Meet Mark Coad: Adland's 'Lovable, Loyal Larrikin'
From terrified deckhand clinging on to life to the beloved captain of some of the largest ships in the media agency world, Mark Coad has pretty much seen it all.
The kid from country Victoria earned his stripes through the glory years of OMD, guided PHD to become a formidable challenger brand and is now leading a transformation at the helm of IPG Mediabrands.
In the first of this two-part series, B&T takes a look at Coad’s earlier life and career, exploring the influences from family, friends and early mentors who shaped his life and career for later success.
“I’d spend a lot of time on boats, but I never thought the sea could get that big. It was like staring up at a three-storey house.”
The year was 1988, Boxing Day, and only days after Mark Coad had just celebrated his 21st birthday sailing around the Wilsons Promontory National Park, Victoria, and up the east coast.
After delivering a boat to Sydney, Coady – as he is commonly known – was invited to join another vessel to sail back down via the Sydney to Hobart yacht race.
The 1988 race ended being one of the most infamous in history, with around a third of the fleet retiring, the majority with broken masts or damaged rigging.
Coad described enormous waves crashing over the back of their battered boat with crew members holding on for dear life.
“Back then I had very little. I owned a red Datsun 180B and you’d have given everything you owned to get off that boat,” he said.
“We had a storm jib not much bigger than a whiteboard on a 50-foot boat, and we were doing 20 knots across a straight line. We were absolutely flying and crashing through these waves thinking this thing’s gonna fricken explode at any minute.
“We had the whole kit and harness on and you were always clipped in. We capsized the boat and it rolled over. I remember hanging in the water strapped into the harness and when the boat self-right, being violently thrown back on the deck.
“I kept thinking, never again.”
Some might characterise the often tumultuous and rapidly changing world of advertising as akin to that Sydney to Hobart yacht race. If that is the case, it is then fitting that Coad’s resilience, calm leadership and humour, which helped him get through back then have also proven to be qualities that has led him to navigate an advertising and media career to the very top.
Coad skippered smaller agency teams in his early career before graduating to larger ships like OMD, PHD and IPG Medibrands, where he built strong team cultures, enjoyed huge success and mentored several industry leaders along the way.
One friend who has known Coad for most of his career is Omnicom Media Group CEO Peter ‘Horgs’ Horgan, who describes him as a “loveable, loyal larrikin”.
“What makes Mark unique is his calmness in any situation and his ability to sum it up with some calming, rural quips. He is the guy you want in the trenches or when it’s all going to custard,” Horgan said.
“A true archetypal Aussie who is loyal and grounded; you couldn’t wish for a better friend. He has grown so many careers and given so much back to the industry through the MFA, charitable endeavours and makes everyone love this industry.”
Horgan notes Coad’s “amazing” sense of humour and confirms to B&T that he has upgraded from the beat-up Datsun of his youth.
“He loves his big Aussie bogan V8 muscle cars and will carry on ad nauseam about how many CCs his V8 has.”
Horgs added that Coad is a tragic Geelong supporter but is unaware that his love of the Cats only paints half of the picture, but more on that later.
Another who has known Coad for a long time is cousin Andrew ‘Billy’ Baxter, former CEO of Publicis Worldwide and Ogilvy, and now chair of Australian Pork and holds several board roles.
“I’m a fairly good historian of agencies over the past 30 to 40 years and I can’t think of any agency CEOs that have been successful leading four or five of them,” he said.
“Mark has an innate ability to move with the times, especially with all of the digital transformation in this industry. Also, a lot of the clients that he’s worked with have been as loyal to him as he has to them.
“With Mark there is certainly a resilience as well as a great sense of humour through the good times and bad. He’s created workplace cultures that are enjoyable and successful.”
The Early Years
Baxter and Coad, whose mothers Helen and Maureen were sisters, were born two days apart in adjacent beds at the Jessie McPherson Hospital in Melbourne in 1967.
Photographed for the Herald Sun under the headline ‘Instant Cousins’, both have forged successful careers in advertising.
“Mark was always very bright and cheeky as a kid, a bit of a practical joker, and a lot of that hasn’t changed over time,” Baxter said.
“He’s always got that sparkle in the eye about him and is a real people’s person.”
Coad grew up in Glen Waverley, Melbourne, and is the son of Maureen and Barry, who met at the advertising agency USP Needham (a forerunner of DDB). He is the middle child of three boys; his brothers are Tony and Brett.
His primary school years were spent in suburban Melbourne during the week, at the family’s hobby farm in central Victoria on many weekends, chasing cows, playing sport and hunting rabbits. The Coads left the big smoke towards the end of Mark’s primary school years, moving to a 40-acre property in Freshwater Creek near Geelong.
Coady grew up playing a lot of sports, including cricket, horse riding (he is a keen show jumper) and footy. He idolises the Geelong Cats, and Gary Ablett Sr, although it would soon turn out that he had another sports passion up his sleeve that few in the industry are aware of, but more on that later.
At school, Coad was a bright kid but he doesn’t feel that he made the most of his time at Oberon High School, an institution where “getting the majority of students to pass” was an achievement.
He went into year 12 wanting to become a vet, but this ambition was quashed by the school’s career adviser, Allan White.
“He said, ‘if you’re gonna be a vet, you’re gonna have to be the smartest kid that’s ever come out of school. And that’s not you’,” Coad recalled.
“That sort of knocked the wind out of that direction”.
The 'Squiddo' Years
After graduating from high school Coad had ambitions to take a gap year and work as a jackeroo in central Australia, but these plans soon fell through. Coincidentally, it’s a path his son Sam would eventually follow.
Instead, Coad signed up to study a business degree at Deakin University in Warrnambool on Victoria’s southwest coast.
“There’s a funny story about uni,” Coad said. “I had my kids bluffed for a long time that Deakin in Warrnambool was a prestigious school. And it wasn’t until my daughter Milly went through her version of Allan White she was warned, ‘pay attention because if you stuff it up, you’ll end up in a place like Warrnambool.”
Nonetheless, Coad still managed to spend four years completing a three-year degree because, “I had too much fun and made some of the best mates in my life”.
“You’re on the coast by the beach, you’re doing road trips, you’re mucking around, you’re learning how to drink – in moderation. Also, you’re always socialising and having a ball,” he elaborated.
Warrnambool – a regional hub – used to attract bands like The Black Sorrows, Midnight Oil, Australian Crawl and other classics at the pubs that Coad and his mates ventured.
One of his best friends at university, and best man at his wedding, is Grant ‘Ralph’ Wheaton told B&T the pair met in 1986 when Coad rocked up at the Turn Inn in his Datsun.
“We were a couple of young boys going to university down in Warrnambool and couldn’t think much ahead of drinking beer and chasing girls, to be honest,” Wheaton said. “He was more successful at that than me.
“One of the reasons why he’s been so successful in life is not because he’s the smartest tool in the shed, even though he is no dill. It’s because he’s very approachable and human when he interacts with people. Everyone loves him, he treats people like humans and he’s very generous.”
Wheaton said there are two stories that stand out from that time, both which many in the industry may not be aware of.
It may also come as a surprise that Coady’s nickname to his university mates isn’t Coady, but rather ‘Squiddo’ for reasons that B&T will not delve into. But back to the stories.
Firstly, Coad – allegedly – supports two football teams, the Geelong Cats and the Sydney Swans.
“Whenever the Swans are up at the top of the ladder, he is cock-a-hoop,” Wheaton said.
“It’s quite funny when they actually play each other because he’s always the winner. So for 40 years we’ve been hanging shit on him that he’s the only person I know that barracks for two sides.”
The second tale raises even more eyebrows, especially given what ‘Squid’ does today. He once asked his father Barry, a well-known marketing director at the department store Target, to develop a marketing strategy for a university assignment in his first year.
“Barry Coad was one of the premier marketeers in the country at the time; he brought the Target logo to life. So Barry wrote this fabulous marketing strategy for Mark… but it didn’t impress the lecturer who failed Mark on the spot,” Wheaton recalled.
“You had one of the best marketers in the country, and one of today’s top advertising executives, collectively fail a year one uni assignment in Warrnambool.”
It wasn’t all fun and games, Coad did eventually graduate with a keen knowledge about business and economics, which would hold him in good stead over time. More importantly, the friends he made back then, a group called the ‘Buzzard Scratchers’, have remained some of his closest mates to this day.
The Junior Adland Years
When Coad left university in 1989, he moved to North Melbourne with his brother Cameron and Andrew Baxter, unsure about what to do next.
Although advertising was in his blood, Coad didn’t get into the industry by design. His first opportunity came when he answered a newspaper ad for a media assistant at Total Media, the media buying division of the ad agency Mattingly.
Coad cut his teeth checking TV confirmations under the guidance of Diana Saul (who is now co-founder of Without Fear or Favour). Also at Total Media at the time was the MD Malcolm Stewart (now with Customedia) and GM Pam O’Connor (who now runs a consultancy).
“You just felt like a very small cog in a frickin massive machine,” he recalled. “It’s a funny fact about media agencies, you are trying to understand an industry you didn’t know existed. Try and find anyone who studied to work in a media agency.”
Coad views this period as somewhat of an apprenticeship. Soon he worked his way up to buying regional TV and then planning and buying TV spots for retail clients and the Victorian government.
Remarkably, he added: “The work that I was doing 30 years ago, the vast majority of media agencies still do exactly the same thing; menial repetitive tasks such as checking confirmations, loading bookings, post analysis – it still happens.”
From Total Media, Coad joined Young & Rubicam (Y&R) under Mike Porter, one of his mentors. He then did a stint at DDB, before returning to Y&R, which had since merged with Mattingly.
At that time, media was one part of an advertising agencies, and Coad worked there towards the end of an era likened to the hit TV show Mad Men.
“There was certainly a culture of the suits would all piss off at lunchtime and you’d never see them again,” he said. “But you could tell that was an era coming to a close and it was pretty hard work, we would work every other weekend.”
And what was it like working with creatives at that time?
“The creative guys were quite precious about their art,” Coad recalled. Our job was to make sure the world saw their art, which sometimes involved chasing their creative because they didn’t complete it in time, and you struggled to get hold of them.
“You needed to go in with a sense of humour and hold your own, but you could also build a healthy respect and I loved it. We were working with some big names.”
During this period, Coad worked with storied creative directors including Neil Lawrence and James McGrath at Y&R, and Ted Horton at DDB.
At DDB, Coad worked as group media head and helped roll out Telstra’s mobile network, among other notable client work.
This period was memorable for reasons outside of the office. In the mid-90s Coad married Kirsten and the couple bought their first house. Wheaton, his best man, wrote a poem for the couple at their wedding, pictured below.
The 'Media Carve Out' Years
Coad re-joined Y&R Mattingly to help launch its standalone media business, The Media Edge, at a time when advertising agencies were starting to spin off their media planning and buying divisions.
“One of the biggest challenges was negotiating the share of revenue with the very people that you’re trying to take it off in the first place, being the rest of the creative agency,” he said.
Coad, hired as a media manager, worked under John Neal and alongside Mark McCraith (who would go on to lead Maxus until it merged with MEC to become Wavemaker). They built The Media Edge team in Melbourne to more than 30 people.
“When Macca and I first worked together, we clashed because he was the big creative thinker – like let’s put a billboard on the moon – and I’d be the analytical realist that would, go ‘do you have any f*cking idea how much that would cost’?
“WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell flew us over to the London and we did one of those Myers-Briggs tests, coming up with completely different profiles. It was only after that we realised just how complementary our different skill sets were.”
Coad and McCraith’s flourishing working relationship wouldn’t last for too long. Neal struck a secret deal to launch Carat in Melbourne, taking McCraith and some of the agency’s clients, including Cadbury and Nintendo, with him.
“They left the media agency we’d set up in this kind of smouldering ruin… I was the only senior one left with about a dozen staff,” Coad added.
Coad recalls the period as a testing time, but slowly, piece by piece, he laid the foundations of a team that was capable of winning clients and growing revenue.
“I remember saying to the team, we can either have a crack at this and make something out of it or all go and find new jobs. We all decided to do it,” Coad said.
“You put pressure on yourself because this is defining my career and the whole industry is watching. We’ve tried to make the best of the situation and although we never turned it into agency of the year, I think we did a pretty good job rebuilding and set about putting The Media Edge Melbourne back on the map.”
The Media Edge won clients including Dunlop, Findus Foods, South Pacific Tyres and Beaurepaires, rebuilt some of its revenue to turn it into “something respectable”. In fact, Coad remains friends with Steven Chaur, who was the MD of Findus Foods at the time.
Coad’s agency rebuild would not last much longer. One day, a visit from Clemenger boss Robert Morgan would change the course of his career indefinitely.
To be continued…
In the second part of Meet Mark Coad, B&T explores the glory years of Coad working with OMD and PHD, and then the jump over to IPG Mediabrands.
B&T then asks former colleagues what they really think about him, and what Coad thinks about his career, how the media landscape has changed, and what he likes to do outside of work, aside from riding his horse Indiana.
