Anne Bologna
Anne Bologna serves as managing director of MDC Partners (www.mdc-partners.com), a holding company that contains several advertising agencies, including Crispin, Porter, & Bogusky. Prior to joining MDC Partners, Bologna was the managing director for Cramer-Krasselt’s New York office. Between 2005 and 2010, she was founding partner and CEO of the independent agency, Toy. Over its nearly five-year run, Toy New York garnered numerous industry accolades and attracted clients such as Amazon, Budweiser, Virgin Mobile, Macy’s, and Google. One of the agency’s most celebrated campaigns, “Elf Yourself” for OfficeMax, achieved unique notoriety when it spread virally to over 200 million people in less than six weeks.
Prior to that, Bologna spent much of her 25 years in the advertising business at Fallon; first as director of strategic planning for its Minneapolis office and later as president of the New York office, where she nearly doubled the agency’s billings and transformed the outpost into one of the top ten most awarded agencies in the world. During that time, she contributed pioneering thinking to a number of global brands, creating the “brand bible” that gave focus to Starbucks in the late 1990s and helping develop the global brand strategy for Citibank’s award-winning “Live Richly” campaign, considered the most successful in Citibank’s history.
In 2008, Advertising Age named Anne Bologna a “Woman to Watch.” She is a guest lecturer at Columbia University and one of an elite group of industry leaders who co-authored the book The 22 Irrefutable Laws of Advertising and When to Violate Them (Wiley, 2006). In 2009, Bologna received the “Changing the Game Award”—an honor given by Adweek and Advertising Women of New York to honor women who’ve reinvented their businesses to meet today’s challenges. She’s happily married to her college sweetheart and has one son, who lives in Brooklyn.
Tracy Tuten: Let’s begin today with how your career evolved. Did you grow up wanting to work in advertising?
Anne Bologna: So, the thirty thousand–foot view of my career? It is not an exaggeration to say I am probably one of those limited number of people who have a blessed career. I’ve only worked in four agencies, one of which was my own, before starting at MDC Partners, and all of those agencies were sort of at the peak of their life stage when I was there, which was purely a coincidence, of course.
First of all, I was a television reporter right out of college, but it wasn’t my calling and so I got into advertising by having dropped out of the reporter business. I went back to my alma mater and took these interest inventory tests, and all signs pointed to advertising, which was not at all anything I had ever considered. But it turns out that those tests must be good because the person who was counseling me, she said, “I think you’d be great in advertising. You should go do some information interviews.”
After my first interview, I was hooked on advertising. I thought I really feel like hand-and-glove fit with this industry. Then with my second interview, I was actually offered a job. I spent ten years at an agency called Campbell Mithun in Minneapolis. I spent ten years there, which I call my MBA in advertising because it was an agency that had a number of blue chip packaged-goods companies, like General Mills, Pillsbury, and ConAgra.
One of the things that Campbell Mithun did that was very noteworthy during that time, was having launched Healthy Choice from scratch. The Healthy Choice launch was obviously a tremendous success. It’s still around and it still is a robust business. I worked there for ten years as an account person and then I became an account director.
I started to get a little bit bored because all the assignments seemed to be the same to me. I was looking for new challenges, and so I walked across the street to Fallon. I started at Fallon as a planner, an account planner, which is on the strategy side of our business. I was a senior planner even though I had no idea what I was doing exactly in that particular discipline, but a handful of years later, I became the head of the planning department, and I had as many as twenty-five planners reporting to me. I did that for ten years.
At that point, I left Minneapolis and I moved out to New York City. This was in the early 2000s and at that time I wanted to make the switch from running a department to running an agency. I was the president of Fallon New York in the early 2000s. My primary goal at Fallon New York was to turn around the agency’s creative. It was a big challenge. At that time, Fallon New York didn’t even have a reel. In our business, the reel is obviously a catchphrase for having a body of work that is a calling card to clients. I found a creative partner, Ari Merkin, and together we reinvented the office. By the end of that third year there, we were proud to be able to be able to say that little New York office of Fallon was among the top ten most creative agencies in the world. We were very, very proud of that.
It was right at that point that the industry started to shift. There were start-ups in New York, like Mother and Taxi and Strawberry Frog. You could see things changing, and at the same time, Fallon didn’t necessarily need a New York office. It seemed like a good time to start an agency. That’s just what we did and we called the agency “Toy.”
Tuten: Where did the name Toy come from?
Bologna: Basically, Toy was a metaphor for ideas that are as engaging as a new toy. That was basically the idea, which I think kind of sums up what was happening in the advertising industry. In other words, we need consumers much more than they need us. If our ideas are not engaging, as engaging as a new toy, we won’t be able to communicate effectively with our consumers. So we founded an agency based on that philosophy.
Tuten: What was it like to compete as a new agency in this world of powerhouses?
Bologna: We did some things that we are really proud of. We launched the Kindle (for Amazon) and developed the “Elf Yourself” campaign for Office Max. The “Elf Yourself” campaign attracted 193 million visitors and was called the best viral campaign in the history of the Web. More than 123 million “elves” were created and shared online.
But my hindsight learning was that we started the agency too late in our careers. After five years, we closed. We were an amazing threesome, the three partners—myself, and Ari Merkin, who’s now at Crispin Porter, and David Dabill, who’s also at MDC. We needed another five or six years to reach the level of scale that we needed. At this late stage of our lives, it just didn’t feel like we had the luxury of doing that. After five years, the timing was right with our employees and with our clients for us to say, “You know what? Let’s transition all of our clients and we’ll all kind of move on.” We tried to treat our people well in that transition and now here we are.
Tuten: What was it like, giving up an agency that you essentially birthed?
Bologna: It was pretty emotional stuff. I call it “the exceedingly rational business decision with profoundly emotional consequences” because it was difficult. It was like giving up a baby, really. And it still is. It will always be one of the best experiences in advertising that I will ever have had because there’s nothing like having your own. It certainly is one of the most unique experiences, but it lives on because it is actually you. One of the best things that came out of it is it strengthened the partnerships and the friendships, frankly, that I had with my two business partners at the agency, David and Ari. That’s something I’ll carry with me forever, as well.
We did some good things and we left a little bit of a creative legacy. “Elf Yourself” is still one of the most significant successes in viral marketing. I think it reached one in five Americans, after just six weeks. So funny. And, of course, launching the Kindle was a something that we were proud to be a part of. It felt like it was a wonderful and precious little moment in time, but for all kinds of reasons it was time to move on.
Tuten: And then you joined Cramer-Krasselt as managing director of the New York office.
Bologna: Interestingly, Peter Krivkovich, who is CEO of C-K, was one of the first people that I spoke to after we decided to close down Toy.
Well, the transition was astoundingly seamless because C-K honestly shared all the same values that I have, which range from a strong work ethic to a humble sense of self. For instance, I don’t talk much about myself. I always say, “I’m from Minnesota. I don’t talk about myself. I just get the work done,” you know? And that was similar to C-K.
C-K is at heart a Midwestern agency, in terms of their home base. They have a very strong work ethic and a philosophy of being humble: don’t pound your chest too hard and talk about yourself too much. Just focus on the work and focus on the client and good things will come. That’s the culture, but it’s also an agency that is essentially smart. It isn’t really fair to summarize an agency in one word, but if I had to do it, I’d say that C-K is smart. It attracts smart people. It’s run by smart people, and the CEO and the chief financial officer and the chief operating officer are all incredibly smart people and they focus on business strategy and consumer strategy. They spend a lot of time on getting the foundation, which is often termed “the strategy.”
And if you played a reel of all the agency’s work beyond just television, you’ll just feel the sort of intelligence that’s baked into it. I value putting intelligence into marketing, because I think the marketing lasts longer and it works harder. That’s what led me to being a strategic planner in the first place. C-K does that—it puts intelligence into everything it produces.
Tuten: It seems in this industry we tend to think that creative work can be creative or it can be effective, but we might not see many examples of both. When creative is smart, it can achieve both?
Bologna: Exactly. You see a lot of clever but kind of “dumb,” or not clever but creative—but still dumb—advertising on the market. Consumers can feel when it’s this kind of creative for its own sake as opposed to being smartly creative, you know? I really appreciate effective and smart creative, and I appreciate that consumers get it.
Tuten: Has it been hard to integrate into a new agency? How is it different from creating a new agency from scratch?
Bologna: When you start an agency from scratch, you have this ability to attract people who want that. People who are eager to see what the agency can become. I’ve always had that experience, though, whether it was growing up or working at developed agencies or beginning my own. I am spoiled because I grew up with a very, very wonderful family. I always say I won the gene-pool lottery. So I was lucky that way, and I was lucky to work at both Campbell Mithun and Fallon with smart, nice people. I’ve just been spoiled by that.
Tuten: What’s a typical day like for you?
Bologna: Well, every day’s different, which is one of the things I love about advertising. We basically learn new things for a living and because all of our clients’ problems are new, not only across clients but within clients, you’ve got to learn something new every day in order to exist in this business. But I would say the general manager’s job falls into less than a handful of buckets. One big part of my job is setting a vision, and setting a mission, and creating an environment in the agency where people can do the jobs that they need to do and do them well. Setting the bar and maintaining high standards, which is the leadership piece in its purest form.
Beyond that, I deal with a lot of the soft issues, like people issues, growth and development issues, and opportunities. Frankly, I just deal with a lot of the people-people-people stuff. That’s one big bucket.
Tuten: Are you involved in client work?
Bologna: That is another bucket of work—client relationships. I try to forge very strong trust-based relationships with each one of our clients. I’m almost an activist in that regard. I’m very proactive in being involved in enough of the detail so that I actually know my clients’ businesses. I have to be involved in client work. I figure the minute I become only a figurehead, then I should be fired. I should fire myself.
Do you know why I think that? In advertising, we are really simply a service business. We service our clients. We make things, but at the end of the day, we are an extension of our clients’ business problems and their brands. I think if you get too far away from being deeply involved in your clients’ businesses, if you get too far away to add value, you’re over. Frankly, clients are paying for leadership from senior staff and if they’re not, they should be. Those that aren’t usually will end up regretting it. Why? Because I have a lot of experience to bring to bear on behalf of my clients. That’s what senior staff does. I really like doing that. You could think of client relationships and adding value to clients as kind of a whole bucket in the role of a managing director.
The third bucket is new business development. To work on developing new business means that I’m constantly out in the marketplace meeting people, networking, and making sure that people that I know—or people that I could or should know—know what the agency is doing. I send e-mails and notes and letters. I contact people and let them know what’s happening, and now that there’s social media, I can post things on Facebook and Twitter about the things the agency is doing. Definitely new business is another bucket of tasks related to my job.
The final bucket is really just the general, operational part. There’s just a lot of business stuff. I run a business here, too, as well as an agency, and that’s a lot about the numbers for everything ranging from how well we’re running the place to what kind of light bulbs should we have. It’s running the infrastructure; decisions that nobody really cares about, but yet can’t be neglected.
Tuten: People oftentimes struggle with maintaining a balance between work life and home life. One might suggest this is harder for women than men and also harder in a business like advertising than it might be in some other professions. How do you manage maintaining balance? Or do you?
Bologna: That’s a good question, and I have a little bit of a different answer than you might expect. I didn’t do this consciously, but as I look back on my career and my professional and personal life, I never really balanced. I never said to myself, “Gee. I’ve just got to get more balance.”
I did say, “I wish I could spend more time with my child.” I don’t think any mother, working mother, ever feels like she’s spending enough time with her child. But I’ve always integrated my work life with my personal life. I don’t know if that’s unusual, but I’ve always blurred those lines. My business relationships became my personal relationships, and my personal relationships became my business relationships. That’s still the case. It all felt satisfying to me because I just never drew those dividing lines. I’ve been called a “workaholic,” but I’ve never felt like a workaholic. I feel like I love what I do and I like all the people that I do it with. This is why I’m extremely careful about choosing who I work with. When you’re working with people that you don’t see eye to eye with or people who are just big energy drainers, which is poison to me, that’s when work starts to feel like work.
Tuten: How did you grow from your early work as a planner to serving in leadership roles?
Bologna: This goes back to the fortunate part. If you look back over my career, you could say that the majority of my career has been spent at Fallon. My experiences there totaled twelve or thirteen years. I always have said the culture of Fallon is simply an extension of me. You have to consider too that not only did I feel so consistent with the culture of Fallon, but I also worked there during my most formative years. I was there during my early-to-mid thirties through to the mid-to late forties. It just felt like I was there forever. Those are really formative years. During that time I rose from just being an employee to being a manager to being a leader. I grew up there. It’s like you’re birds of a feather. Toy was more of the same. During my time at C-K, likewise. I have felt that I worked with people that I would want to spend time with. I’m so fortunate to be able to work with like-minded colleagues and like-minded clients.
As for leadership, people either take to leadership or they don’t. I did and I do. Even if becoming a leader is difficult for someone, even if a person doesn’t take to the leadership role initially, growing into a leadership role is really about serving others. There comes a point in a leader’s tenure when they have to reconcile the fact that leadership is nothing more than being the best possible version of yourself in service of others. Basically, that’s what leadership is. To lead, you’ve got to get comfortable with that.
Once you step into that role of leadership—well for me, at least, it’s not like I miss being in the actual day-to-day practitioner roles. Why? Because once you have a certain role in the agency, it’s not like you ever really stop. I still do account planning every day. I still do account management every day. I kind of pretend to be a creative every day. It is more satisfying to me to help other people to be the best version of the roles they are playing, which is what they are, than for me to be doing those roles, though. In that way, I guess you can say that I’ve crossed over to the side of facilitating and developing people more so than doing the work of the agency.
I’ll tell you this, if I wasn’t around account planners, or around account planning such that I could at least contribute, I probably would miss it, but I’m still around it. And I’m better off, because I think there are people that are better than me now doing account planning. I can add value, but the people actively in those roles are current and practiced in their respective crafts.
Tuten: Do you have any rituals that are important to your ability to work effectively? Things you do to gear up for work?
Bologna: That is an interesting question. I do a couple of things. One of my rituals—really more of a practice than a ritual—is to nurture diversity. I’m really, really big on diverse people. I love getting a group of people who have different points of view together in a room. When you do that, chances are the room is not going to be a comfortable place for anyone there! But good things can come out of a room full of different people with different points of view. I even hire that way. Companies need to fill themselves with diverse people. Agencies need diversity to grow and succeed. Pick people with the same values, and you’ll get the same outcomes. So I’m really big on that. I also try to foster debate and discussion. People tell me that I create tension. I call it “creative tension.” I call it “healthy tension.”
First of all, I think when you are disagreeing with someone, the act of disagreeing must always be managed with utmost respect for the individual. I won’t tolerate people treating others in a disrespectful manner, no matter the nature of the disagreement. But healthy discussion and debate, I think, is how you get to places, to more creative solutions.
The other thing I believe in and that I use as a practice for effectiveness is to be “in touch.” When my son was young, I really felt like I was in touch. If you have children, you know that’s how you stay current. Just look at the children and you know what’s happening! You look and see what they’re doing, and that keeps you fresh. This is really key for creativity. Creativity comes when you combine two things that aren’t generally combined. That’s why I talk to a lot of people—I find stimulation in talking to a lot of diverse people. And I read a lot. I keep myself in touch with whatever is new and fresh. I’m sort of an early adopter of new technologies and new things because I think that’s how you make connections between things that might otherwise not be made. So my unwritten rules are just the whole embracing of a sense of diversity and outside influences and bringing those things to bear to solve the problem at hand.
Tuten: If you had a magic, fairy wand and with it you could change one thing about advertising, what would you change?
Bologna: I would abolish all fear. There is so much fear now. Too much fear in the business world and particularly today, with the economy the way it is. One of the things I lament about is the way fear limits us from making advances forward. It’s not like I’m pointing fingers because the clients are under pressure. Still, the business world in general has a lot of legacy and fear and we have to stand up to pressure and adversity. These are just words when I say them—it’s easy to say these things, of course. But it can be amazing when you stand up in the face of pressure and adversity and you just take a stand for something and you decide you’re going to take a risk with something. That takes personal courage, and I think we need more of that today than ever.
And in the agency world there’s a fear of change. On the client side, there’s fear of being the champion for an idea that has longer-term potential than just next quarter. So I would eradicate fear.
Tuten: Is there a way to do this?
Bologna: Well, first of all, I think humor can be very useful sometimes. It can be useful to think of people from the perspective of a parent. I would say everything you needed to know about humans you learn as a parent. If you’re not a parent, I would say think about what it was like for you when you were a child or when you were a teenager. You never wanted to do what your parents told you to do. In fact, if they told you what to do, you wanted to do just the opposite. Everybody is still that way.
If you want to get people to do things, you’ve got to take note of human nature and you’ve got to do a bit more cajoling and allow people to have ideas of their own. Nobody wants to be told what to do. You need to inspire people and to help direct and guide people to make good decisions on their own. I deal with fear the same way I would deal with any challenge. I brought up the humor thing because sometimes humor can be the great leveler. It can cut through a lot of tension. I remember I’ve done that since I was a kid. I’m a pretty straightforward gal, and I try to deal with things head-on. I don’t let things fester and I’m also not big on subterfuge. I always say I’m too stupid for politics. I just don’t get that stuff. I just say what needs to be said. But I’m direct and yet respectful of people’s humanity and people’s sensitivity. I deal with things straight on, but I also use a liberal amount of humor and empathy.
Tuten: It’s easy to forget how powerful simply showing empathy to others can be.
Bologna: Oh yes. Besides the fact that human beings can be far more fragile than they appear, there’s also this fragile thing called ego. Sometimes you just have to be mindful of the fact that ultimately everyone needs to feel all right about themselves. I remember I heard a terrorist negotiator once say that the secret to successful negotiation is to allow your opponent to save face. I think people forget that. People forget that nobody wants to look stupid. No one wants to look wrong, and certainly not in a big meeting when the stakes are high and others can observe your shortcomings. People don’t want their dignity challenged. You’ve got to be mindful of those things as you handle difficult situations. It takes a deft hand.
At the end of the day, I would say the one thing that I’ve always found that transcends things and makes difficult things very easy besides a liberal amount of humor is just simple honesty and integrity. Those two things will get you a long way. Even recently, I’ve had to face some very difficult conversations with clients. Conversations involving very sensitive situations with clients. Whether they knew they were doing it or not, situations in which clients were treating some of our people with disrespect. Those are hard conversations, but they are conversations that must be had. You can’t let those things go. As a leader, I have to bring those things up, but such conversations have to be managed in just the right way. If you do it with integrity and honesty and treat them the way you want to be treated, it’s going to be okay. I can’t think of any situation where this approach has gotten me into trouble or even gotten me an adverse effect. Frankly, if it has, it was probably meant to be anyway, whatever the outcome was, even if the agency got fired or they asked me off the business, whatever. Probably in the end, it was the right thing.
Tuten: Mad Men has reintroduced a lot of stereotypes about advertising. Do you see any truth to those stereotypes in the industry today?
Bologna: Well, I think a lot of stereotypes still exist, I just think they’re a lot more hidden today than they used to be. They’re a lot more under the radar. There are things that happen and things people believe or don’t believe, but these kinds of things are kept more covert. I try to ignore all that, I guess. When you watch that show, I think the things that definitely still exist in the industry today are the characters. In fact, there are a lot of characters in the business, which is one of the things I love about it. Sometimes the quirkier you are, the better. I think human beings are characters, and I think sometimes we hide our quirkiness, which is not a good thing.
There’s a lot of drama in agency business. Whether you’re making a show about it or not, there’s a lot of drama in agency business. I think it’s because we deal with the most fragile part of the human condition. We use our imaginations for a living, which means you have to have an idea. That means you’re putting yourself out there—way out there—all the time, every day. It’s a very insecure place when you’re doing that. You’re dealing with a lot of human drama in the whole business.
Even beyond creativity, pitching business is the lifeblood of the agency business. We’re constantly pitching. There is no high like winning, and there’s very few lows like losing. It’s an emotional rollercoaster. I always say that managing an agency is really about managing energy. You can help build that energy and fuel that energy in a positive way, or you can do the opposite. If you lose a pitch, an agency feels terrible, just terrible. . If you lose several in a row, which happens to all agencies sometimes because that’s just how it goes, it can be extremely demoralizing. There is an ebb and flow to the industry. Agency leaders have to figure out how to just keep people up.
The other thing, that’s not as prevalent in the industry today that should be more prevalent, and that did exist back in the Mad Men era, is the ability to get to the point. This might sound funny. But watch an episode with a pitch in it. If you watch their presentations, Don Draper will spend about two minutes just setting up the situation, something like, “Well, okay. You came to us and you said you want to sell hotels.” Then he says about a minute’s worth of explanation on creative strategy and then he shows the ads. That’s it. Agencies have gotten into this really bad habit of spending forty-five minutes or more, and one hundred and twenty slides to explain the most obvious things. We explain things the client knows. We explain what can be assumed. And in the process, we make something that should be exciting and interesting, boring. We have made things a lot more complicated and time-consuming than they need to be.
Tuten: I see that kind of inability to focus in many areas today. Do you ever say that to the team you are working with as you prepare presentations?
Bologna: I do try. I think if you ask people here one of the things that I am notorious for saying is, “Excuse me. Do you have a point? So what’s your point?” It’s like, “Get to the point!” People do not want to hear you drone on and on. A good metaphor is PowerPoint. On a slide template, there is a headline and then there’s a whole body of text. The client doesn’t need to hear all the text. Get to the headline! Then move on to the story. We tend to overwhelm clients with too much information that’s not really leading to a solution. That’s something that has become prevalent throughout the industry—the overkill of information. Mad Men has that right. That’s how presentations ought to be and that’s a lesson that the industry has forgotten.
You know, this isn’t really rocket science. We are in a very human business, whether people like to admit that or not. If you look at some of the best advertising ideas of all times, they are so incredibly simple. Now, the business world has gotten very complex. How to reach consumers is complex. I’m not issuing a call for oversimplification. I am, however, issuing a call for simplicity.
Tuten: But everyone has bought into the same approach. What if one agency goes in with simplicity and another goes in with overkill. There’s the fear you mentioned earlier—what one agency loses from an impression of lack of preparedness.
Bologna: Yes, right. We’re our worst enemy. You know why? It’s because agencies are so competitive. And the times that we do that most is when we’re pitching. You keep thinking to yourself, “Oh my God, my competitors are probably going to come in with more ideas and a better strategy.” Agencies tend to react to that by presenting more and saying more and going deeper into the details when, in practice, you should do the opposite. You should have better ideas and explain them less [laughter].
Tuten: What changes in the industry have you found surprising?
Bologna: One of the things that is most surprising to me is that things are really not as different as we think they are. Consumers aren’t that different. What’s different is how they’re behaving and what they’re interacting with. But the basic motivations? They are the same. Five years ago, I did not get the majority of my news on Twitter. I still got the news. My need for news is the same, but where I go to get the news is different. The point though is that human nature has remained very much the same. As an industry, we tend to forget this. The other thing about advertising is that we’re in a “back to the future” situation as an industry. We are actually returning to some of the approaches we used long ago. Remember, the soap operas were invented by advertisers. That was branded entertainment. Now, years later, we see brand-sponsored entertainment as one of the most rapidly developing areas of advertising.
I was reading a piece that was published in Harvard Business Review in the early nineties. [It] was published almost twenty years ago. The article was about launching brands without mass media advertising. The article was all about the importance of sponsorship and promotions. It talked about Swatch, Häagen-Dazs, and The Body Shop. Since then, of course, there’s been Starbucks. The idea is that consumers aren’t watching as much television anymore, and we have to respond with sponsorships and promotions.
But, you know what? When advertising started, consumers weren’t watching television! Brands infiltrated popular culture then and when brands infiltrate culture and consumers’ lives now, we think how it is all brand new. It’s really not! What’s new is the range of vehicles and technologies. We just have to use some of those old-fashioned principles of getting your brand in front of consumers in a relevant way without just pouring money into thirty-second TV commercials. My short answer to what’s surprising to me is that things are actually not that different. Once you look beneath the massive changes in vehicles and technologies to the way consumers actually interact with messages in the media, the fundamentals are still the same.
Tuten: Share a campaign that is personally meaningful to you. Is there one that stands out? A favorite?
Bologna: Do you mean from my own personal career? I have one that comes to mind. One from my history that is near and dear to me is Citibank—the “Live Richly” campaign. It launched in 2000, I believe. What I loved about it is that it was like a good movie. When you go and see a really good movie, the movie stays with you for not only days, but you remember it for years. That’s what happens with a movie that really resonates with you. The same thing that makes a movie great is the same thing that makes an advertising campaign great. It’s not easy—but a lot has to go right.
With the Citibank “Live Richly” campaign, everything went right. First off, the clients were wonderful people. Anne McDonald and Brad Jakeman were the clients, who are now still professionals in marketing. Anne and Brad are really very talented, visionary people. They decided that they wanted to do the best work in the world, not just in banking, which, by the way, was not known for great advertising. So they set an enormously high vision, an aspirational vision for the campaign. They did their homework. They didn’t even do an agency search until they had their own ducks in a row. So they really set an aspirational vision, and then they got their act together.
One thing that’s become too uncommon in the agency business is that sometimes a client needs to kind of get their own house in order before they do an agency search. So Citibank did that. They got their house in order. They spent a couple of years figuring out their own internal politics and their own product and they put together a really thorough visionary brief, and then they decided to do an agency search. In a nutshell, they were brilliant people who set a high aspiration and did their homework and they briefed the agencies really well.
In the agency business it is a little bit like garbage in–garbage out. The work is only ever as good as what you put into it. I always say that one of the dirty little secrets in the agency business is that agencies really are pleasers. Agencies want to do a great job, and when you give them a huge challenge and then you get out of the way and let them do their jobs, agencies will go beyond the call of duty. Citibank did that. The pitch included seven or eight agencies, and Fallon ended up winning it. We made history together.
We launched this campaign called “Live Richly” and it ran in thirty-three countries. It was their most successful marketing campaign ever. In fact, after the first six weeks, the increase in checking accounts was something like three hundred percent just because the campaign struck an emotional chord. It was an incredibly successful campaign. It touched people in ways that no one would have ever imagined. It was just an emotional appeal, but it moved the business and we, everyone who worked on it, had not only continued successful careers after that, but we all became friends. We’re still very close friends more than ten years later.
Tuten: What made it so special? The work or the people with whom you were working?
Bologna: It was all of the above. Back to the point that everything went right. All those things that went right are the same things that are so satisfying. The campaign theme was smart and emotional. It was successful. We made friendships. We were like a band of brothers. It’s satisfying to be a part of something.
Tuten: Any special moments from your current role?
Bologna: I wish I had a story here to share, and I’m sure I will at some point. But since you’ve asked such a big question, I thought I’d better go back into the archives of my history.
Tuten: What’s still ahead for you? You’ve started your own agency. You’ve risen through the ranks at two of the top agencies in existence. What still awaits you?
Bologna: That’s a great question. I think I kind of alluded to it earlier when I was saying how satisfying it is to me, having crossed over into the realm of leadership. Really, I would love nothing more than to help create the conditions for greatness for other people. To help create the right environment for successes like the Citibank “Live Richly” campaign to happen for those working on my team. I work with a wonderfully talented group of people, and many of them are in that sweet spot age of between thirty and early forties. Everyone should be able to have the kinds of opportunities that I’ve had. I’d love to be able to give these folks the opportunity to have the same kinds of experiences that I’ve had, to be honest. If I can do that, it will be very satisfying for me at this stage in life. It’s the whole giving back day to day. Frankly, I don’t think you have to go to Africa to help the world, right? You can help people in your own backyard. That’s one thing I want to do. It’s important to me.
And then, when you think about the struggles and challenges we have in the world. But one of the realities of the world in which we live is that the entire world is challenged. Things are not great in the world right now, starting with our own economy. Our economic situation is pretty dire. I heard a statistic the other day that’s very upsetting, which is thirty-seven percent of the children in America are living in poverty. That’s terrible. That’s here. Right here in the US. When I talked about how I blur the lines between my personal and professional lives, well, I’d like to blur the lines between doing business and doing good. I haven’t quite figured out how to do that yet, but it’s something I will do and I look forward to doing.