She was originally attracted to the media side because it was scientific and arty at the same time, but over the past 20 years Anne Parsons, chief executive of MediaCom Australia, has seen the media function move from the sidelines to centre stage, which is exactly where she likes it.
“It started because clients understood that’s where their money was being spent,” Parsons says.
“But I think it’s gone beyond that now to an understanding from advertisers that media is in fact quite interesting and challenging and there is no one answer and therefore having someone who really gets media and understands the client’s business is very important and very powerful.”
Her first job in advertising was at Mattingly as a junior planner/buyer while she was at uni studying journalism and psychology. Joining George Patterson she steadily worked her way up from planner/buyer to group head, then media manager, associate director and media director. In 1999 Parsons moved to Zenith, which handled the buying work for Patts, as managing director just as it morphed into a full service media agency, becoming CEO of Zenith Australia two years later.
In 2005 the agency was renamed MediaCom after WPP acquired it as part of The Communications Group buyout from PEP and agency management, merging Zenith and MediaCom and with Parsons named as CEO. She is also chairman of WPP’s media buying group Group M, which is Australia’s largest.
A moment that stopped her in her tracks was the death of her business partner Peter Gallucci, former managing director of Zenith Media.
“It was like, I thought this was going to be a partnership and now I’m on my own and so that was probably the biggest thing that made me think about what I was doing and whether I loved this enough to keep going,” she says. “It wasn’t a difficult decision, the answer was definitely yes but that was quite a catalyst moment.”
Other mentors have included clients Paul Moore CEO of Pacific Brands, John Symond founder of Aussie Home Loans, David Jones’ Mark McGuinness, as well as former Seven executive Maureen Plavsic, who is an ex-colleague.
Parsons also learned a lot about running a business from former Zenith owners, PEP, and has fond memories of this time.
“Being owned then by a venture capital group was fantastic, what you learned from them was quite wonderful because they are just such incredibly sharp business people. I loved it and if you asked the team of people we had running the business then, I suspect all of them would say it was a really great, interesting time,” she says.
While the lead-up to the WPP take-over was fraught with rumour-mongering in the press, Parsons says this is typical of the advertising industry.
“We haven’t gotten better yet, but it is an industry where we do operate a lot on rumour and misinformation and because we know that it is quite easy to get rumour and misinformation out there,” she says.
Parsons agrees it’s shame that a lot of the characters have gone from the industry, but thinks this has been driven by the rigours of the business with long lunches, generous entertainment allowances and deals over golf all part of a bygone era. The good thing about that is it reflects the seriousness of the business.
“There’s hundreds of millions of dollars that we are responsible for, so there is quite a serious component to it. I would still suggest that if you walk into MediaCom, versus walking into the Commonwealth Bank, (we) would be a much louder, less disciplined environment and therefore that kind of freedom and opportunity is still there. But the colourful characters? I don’t know if a John Singleton would be able to be what he is and do well in media now,” she says.
Her boss, Alexander Schmidt-Vogel, chairman and chief executive, MediaCom Worldwide says Parsons is the consummate professional, very determined and always perfectly prepared for whatever challenge she faces.
“Since the purchase of Zenith by WPP, Anne has led the way in melding the former MediaCom and Zenith agencies, and transforming the total company into a MediaCom office with MediaCom culture. There are not many who would have been able to make such a positive, thorough and quick transformation, and I think that says a lot about who she is and how she works.”
Parsons says the name shift was simple – at 5pm they were Zenith and by 9am the next morning it was called MediaCom.
The tough part has been in having people who work at MediaCom understand it’s positioning, which is about people first for better results. “It’s a focus on people but we have needed to, and will continue to, make changes to make sure we can deliver on that and so to that end we got an external change company to help steer us through that to make sure MediaCom was not just a vision of Anne Parsons but it was actually what the management team wanted it to be,” she says.
Henry Tajer, now general manager at Universal McCann, who worked for Parsons for five years, recalls her being a supportive boss who taught him a lot.
Looking forward, Parsons identifies the media industry’s talent shortage as her biggest challenge – from honouring the senior talent already at the agency to ensuring there is opportunity for growth among the middle managers and attracting more graduates. For the first time Parsons has tapped into the network to bring in talent from overseas because the shortage is so acute.
So far, Parsons’ career has been forged in Australia but if a great opportunity did come up to work overseas then she would consider it, as long as she was leaving MediaCom in good shape.
She considers Europe to be the most sophisticated market for media.
“Our head office is in Germany so maybe the logical thing would be to be in Frankfurt,” she says.
How about Paris? “That would be pleasant, yes, that sounds really good.”
