Within minutes of Karen Blackett striding on to the newly refurbished 7th floor terrace of MediaCom’s London headquarters, the small groups of employees enjoying the unseasonably warm weather all move back inside. Few appear to want to be seen chatting outside by the chief executive of one of the UK’s biggest media buying and planning agencies.
Yet, gamely standing on a wooden table when the photographer asks her to and giving one of her frequent hearty laughs at the incongruity of the situation, Blackett hardly seems a typical tough boss. She is, however, renowned for working hard and makes no apologies for it. “My dad always said, ‘You’re black and you’re female. You’re going to have to work twice as hard as everyone else’.”
The hard work seems to be paying off and not just at Mediacom, where a slew of blue-chip clients including BSkyB, Audi and GSK continue to put the WPP-owned company at the top of the billings league table, with £110m new business won in the first nine months of this year alone. Blackett was one of the finalists in the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman awards in March and in June she received an OBE in the Queen’s honours list.
So surprised was she to receive a letter with the royal crest alerting her to the fact that she was under consideration for the award that she immediately suspected a ruse by the graphics department. The letter wasn’t an in-house prank, however, and she is planning to collect the gong at the palace in January along with her mother, sister and five year-old son. She has no idea why she was put forward for the award but is particularly proud of the apprenticeship scheme she launched two years ago for 18-24 year olds. It started with 10 places, and there are now 15 apprenticeships. “With university fees so high, industry needs to be doing all it can to promote apprenticeships and to get talent,” she says. She speaks passionately about how much the industry has to do to break away from the old boys’ network. “It’s really odd that you had only people who had been to university, often only a certain type of university,” she says. “Nepotism was absolutely rife. It’s better now, especially in the media agency world.”
Yet Blackett’s gender and particularly race still continue to set her apart from the typical adland executive. The latest industry survey found that non-white people working at any level in media agencies amounted to just 11.2% last year, a proportion she calls “pathetic”. And women, half of the population overall, make up 26% of executive positions, according to the latest IPA Agency Census. At MediaCom UK, four of the seven most senior executives are women and 16.5% of staff are non-white.
There is a business as well as a social cost to the industry’s lack of representation, she argues. The purchasing power of the UK’s black and minority ethnic population is estimated at £300bn and rising. “I just feel it’s really odd,” says Blackett. “If the future of the industry is being able to target the UK you should have a workforce that looks like the kind of people you’re trying to talk to.” Although the percentage of the UK population as a whole may be close to the 12% mark, in London, where nearly all the agencies are based, it is closer to 25%.
Blackett has none of the qualms that some senior women have of talking about their point of difference. She revels in being placed seventh on the Black Powerlist ranking the “most influential”, saying with a hoot: “Idris [Elba] was behind me and Mo [Farah] in front!” Not for Blackett the idea that such lists ghettoise ethnic minority contenders. “If anything I think it helps the other lists,” she says simply. She has the same attitude to October being designated black history month, a concept that has been criticised again for underlining the lack of notice in the other 11 months of the year. “For kids I do think it’s really good for that celebration and the understanding of history.”
Asked about her own experience, Blackett replies: “I’ve found companies and clients able to judge me for what I can do, not what I look like.” Yet she still recalls a “hurtful” occasion 15 years ago where a friendly rival told her that the reason she hadn’t won a pitch was because the all-male senior client team had said “there was no way we’d appoint a female account director, let alone a black woman”. “It was a setback,” she recalls, “but it wasn’t about what I couldn’t do. It was about my race and gender, neither of which I would change.”
She is also conscious that whatever difficulties she has faced in becoming a highly paid media executive are as nothing compared to the “horrendous” racist abuse suffered by her father, who arrived from Barbados to work as a bus conductor in Reading. Or her mother who was a nurse. She thinks this is why they constantly encouraged her to work hard – she once fluffed a mock exam and “didn’t hear the last of it, nor did I come back with a C again”. After university, she applied for a job as a media auditor with CIA. She didn’t get the job but they suggested she talk to the media planning department (“probably because I was so gobby”).
During our conversation, a personal trainer sends her text updates reminding her to exercise. Appointed chief executive in December 2010, she says being promoted a few months after finding herself the single mum of a five-month-old son made it both the best of times and the worst. Doing both roles should be exhausting but Blackett, who disappears to a house in Gloucestershire with her son at the weekend, seems to thrive on it. She was a runner at school and laughs when she mentions how competitive her son is when they ride together every weekend, “I wonder where he gets that from?”
This competitiveness is given free rein at work where Blackett likes to attend as many pitches as possible – even for smaller accounts. She says it’s important because, “you sometimes get people thinking that because you’re big you won’t care”.
Blackett obviously does care and is busy working on a form of multi-channel approach to advertising that sees traditional media brands working with newer digital agencies. “I think there’s an awareness in the industry they we can’t just operate in silos any more. Whether it’s when the Guardian partners up with Twitter, or somebody else with Facebook, BuzzFeed or the retailer, it’s all part of total communication package.”
She cites an ad plan that involved Nikon, Asda, Lime Pictures, Channel 4 and Hollyoaks as a great example. MediaCom, like much of the industry, is also enthusiastic about native advertising, or advertorial as it used to be known before the internet made the boundaries even harder to define. This is commercial content that looks just like editorial content except for the warnings. The online deal between Direct Line and the Guardian, with its fixology branded content hosted on a microsite linked to theguardian.com, is one example.
Blackett, perhaps unsurprisingly, has no truck with those (including adland veteran John Hegarty) who say this type of content is a sort of trick. “Your audience are bright individuals and you’ve got to respect them. It’s about producing more saliency, not about tricking people. Respect your audience, they’re not stupid.” Hegarty, she says, is “from the era of 60/90-second” TV spots. Today’s executive needs to focus on what happens before and after they watch the ad. “It’s not just one ad but what happens after that. Does it inform, inspire, involve?”
New digital channels and content providers are providing more avenues, she adds. “Vloggers are just as interesting in terms of what we can do for clients as ITV. Yes it’s tiny at the moment but it’s part of overall system.” She likes the more collaborative way of working and the fact that the industry has moved on from everybody working in “silos – either TV buyers or direct response marketing specialists”. “Now I am talking to people with robotics degrees. It’s such a rich fruit salad of people.”
Curriculum vitae
Age 43
Education Chiltern Edge school, Henley College, Portsmouth University
Career: 1993 direct response planner/buyer, CIA MediaNetwork 1995 senior planner, Zenith Media 1995 senior planner/buyer, The Media Business Group, 1999 director, MediaCom and Media Business Board 2003 marketing director, MediaCom 2008 chief operations officer, MediaCom EMEA 2010 chief executive officer MediaCom UK