Creative Q&A: The Martin Agency’s executive of the year

By Jonathan Spiers

When Kristen Cavallo was named CEO of The Martin Agency in the midst of a #MeToo scandal in late 2017, the marketing strategist and 25-year industry vet had less than 24 hours to wrap her head around the idea, let alone come up with a game plan or entrance strategy.

Happy in her job as chief strategy/growth officer with fellow Interpublic Group agency MullenLowe, which had allowed her to work from and remain in Richmond after an earlier, 13-year stint at Martin, Cavallo said she was hesitant for a moment but then jumped at the challenge – just as her military father, who just recently passed away, had effectively trained her and her siblings to do.

Her handling of that crisis and steering of the agency through the past 16 months, in which time it not only retained clients but also picked up new ones, have garnered Cavallo a string of industry accolades.

Trade publication Ad Age recently named her its Executive of the Year for 2019, on top of naming Martin one of the year’s standout agencies. And locally, she shared Ad Person of the Year honors from the Advertising Club of Richmond with chief creative officer Karen Costello, likewise the first female named to that role in the agency’s 54-year history.

A self-described Army brat who settled in Richmond during her first stint at Martin, Cavallo sat down with BizSense to discuss her sudden return to the agency, her approach to the gig in light of the circumstances, and how she balances creativity with her role on the business side of the company. The following is an edited transcript:

Richmond BizSense: Congrats on your recent accolades. Have they given you pause to reflect on the past year and a half? What do they represent to you?
Kristen Cavallo: We’ve done so much that I don’t think it’s any one thing that’s landed us in this spot. I think it was a cumulative effort by a lot of people doing a lot of different things. Mostly, to me, it’s a reflection of courage and risk-taking, but also about trust and reconciliation. All of that was hard-fought for.

This past year and a half has been the highlight of my career. Not the award, but the work, and the opportunity. It was even more so because I was not gunning for it. I was not interviewing for it. I had no plan. I knew only about 21 hours before where I was going to be.

I am proud of myself, actually, and I am very proud of the people here and the team we have built and the openness with which they received me and embraced all the changes that we went on to make and decide together. It’s been a real team effort. There were no heroes in this. That’s the hard part about accepting a singular award, because there is nothing in advertising that is gained or won by yourself.

RBS: You said you didn’t have a plan, but how did you end up approaching the job and situation?
KC: My dad – maybe it’s military, or maybe it was just my dad – he taught my brothers and me to take accountability and to recognize that we could make an impact. There’s always been strains or threads of accountability, service, courage, that were weaved into us, and we were taught to run towards problems and not away from them.

I think there was a part of me that just naturally kicked into gear. I have not experienced a lot of management during crisis. In most of my years in advertising, there has been certainly change, but not crisis, so it would be the first time I would be able to apply those skills in that setting. But I think the same skills that enabled me to thrive at a company during dramatic growth were also used here: having stable legs on unstable ground; learning that when things get tough, you don’t jump out of the boat, you paddle harder; trusting your gut instincts on things and moving quickly.

The other thing I found, and this would be in retrospect: Coming into a crisis situation, I would have thought that people followed vision, and I found that people followed availability more than they followed vision. I think vision sometimes feels very 30,000 feet in the air. People were feeling real anger and pain and fear, and they were feeling those things in their heart and in their head, and those are pragmatic little bastards. You’re not going to reassure or comfort or inspire something that pragmatic with something that removed.

I decided to fight those pragmatic things with humanity. I made myself extremely available. I told everybody in the agency that I would be available for coffee over the holidays – I started a week before the holiday break. And I will tell you, so many people took me up on it. I was so jacked up on caffeine, I don’t think I slept for a month.

I think that approachability and accessibility and humanity, I would hope, created a trust very fast, and I think they could also see that I was hustling hard. We had to save every client; we had to try to pitch and win; we had been dropped out of a number of pitches. There were some, though, that called us during that time, and we had to make sure that we won more than our fair share of them, because we didn’t know if we were going to lose any clients, and we wanted to show strength and momentum.

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