Cannes 2015: Cindy Gallop on the Glass Lion

Glass ceilings don’t last long around industry activist and ardent feminist Cindy Gallop, making her the obvious choice for jury president of Cannes Lions’ newest award celebrating gender equality. But, while lauding its birth, the former account executive tells Selena Schleh she can’t wait for the Glass Lion to become obsolete 

Founder and former chair of BBH New York, Cindy Gallop has worn an eclectic selection of hats since stepping down from agency life in 2005: advertising and marketing consultant; motivational speaker; sex-tech entrepreneur. Her real-life wardrobe is equally idiosyncratic. When we meet at London’s Haymarket hotel, Gallop opens the door to her suite in spray-on PVC leggings and a hefty pair of biker boots, which must come in handy when your day job is kicking through glass ceilings and stomping on gender stereotypes.

Irked by extravagance

This summer, Gallop will be switching her urban warrior attire for something a little more Croisette-friendly, as she dons yet another hat: that of jury president for the inaugural Glass Lion, which recognises ‘work that implicitly or explicitly addresses issues of gender inequality or prejudice’. Although it’s her first time on a Cannes jury, Gallop is no stranger to the festival itself, having engineered a visit many years ago through a copywriter boyfriend working at BBDO Amsterdam [FHV BBDO] and becoming a regular in the 90s while running BBH New York. “It was a big deal for doing business,” she remembers. Her fellow agency heads weren’t initially as keen to attend. “I told them we [all] needed to go, in order to establish ourselves as a global network, and dragged a very reluctant Nigel Bogle and John Hegarty along with me.”

Business opportunities aside, Gallop’s personal views on the festival are decidedly mixed. “It’s the only truly global meeting place for the advertising industry and a phenomenal celebration of the best of the best in terms of creativity and the extraordinary talent that exists within our industry, so I love it for that,” she ponders. 

However, while supporting its core values, Gallop thinks the festival’s flashness is increasingly out of touch. “It is also appallingly old world order – all those ridiculous yachts and lavish spending in a way that I honestly find embarrassing on behalf of our industry. That is not the image that we want to be putting out there.”

There are other aspects of Cannes that have irked Gallop over the years, including “the appalling gender ratio” of the juries. Lately, her attendance at the awards has been sporadic, but physical absence is no barrier to the self-dubbed ‘Michael Bay of business’ – Gallop simply blew up the issue on Twitter and Facebook instead. That sparked a conversation with Cannes’ director of brand strategy, Senta Slingerland, who was, says Gallop, “already acutely aware of the [gender inequality] issues herself” and taking steps to address them through initiatives such as the Sheryl Sandberg-backed ‘See It Be It’, introduced last year to help accelerate the careers of women creatives.

“Senta rang me and said, ‘We’re working on a project we think you’ll like, and we’d like to bounce it off you and get your input,’” recalls Gallop. “So we had a long call where I recommended how I thought the award should be positioned and characterised, and what the criteria for entries should be.” Interestingly, the Glass Lion had been foreshadowed by a proposed Lioness award just a few weeks earlier, cooked up by a creative team from DDB Sydney for the Young Glory competition, to honour work ‘that changes the culture of objectifying women in order to sell stuff’. The fact that the concept was generated by young male copywriter, Christian Tough (and female art director Effie Kacopieros), shows that it’s not just women pushing for radical change in the old world order of advertising, claims Gallop.

Reimagining male morons and hapless husbands, too

Although she was closely involved in the development of the award, Gallop says her subsequent appointment as jury president came as a complete shock: “I was absolutely gobsmacked!” Not that she lacks the chops for the role. Her background is account management, rather than creative, but she has ample experience of reviewing and evaluating work, having chaired a creative review committee at the Advertising Council in New York for years, as well as organising Advertising Women of New York’s now-shelved awards event, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which celebrated depictions of women in a non-offensive, non-stereotyped, non-objective way and shamed advertising that did the opposite.

The male-female ratio of the Glass Lion jury will be 80:20 in favour of women and while the priority remains recruiting industry leaders (“We need people who can really evaluate the best of the best creativity”), in an ideal scenario, says Gallop, some of the 10-strong jury will have been drawn from beyond the agency sphere. “We want people who operate in areas where there is a real need to rethink the gender ratio and representation of gender, whether that’s media, entertainment or technology, because everything that this award is about is also true for popular culture generally.” Since this interview, jury members announced include the executive director of UN Women, Elizabeth Nyamayaro and founder and CEO of non-profit organisation, The Representation Project, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

So how will she direct the jury, when it comes to judging the entries? For Gallop, the award should recognise “great creative work in our industry reflecting the world around us, as opposed to perpetuating outmoded stereotypes.” What it’s not about, she stresses, is going to the other extreme and bringing in new gender stereotypes. “Ads showing women in wildly empowered situations is, unfortunately, what people’s minds go to, but it’s enormously important that this [award] is about great creative work where a complete re-envisioning of gender is a fundamental part of the DNA.”

And that goes for both sexes. “When we talk about shattering gender stereotypes we’re not just talking about women. I am fed up with young male morons in beer ads and hapless husbands in household goods ads – and men are as well. I have a very wide [social media] network and every day young men are critiquing advertising for the stereotypical way it depicts them.”

Making the Glass Lion less of a ‘girl’ thing

When asked for examples of brilliant gender-neutral advertising, Gallop is more cagey. “For me, the best advertising of that sort is where I don’t even think about it; I don’t have to be outraged. I’m not going to point to all the usual suspects and say ‘[these ads] really empowered women’. By far the most interesting creative work is where gender is not an issue at all.” She cites Apple as a brand which has never discriminated between men and women in its advertising, in contrast to what she dubs the usual ‘pink it and shrink it’ marketing approach.

Where does Gallop stand on the widely-publicised wave of pro-female advertising such as Always’ 2014 spot #LikeAGirl and, more recently, Sport England’s This Girl Can? While she applauds the likes of Pantene and Dove – “Obviously, I’m absolutely thrilled that all this is happening, and we can’t have too much of tackling this issue from every possible angle” – she is keen to see a creative diversity of approach when it comes to entries. “I just worry those ads are creating a very narrow bandwidth of what people think would win the Glass Lion,” she explains. “There are just so many different ways that we can reflect the real world. Those [types of] campaigns are one area – which has gotten a lot of coverage because it’s so rare – but I want to see the entire spectrum.”

One of the biggest challenges for Gallop was positioning the Glass Lion as more than just ‘the women’s award’. “Things concerned with gender equality – because it’s not something that affects men – can very easily be marginalised,” she says. “I want this to be the award that every single young male creative around the world is gagging to win. Obviously I want every young female creative around the world to enter, too – but if we crack [the young male creatives], we’ve cracked the problem.”

If anyone can galvanise people into action, it’s Gallop. After all, this is the woman who got into advertising after being told ‘You could sell a fridge to an Eskimo’. After landing her first job at Ted Bates in 1985, she moved to JWT London, Gold Greenlees Trott and BBH London, where she worked on a string of big-ticket accounts including Coca-Cola and Polaroid. In 1996 she left the UK for Singapore to start BBH Asia Pacific as Simon Sherwood’s number two; two years later she set up BBH New York (essentially Gallop “in a room, with a phone”), growing it into a successful shop with the likes of Johnnie Walker, Unilever and Levi’s on its books and bagging herself the 2003 Advertising Woman of the Year award along the way.

After her textbook rise through the ranks, it was a surprise to many when, in 2005, Gallop stepped down as chairman in favour of fresh challenges and a portfolio career – founding her own brand and business innovation consultancy and carving out a niche as a professional public speaker. It was during an explosive TED talk in 2009 that Gallop launched the first of her two internet start-ups, MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP). Garnering over 1.2 million views on YouTube to date, the talk tapped a global social nerve that Gallop had no idea existed, catapulting her into the sex site industry. “It’s the start-up the world asked for, but it started off entirely by accident,” says Gallop. “Through dating younger men, I experienced first-hand what happens when today’s total access to hardcore porn online meets our society’s equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. Porn becomes by default the sex education of the day.” MLNP seeks to redress the balance by depicting “real people” having “real world sex”.

In two years, Gallop’s “tiny clunky site” has blown up in a way she never anticipated, gaining 350,000 members across the globe (their biggest market is Scandinavia, followed by China), undergoing a sleek facelift and taking a monthly revenue, “in the low five figures” admits Gallop, “but in a world where the received wisdom is: nobody pays for porn, they’re paying for real world sex.” Following prolonged but ultimately fruitless discussions with Durex (who “fully endorse the concept but are too nervous to partner with us”), Gallop is negotiating an interesting brand partnership that’s currently cloaked in secrecy. The branding opportunities, she says, are huge.

Flip the gender, fix the ad

MLNP’s success has put Gallop’s second, socially-minded start-up, If We Ran The World (a web platform designed to turn good intentions into action) on the back burner for now. With all these projects on the go, does she ever miss her agency days? “Not in the slightest,” she says cheerfully. “But I love the industry and I’m very much still involved.” And she’s unlikely to step away any time soon since her twin goals – advertising that reflects the real world and parity of men and women in the top creative and management roles – are still some way off, as her experiences as one of the chairs of the Ad Council’s campaign review committee have shown.

While Gallop won’t name names, she recalls “a very large agency” presenting a campaign in 2014, which featured a daughter in the kitchen with her mother, and a son on the football pitch with his father. Gallop’s first recommendation? Flip the genders of the kids. Another recent review illustrated the problem even more clearly: in a series of six TV spots, every single one featured a male-centric scenario – despite the fact that the main decision-maker and action-taker in the household would be the woman. When Gallop pointed this out to the “two older white guys” who’d presented the campaign, there was a “deathly silence”: the issue hadn’t even occurred to them. “And that,” says Gallop, “is what happens when you have all male ECDs, all male creative directors, all male creative teams – they unfortunately default to outmoded stereotypes.”

Looking back in anger and forward to smashing glass

The paucity of female creatives, especially at the higher echelons of the industry, isn’t a new issue, but it’s reached a tipping point now that women are the predominant purchasers and doers of virtually everything the industry targets. Now more than ever, it’s head-slappingly obvious that there’s a huge commercial case for taking women seriously: “Gender equality is not a ‘nice to have’, it’s great business.”

Incremental changes, with the odd female hire here and there, won’t bring change fast enough: agencies should be, as Gallop puts it, “bulk-buying”.  Tokenism famously doesn’t work; one senior woman cannot change things single-handedly so ends up adapting to the environment around her, inevitably becoming like her male colleagues in what Gallop calls Highlander syndrome (“There can be only one”). That leads to “the very unfortunate dynamic of women competing with women. And it’s a syndrome entirely brought about by men.”

It’s tempting to speculate that Gallop is speaking from personal experience, so just how much gender bias did she encounter while working her way up through the agency ranks? “Quite frankly, it’s not the kind of thing I ever thought about,” she claims. “Obviously I can look back and see all sorts of things which horrify me now, but at the time… well, you’re ambitious and you’re working really hard. It isn’t until you’re older and you have the chance to take a very clear-sighted look at your industry, that you start thinking about things like this.”

Notwithstanding the flaws that are now apparent with 20:20 hindsight, Gallop’s affection for the advertising industry is clear – “it’s jam-packed full of brilliant, talented, creative, articulate people who do not get enough credit for that talent from the outside” – and for Cannes itself: “I welcome any opportunity to celebrate those vast amounts of talent.”

As for the award she helped shape, Gallop is already looking forward to the day that the Glass Lion is smashed to smithereens. “I really want this award not to exist in a few years’ time; I want it not to be necessary. To paraphrase a well-known slogan, every Cannes-award-winning ad will be built this way.”