale makelovenotporn, I knew it was going to be difficult. And so I realized that I was going to have to pave my own way. I have to break down the business spares and my own path if I wanted to scale makelovenotporn to be the billion dollar ventrinoic and me. And so I began doing what I tell other entrepreneurs to do, which is when you have a truly world-changing start-up, you have to change the world to fit it not the other way around. And that's the point at which I like to say, I got into the Steve Jobs business of reality distortion, because if reality tells me that I can't grow makelovenotporn the way I want to, I'm going to change reality. And what I mean by that is, I deliberately, therefore, four years ago began defining pioneering and championing my own category, sex tech. So I literally wrote the definition of sex tech. If you Google sex tech, I'm result one on page one. And by the way, sex tech is any form of technology designed to innovate, disrupt, and enhance in any area of human sex running, human sex experience. I coined the hashtag sex tech. I didn't invent the term, but I'm responsible for propagating the hashtag as widely as it is used today. And I began speaking at tech conferences all around the world on why the next big thing in tech is disrupting sex. Because I thought at base level, if I just say this, [BLANK_AUDIO] enough, often enough in enough places, people start to believe it. And that had two further accidental consequences. The first was that I began seeing for myself the enormous potential in this sector, not least financially. And secondly, sex tech founders began writing to me from all around the world. They saw me as a champion of sex tech. They've all the same problems I do. You know, they can't raise funding, copper payments and places etc. And I realised I have unique access to extraordinary sex tech deal flow. And so that was the point at which I went. Okay, if I can't get my own start up funded, I'm just going to have to get the entire category funded. I'm going to start the world's first and only sex tech fund, because if nobody else will do this, then I will, to fund myself. And so I basically, you know, gave my fund a name, bought the Royal Records of the company. My sex tech fund's name derives from a quote by Chairman Mao, who famously said many years ago in the interest of gender equality, women hold up half the sky. I think that's relatively unambitious. My sex tech fund is called all the sky holdings. But the derivation is deliberate because it's a dual investment thesis. A, if I can raise this fund, I want to invest in radically innovative sex tech ventures founded by women. The most interesting things in sex tech day coming from female founders, we get the enormous market that as women needs, wants and desires, is historically deemed to to boo, embarrassing, shameful, to do anything about business. And by the way, tap that huge primary market, you tap a huge secondary market, a very happy men. And then the second area is every business obstacle I encounter is a huge disruptive opportunity itself. I want to fund the infrastructure of sex tech, what I'm calling the sex tech full stack, because the first payment processor that welcomes legal, ethical, transparent ventures like mine, cleans up the first hosting provider, the first bank. I want to fund the ecosystem of sex tech to do three things. A, basically create a self-sustaining portfolio for all the sky, because all of my ventures that I fund will need this. B, to be a bloody huge revenue generator, every sex tech venture around the world needs this. And C, and I use a Peter Tiel term here deliberately, to monopolistically build out the entire underlying ecosystem to make sex tech the next trillion dollar category in tech. On a related note, you gave a talk about responsibility and advertising, where you espoused this notion of re-inventing aspirational culture. What did you mean by that? Right. So this is something I've been talking about for years. And in fact, I've given a talk around the world. I gave this talk a can a few years ago, related to this on how advertising can change the world. Because our industry can absolutely change the world, but not in the ways that people currently think about it in that context. So I'm not talking about cause marketing. I'm not talking about purpose. I'm talking about something much more fundamental and profound than that, and yet so much more beneficial. So, you know, our industry historically has absolutely been responsible for selling through creating aspiration. And, you know, 30 years ago, those aspirations were very externally focused. You know, they were about badging yourself with the symbols of success. You know, things that showed you to arrive, things that showed that you were keeping up with the Joneses, you know, whatever you were. Today, there's a huge opportunity, and honestly, it made virtually nobody in our industry is seasoned this opportunity to completely redefine aspiration in a much more fundamental way that will benefit everybody. So, I'll give you a couple examples of what I mean. The first is, and I've been banging this drum for years as well. I want to see in advertising many more aspirational relationship role models of today. So historically, our industry is perpetuated stereotypes. And by the way, there's very practical reason for that. When you have to get a message across in 30 seconds, stereotypes are a fantastic shorthand. But the classic stereotype in advertising is, and this is heteronormative, you know, a couple with the man as a strong confident red winner and the woman as the warm nurturing caring homemaker. And you see this played out in numerous ads every single day. I want to see, as I said, the relationship role model of today, which is a partnership of equals, because today in every country around the world, both halves a couple work. They have to, because the economy demands it. And by the way, that applies to every kind of couple, you know, LGBTQ, whatever. That in turn requires completely new forms and negotiation as to, who does the housework, who does childcare, what happens, and this matters more in heteronormative couples. What happens when, for example, the wife earns more than the husband? You know, the wife has a job and the husband doesn't. Or, you know, couples where, and I have another friend like this where the woman is the primary red winner. The man has chosen to stay home and look off the children, but he is despised by his fellow men and women alike, because that is not a role model held up to aspire to. Oh my god, the opportunity to actually reflect what is really happening in the world today as aspirational, make people feel better about all of this, and give people ways to live their lives in these new models, and feel really great about it, and be able to look at different ways of doing it in a way that not just is a norm. That's a huge opportunity that nobody in our industry is taking. You created Make Love Not Porn, you created the Sex Tech Fund, you created, if we ran the world, which is now Harvard Business School Case Study, you are truly an aggressive entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur means taking on certain responsibilities that would have previously been done for you at an agency, and we talk about the plunger example with John Haggerty. What is one aspect of entrepreneurialism that you enjoy, maybe more than you would have anticipated when you left B.B.H.? The single best thing about being an entrepreneur is that it is stressful. Absolutely. I coined the hashtag several years ago, Start Up Stress, because I realised that if you looked at my life on social media, it could superficially look very glamorous. I was jetting off all around the place, but the reason I was jetting off all around the place was that people were paying me to go and talk in various countries. Again, that was how I was paying my mortgage. I deliberately decided to be completely open about how very tough it is being an entrepreneur. I coined the hashtag Start Up Stress, and the response was amazing. People mess with me going, "Oh my God, I'm so glad you go through this too, and you're being transparent about it." It is stressful, but the single best thing about it is that you decide exactly how you manage that stress. You are in charge of your own destiny. You are in charge of your own schedule, and that in itself is so de-stressing. Either way, also opening up about how stressful it is is very de-stressing too, because I'm not one of those entrepreneurs who feels that they have to pretend they're crushing it all the time. Everything is going great. In a way, it's liberating working in an era of tech where it is very hard to find investors, so I'm not taking meetings with VCs all the time where I have to put up this facade. I'm completely frank about how difficult it is running a sex tech business, because the people who want to support me know that and want to support me through it. The best thing about being entrepreneur is being your own boss in charge of everything, because ironically, it is very liberating on the stress front. It must be interesting this transition from getting validation from an agency founder like Nigel Boggle, who seems to have been another mentor of yours, and that type of validation is a secure and personal type of validation that you can count on. We all need forms of validation and then transitioning into being your own business, and you're getting a different type of validation that is much harder to earn, but I would assume there's also a much more satisfying validation to earn. It's something that I would also say to anybody listening to this podcast, don't look for validation from your job title or your role. My self-validation comes from, and I live my own philosophers, and this is something I've talked about a lot over the years. The most important starting point for anything is to take a long hard look at yourself and go, "What are my values? What do I believe in? What do I stand for? What am I all about?" And then to live your life and work your work according to those values, because that is fundamentally the secret of happiness. When you know that you are operating according to what you believe in and what is true to you, and you don't give a damn what anybody else thinks, okay? It's the only validation I need, and it's terrific to have external validation, and especially by the way these days, you know, what keeps me going on this very difficult path of being loved not porn is the validation I get from our community, our being loved not porn stars, people who say, "Oh my God, I love what you're doing. It's been so helpful to me." I mean, you know, that's important for my business, but fundamentally, nobody should need validation from anybody other than themselves. I'm aspiring to get there. Most of us in advertising know you for your public speaking, you mentioned public speaking, and you've spoken at conferences and summits around the world. When I watch you speak publicly, I see a very interesting contradiction. On one hand, I see someone who seems incredibly effortless, and at the same time, I see someone who seems incredibly prepared and well scripted. Can you talk a little bit about your preparation in the lead up to a 30 minute or one hour speech where you're planning to introduce a new idea? Sure, well, first of all, you should know that I am always scared shitless. before I speak anywhere. I'll worry about myself the day I'm not. That's reassuring because it doesn't seem that way. People tell me that, but I'm always incredibly nervous for our step out on the stage anywhere. But do you know, really, and I'm going to go back to something you and I were talking about before we actually began this interview. So one of the really interesting things too about leaving BbH in the summer of 2005 was that I always remember, I had a speak engagement that fall. I can't exactly what it was. It was in L.A. It was a digital conference of some kind. And I'd always done a lot of speaking while I was at BbH. And this was the first time I realized that, you know, historically, when I spoke as the head of BbH New York, I always had to take account of communicating the agency philosophy and the agency agenda. Right. Needs to make sure I didn't say anything that would piss our clients off. You know, I had to construct my presentation in a corporate context. And there was this moment of revelation in the fall of 2005 where I went, I can walk out in that stage and I can say whatever the hell I want. I can now put my own ideas out into the universe because I'm completely free to do so. And so, you know, what I love about speaking these days is that, you know, I'm always in whatever context. And, you know, I always take the brief from the client who's engaged me and I ask them, what do you want the audience to leave thinking, feeling and doing? And I then craft my talk specifically for that. But, you know, they have hired me to basically open up the audience's mind to new ideas, the future of their business, whatever it is. And so I am putting ideas that I believe in out into the universe. And so, you know, you know, in terms of preparation, it really is about rehearsing and making sure that I am delivering against my client's goals. By the way, another crucial factor, I time rehearse the hell out of everything. Okay. One of the most appalling things you can do as a speaker is overrun your time slot. And so I rehearse, you know, I time myself and I run through again and again and again to make damn sure I'm always spot on. Absolutely to time. I myself have fallen off agendas in the past because other speakers were not that courteous. So, you know, that's a very important part of preparation. But it really is, you know, I'm always putting things out there that I feel passionate about. And in that context, it's just that having conversation with the audience. It's terrific. Yeah. Yeah. It takes a lot of hard work to seem that effortless. One of the ways that you've used that untethered freedom to introduce ideas of your own is to become a leading voice for women and people of color in the industry. You have helped bring this issue to the forefront. I hear more people saying the right things, but are the actions matching up to the words, where are we in 2019 are things getting better in your view? Actions are absolutely not matching up to words. So no, I see way too much talking and way too little doing, you know, and that's why I'm constantly saying, especially to our industry, you know, don't talk about diversity. Don't do, you know, compelling emotional campaigns about diversity. Don't do stunts about diversity. Just be diverse. You know, communication through demonstration. That's what I'm looking for. And not enough of that is going on. Yeah. After Harvey Weinstein, you became a champion for sexual harassment. Fundamentally sexual harassment destroys women's dreams and derails women's careers. And our industry has long had a culture of silence and NDAs that has led to a lack of justice. You've become, for my research, you've really become sort of a repository for many of these women's deeply personal stories. How much of your sense of mission comes just simply from from being entrusted with their stories? Well, I mean, to be frank, I mean, I've been speaking out publicly about sexual harassment for years before me to ever happen. And I've been speaking out about it publicly because nobody else ever would. And, you know, I, since I was doing that anyway, I was sexually harassed at Cannes a number of years ago. And that was extraordinary to me because, you know, at the age of back then, I mean, I'm about to be 59 now. So this would have been when I was 55, I guess. You know, I mean, the fact that that would happen to me, I thought Jesus Christ, this is what young women and industry live with all the time as as per older women to. And so as I said, I've been speaking out about a few years and I've been hearing these stories for years. And I've been trying to persuade women to tell these stories and they've always been to understandably fearful to. But it wasn't until, you know, I put my quite industry in the wake of Harvey Weinstein being exposed because I thought at that point, maybe the time as finally common people will name names publicly. And that was when I mean, I've been getting these stories for years, but that was when a total like tsunami hit my inbox. And I'd always known it was bad. I'd never known it was that bad. And and yes, you know, I feel enormously motivated to expose the Harvey Weinstein's of our industry because of all the horrifying things I now know that to some degree, I wish I didn't know. And and you know, yet again, over the past, you know, year and a half, understandably both women and men are still too frightened to speak up on the record. And they're too frightened because the power of men doing the harassing are the gatekeepers of everything. Jobs pay raises promotions, awards opportunities, career paths, but I'm not giving up, you know, to, I said this at the sleepers conference back in November, because I spoke about the avalanche in my inbox a year ago. I felt the onus on me to report back to the audience. I said, I wanted to expose these men have spectacly failed. I can't get people to speak up. I understand why I'm not giving up. You know, the power of men and street, you think they've got away with it. They haven't. The power of the world industry who are covering up for power for men. And there are a number of those they have not got away with it either. And I'm going to keep going and keep trying to break those stories until that actually happens. Do you feel like agency leaders who largely agree with and want to champion this mission, find themselves for various reasons too scared to speak up? Maybe it's for the reason that you mentioned when you're at BBH, which is you feel this obligation to represent the values and the agenda of your agency and you're not sure where your own personal opinions fit within that context. No, there are a ton of agency leaders out there publicly chavness agenda who are sexual harassers themselves and and it's systemic. It's built into the structure of the agency, the holding company, because when that is what you real model at the top, everybody else knows they can get away with it. And it's literally so systemic. They're not going to do anything about it because they bring themselves down. Having seen you speak a number of times, here's an observation that I have made, which is that I think if people take the time to hear what you're saying and the message that you're espousing, most men in the industry actually full-throatedly agree with what you're saying, but because we live in a culture that is a sort of headline culture and a information morsel culture, they only see the headline and all of a sudden you represent the symbol of anti-man, which if you listen to your words, you're not anti-man. And all of a sudden you fall into this sort of black lives matter versus all lives matter nonsense where men feel this undue obligation to defend all mailhood when in fact, if they just listen to the full complexity of your message, they would understand that that maybe more of us are on the same page than we realize. Have you observed the same thing? To be frank, I've had very little of the negative sentiment you cite expressed to me, or I'm sure there's a ton more express that I don't get to hear about. I'm very gratified by the number of younger men in the industry who reach out to me, can't to me at can or wherever to say, oh my God, I couldn't agree more. And I think, you know, to your point, the men who get it, understand that what I'm trying to do is get this industry to be a better place for all of us. So for example, you know, off the back of my me to call out, I've had a ton of men write to me. And I've had a number of men write to me in a very interesting context, which is because me to is all about abuse of power. Okay. The flip side of sexual harassment when power is being abused is bullying and aggression exerted towards men as much as women. And so I've had men write to me and I've had men write to me. There's a men for our industry. I've had men write to me as emotively and as emotional as the women who've been sexually assaulted and raped, who've been bullied and literally bullied and harassed out of jobs and out of careers. And they they have had no way of speaking up themselves because our societal construct and masculinity is such that a man who tries to take a complaint about being bullied by his male executive creditor to HR or publicly is fearful of what he looks like as a man. And that he'll be thought of as less of a man because he couldn't take it. That's appalling. You know, and so everything I'm doing is about creating a kind of industry that both women and men would want to work in and would thrive and be a whole lot happier in. Yeah. Sexual harassment is a broad term and and on the spectrum of that term, it covers every thing from undue advances and misread flirtation all the way to serial rape. For those who fall on the complete other side of the spectrum and that sort of undue advance side of the spectrum, there have been people who fall on that side of the spectrum who've lost their careers. And as a necessary movement happens, sometimes people and their careers will sort of get caught in the spokes of a necessary movement. Do you believe that the punishment is befitting of the crime in all instances when people's names have been named? Two responses to that, I mean, the first is that, based on the contents of my inbox over the past year and a half, and, as I said for years before that, you have no idea of the scale of injustice delivered to the thousands of women who have been harassed, managed out of and left our industry because of sexual harassment. You have absolutely no idea. Secondly, you have no idea of the scale of injustice regarding the men responsible who have gone on to thrive, to continue to pay tons more money than women, because that is a fact of life in industry, to be celebrated and lauded and awarded, who have behaved absolutely appallingly and have forced out the women who tried to bring any kind of accountability to them. You have no idea of the scale. The tiny 0.00% that you see in the media is in no way representative at all of the vast amount of injustice that has gone on in our industry for literally the past century. So, that question is completely relevant in the context of that scale. Is the best solution essentially 50/50 gender balance in all departments? As I've been saying, again, for years, sexual harassment magically disappears in a gender-equal industry because when you have work environments at every level of a company that are 50/50 male female or, ideally, more female than male, because this has been the other way around for too long for an industry's primary consumer as female. First of all, there is no longer the implicit bro endorsement in a male-domin environment that it's okay to behave like that. And secondly, in a genuine equal environment, when men are engaging with women as professional equals at every level of a company every single day, when they are being exposed to an equal amount of amazing female creativity ideas thinking, they cease to see one in one of only two roles, girlfriend or secretary. What I love about your message is that I feel like you drive inclusion of women and people of color, not just as an equal rights advocate, but as a capitalist. The thesis of your inclusion and it's your term is make a shit ton more money and you're not apologetic about that. I mean, I just, I could weep for our industry. Our industry thinks it's glory days are over, it's glory days haven't even begun. We have not even begun to see what this industry could be like, how much money we could all be making, how much more dominant we could be as an industry with the talent and skills and creativity of women, people of color that is say-bored, LGBTQ older people. We have no idea. Warren Buffett put out an article, it might be eight or nine years ago now where he said most of America's prosperity was created using only 50% of its talent and so he actually sort of cited that as a reason for optimism that our country will prosper when women excel in the workforce. I could not agree more. Susan Cradle consulted with you before she took the CCO job at FCB, she's been on this podcast and she said that one thing that became that she became aware of is that once we started having these discussions is how men will take jobs they aren't ready for and women will wait until they are prepared and feel they have sort of a hundred percent of the qualifications and part of our job as bosses is telling them that they are ready to do it and showing them that they are ready to step up. Can you just talk about the challenge of sort of reprogramming women to better understand their worth and demand their worth? Susan Cradle, who my absolute door, she's a dear friend, she is one of the biggest talents now industry and she very kindly credits me with having opened her eyes to how much, I mean exactly the point you made because I was going do it, do it, do it, do it. But also in turn to provide that to other women and you know, Swati Bhattacharya who is the Chief Creative Office of FCB India, wrote an amazing letter of gratitude to Susan at the 3% conference last November, Swati was meant to be there to read it in person but she couldn't make it. And Susan made her take that role when Swati thought she wasn't ready for it and she has gone on to lead the agency, I mean FCB India, at agency of the year in India, they won all these awards and it's the point I make constantly about, you know, men are hard and promoted on potential, women are hard and promoted on proof and not even then. So you know, it's very easy when our industry is dominated by, you know, male leadership. For the men at the top to look at the man coming up with the rights and go, oh, he reminds me of myself at his age. I can see myself in him. He's great to have a beer with, I reckon you can do the job. Even though women, it's a completely different set of standards. Well, has she done the job before? Has she done the job long enough? Has she done the job well enough? And so what I say to the industry, again being saying this for years, is it's very simple, flip the equation. High and promote women on potential, high and promote men on proof and we'd see a very different picture very quickly. And so, yeah, you know, A to everybody, high and promote women on potential and B to women when you offer that opportunity, step up and seize it with both hands because you can absolutely do it as much as all those less qualified men being given those jobs can in it, think they can. And so the point I make is, because you know, I get women saying to me, you know, oh, but Cindy, you know, you know, with all these diversity issues, I don't want to be hard just because I'm a woman. And I go get over it and look around you at all the media, come in and you've got hard articles for men. Think that job and then do a, love your amazing job in it to demonstrate how much you deserve the opportunity. Right. Part of being a leading voice on these important issues is that you've become a highly adept social media influencer. Do you have any sort of self-imposed rules for how you wield your influence on Twitter or in social media? Well, you know, I'm just being myself on social media. You know, I love social media to death because it's a great way to broadcast the things you care about, to get more people to rally behind them. And you know, I don't, you know, I don't look for followers. I don't do anything to encourage that. I'm just putting what I believe in out there and connecting with enough people who share those views and want to, you know, spread them on and respond to them. That, you know, I just, I think the best thing about social media, obviously, you know, that there's a lot of debate these days about the negatives and the positives. I mean, I acknowledge the negatives, but ultimately I think social media does more good than evil. Not least of all because it makes each of us feel we're not alone, you know, whether it's the people who respond into my start-up stress hashtag or, you know, now that I'm partnering with ARP on their disrupt aging initiative to basically champion older people everywhere, you know, I have the hashtag say your age, you know, I'm about to be 59. Whoopi, I talk about that as much as possible and I had so many people respond to that. I think it's a great way of putting things out there that just to my point earlier, give people the self validation they need, not the, not the external validation that may be, you know, misdirected or wrong headed. In order to enjoy success, we must endure failure. It's part of life. At this point in your journey, you said you're 59, how do you view your relationship to failure? Is that a healthy relationship that you have with failure? Oh my god, yeah, no, I'm failing all the time. I mean, I mean, I, you know, and in fact, this is a point that I make in my public speaking gigs because I always say to the audience, I'm not one of those speakers who pontificates on the stage. Everything I talk to you about, I'm doing myself. I'm trying, I'm experimenting, I'm failing, I'm trying again. And so, you know, I'm, I'm constantly trying things and failing. I mean, you know, I talk about failure. I talk about the fact that, you know, a couple of years ago, three percent conference, you know, ad week very kindly called me up and said, we have these, you know, awards for, I can't, what it was, you know, like for groundbreakers now industry or innovators, you know, what we're giving you on these awards and you want to interview you, you know, I went, okay, fine. And the reporter said to me, so, you know, how do you feel? You've, you know, broken ground, you know, you know, driven change industry and I said, I haven't. I've spectacularly failed because I've been banging the diversity drum for years and nothing's happened. I failed, you know, I stood on the stage at three percent conference last year, as I said, and I said to the audience, I wanted to expose the halving wine to the industry and I failed. You've affected massive change. You're not where you want to be yet, but you've made incredible strides. Well, well, I hope so, but nevertheless, in the big scale of things, so far I've failed. but I'm going to keep trying. Yeah. So if we're going to change the talent equation and we're going to hire women more on potential than proof, I'll ask you, when you see yourself in a junior account executive, what is it that you're most often seeing for the good and for the bad? Well, I mean, I don't, obviously, what I'm not doing because I know long work in the industry is I'm not interviewing and engaging with the young people in the industry on a regular basis. I meet them at the 3% conference. But also I'm interviewing for my own business. And I think in both young men and women alike, in terms of potential, what I respond to is something that I think people lose sight of when they look at what I'm doing. I do what I do because I bloody love our industry and I bloody love advertising. And what I respond to is a passionate love of what it is that we do. What we do at its best has the ability, as I said, to change the world, to reshape culture, to do all sorts of things that to be honest, we're not even leveraging our ability to do. And so for me, the biggest indicator potential is just somebody who absolutely loves this industry and is passionate about what we do and wants to do their very best within it. You've managed employees throughout your career, large teams and small teams and presumably you manage people now. What have you worried more about being too hard on people or being too soft on people? I've had occasion to say this to my management team and employees many times in the course of my career right up to the present day. It is more important to be respected and not necessarily liked than liked and not necessarily respected. And by the way, the ideal is to achieve both. But if you are concerned, it is better to err on the side of respect. Because when the chips are down and time is a tough, you know, people want the leader who they know will make the tough decisions to get them through that versus the one that's great fun down the pub. In the last ten plus years since you've become an entrepreneur, what have you gotten better at saying no to? I mean, I'm pretty good at saying no to a lot of things. I think really what being an entrepreneur forces you to do is prioritize and focus. And so I'm very single-minded about what is worth my time. And so I'm able to say no to anything that I don't think is a good use of my time. Yeah. Speaking of which, something that you have said yes to is a good use of your time and you mentioned, you made a brief mention of it earlier as your partnership with AARP to sort of take on this conversation that we don't hear a lot about today in the context of our culture, which is ageism. Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of that partnership and what you hope to accomplish? Absolutely. So I've been combating ageism for years, you know, in our industry and in business and life as a whole. We were talking earlier about things that are going to waste now industry. Oh my God, the waste of experience and expertise. And this is why, you know, the term I use is I go, I'm a street so needs older people, or as I like to call us experts. Because when you are older, you have built up over years a wealth of expertise in, you know, you know, just, I mean, at its most basic, any nightmare situation in the risers, any business crisis, you know, we know what to do immediately because we've been around the block 15 million times. Okay. That is enormously valuable in the business context. It saves so much time. You know, people management, that is something our industry does not train people in, by the way, by the time you're an older person working advertising, you've had years of people management that means that you can manage a team to get the best result out. You can manage people to defuse conflict, make everything go so much more smoothly on day to day basis. Something as fundamental as craft skills, the sheer repository of craft skills in older creatives, account men, planners, producers, you know, whatever it is that, that younger people need to learn, but that mentorship and that coaching isn't there. I mean, honestly, I could go on, on, on, on, on, but what all of that adds up to is whatever work you need to do as an agency, the sheer time and cost efficiency of having older people in the workforce doing it. It's, it's an absolute crime how age is starting to start industry is. And so that's what ARP and I are partnering to challenge. And I've been putting together for them a call to action for the industry that is a whole list of actions every single agency and client company, by the way, can take to change this. And so that's what I'm going to talk about is the fact that we have a lot of, last year, you know, together with ARPI hosted three dinner salons in LA, New York and Chicago, where we brought together a group of industry leaders, you know, creative CEOs that these were private conversations, you know, we reassured them nothing was going to get quote, an attributed. And that led to fascinating and very insightful conversations around the dinner table, because leaders, everybody is staring at you in the face. Aging is the one thing that we all do. It's universal and it's to our own benefit to make damn sure that our industry is not discriminate in this context. And so, you know, we've got several things we'll be announcing this year that I'm doing with this ruptaging that I'm very excited about. It's particularly egregious, I think, on the creative side, where our work is the best representation of our skills, but our work also ages and dog years just by virtue of the speed of our industry. And so you look at a campaign that might have been the darling of the industry seven years ago. But when you watch it, it looks 70 years old. And so as a result of this, it's sort of like no matter what you accomplish, strictly as it relates to work, not as it relates to the management of people or the craft, you're sort of only as good as the things that you've made in just the last two or three years. And I think that really works against people as they move into their 50s in creative departments and look for new jobs. Do you agree with that? Do you know that there's a huge misconception there, because, you know, you've just very kindly earlier in this interview, I mean, to pay tribute to my entrepreneurs and my social media skills. I'm 59 years old. Okay. We are as up to the minute digital savvy as any millennia. It's a great point. And, you know, there's this misconception, which is born of prejudice and stereotyping. And that's why it's so important, as I'm doing with this ruptaging, to take a holistic approach to this. You know, it's about breaking down these ridiculous inherent biases in everybody's minds, including in the minds of the young people coming up through the ranks in the industry. That's a great point. So we end every podcast with the same two questions. We're going to do a little experiment, because I'm applying these questions to you, even though you wear many different hats than my previous guest. And if it doesn't work, we'll just edit it out. The first question is, in a presentation of your work to a client, a VC, someone for whom you're trying to sell an idea, what is the most horrifying or excruciating response you've ever received to an idea you attempted to sell? Um, actually, I think the worst response I've ever received, and this is indicative of fundamental gender bias, was I was talking about the idea for if we ran the world to a VC. This is many years ago. We said, um, your problem, Cindy, is that you're thinking too big. You should think really small. That's a good one. And the final question, and again, let's see if it applies. We call this question the one that got away. And the premise is, what is that idea that has lived in your heart, and you've tried to sell it on many occasions, you've tried to bring it to fruition on many occasions. And for whatever reason, you just couldn't seem to bring it into the spotlight or give it its proper due, but it continues to live with you and you continue to carry it with you. Okay. So I have a different type of answer to that, okay? Because in terms of my own ideas, um, I have an idea, I make it happen, okay? Yeah. I, to me, but, but, and I've spoken about this publicly, any account person worth their salt and any person in advertising worth their salt has eternally filed away in their mind that list and idea. It's a short list, but often it's quite a long one. It might not be quite a long one of all of those ideas that were bloody brilliant that never actually got produced and ran. Okay. And that didn't happen for a variety of reasons. The clients appetite for risk, you know, the clients budget, you know, um, the agency's willingness to go out and all in, but I absolutely have my list of things that years, decades later, made me go red hot with rage because that was a bloody brilliant idea that we couldn't make happen, okay? And, um, and, you know, that's why I actually am a fan of something, you know, people push back on, which is whatever you have. in your bottom drawer, whatever you have in your back pocket, that is that list. If you ever find an opportunity to recycle that idea for a different client, bloody do it. In fact, that was why, again years ago, in BVH New York, I deliberately, after, you know, a couple of instances of this, wrote into our contract that if a client rejection idea we owned it. Cindy Gallup, thank you for championing important conversations that belong in the public discourse. Thank you for speaking truth to power. And thank you for joining me today. Absolutely pleasure. Pleasure, thanks. All right, thank you very much to Cindy Gallup. Thank you to JSM Music and the executive producer of this podcast, Jeff Fierello. And if you're enjoying the podcast and excited for season two, please share it with a colleague or friend. And until next episode, peace.