The Trailblazers Experience Podcast

EP41 Mary Keane Dawson : The journey to becoming a female C-Suite Leader

• Ntola • Season 3 • Episode 41

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Mary Keane-Dawson, a digital maven and entrepreneur, shares her career journey and experiences in the advertising industry. From her early life and education to entering the advertising industry and transitioning to digital, Mary reflects on the challenges she faced, including gender inequality. She emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and therapy in overcoming these challenges. Mary also discusses her role as a thought leader and agent for change, advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion in the industry. 

Mary Keane-Dawson, an industry veteran, shares her passion for coaching and involvement in artificial intelligence projects. She discusses the importance of fostering open conversation and transparency in the industry, particularly in relation to internet safety and digital accountability. Mary highlights her role in the Internet Commission and the need for engagement and discussion to drive change. She emphasizes the importance of always learning and challenging assumptions, as well as building meaningful connections and networks. Mary also encourages self-auditing and continuous learning to stay relevant in the industry.

Takeaways
Embrace your success and acknowledge your achievements.
Learn from failures and use them as opportunities for growth.
Challenge gender inequality and advocate for diversity and inclusion.
Continuously adapt and stay curious in the ever-changing digital landscape. Passion for coaching and involvement in AI projects
Fostering open conversation and transparency in the industry
Engagement and discussion for driving change
Importance of always learning and challenging assumptions
Building meaningful connections and networks
Self-auditing and continuous learning for staying relevant

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background
01:29 Early Life and Education
03:00 Entering the Advertising Industry
09:35 Transition to Digital and New Technologies
15:26 Challenges and Gender Inequality
28:20 Self-Reflection and Therapy
41:19 Becoming a Thought Leader and Agent for Change
46:53 Passion for Coaching and AI
48:22 Fostering Open Conversation and Transparency
49:42 Making a Difference through the Internet Commission
53:00 Engaging with Stakeholders for Policy Development
55:57 Moving Beyond Dogma and Emphasizing Cooperation
57:03 Redefining Metrics for Success in the Industry
58:54 Addressing Mental Health and Meaningful Work
01:00:05 Building Meaningful Connections and Networks
01:01:45 Embracing Shapeshifting and Reinvention
01:05:10 Finding Mentors and Giving Back
01:07:30 Always Be Learning and Testing Assumptions
01:17:47 Immersion in Industry and Building Connections
01:18:16 Self-Audit and Continuous Learning

FInd Mary Keane Dawson 
IG  @marykeanedawson 
Linkedin :https://www.linkedin.com/in/marykeanedawson/ 

Listen : to the audio version Apple Spotify .Amazon Music Google Podcasts
Watch and subscribe to my YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@Thetrailblazersexperience
Follow Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/thetrailblazersexperience/

The Trailblazers Experience :

So welcome to another episode of the Trailblazers Experience podcast, where we have candid conversations with women sharing their career journeys. And I'm really excited today to have my next guest, who is described as a digital maven, an entrepreneur, a business mentor. She's held several C-suite positions, such as WPP, and is also sitting on many boards as well. Excited to just talk to this renowned leader, coach, advisor to many businesses, and she's currently operating as a management consultant. Growth hacker, industry speaker, writer. I could go on and on. Welcome, mary.

Mary Keane Dawson:

Hello, lovely to meet you properly. Let's have a. Thank you so much for working on this morning.

The Trailblazers Experience :

I just think with such an impressive bio and eclectic mix of experience, there's so many lessons. I think that can be drawn. I'm looking forward to learning, understanding you, and I guess you know you should take the time and the podcast to just enjoy and reflect on your achievements so far. We were talking earlier, before the podcast started, about just you know acronyms and terminologies and just how over time, probably the industry has involved. So let's talk about your journey. How did this actually all start?

Mary Keane Dawson:

Well, like a lot of people of my vintage, I was one of the last people probably to get paid to go to university. I come from an interesting background. Unfortunately, for various reasons, my parents split up and I kind of left home when I was 15 and went to basically live with my best friend and my. We didn't want to, you know, we were quite bright, we were smart kids, you know, but we were also very. We weren't punks, we were a bit young for that but we were new romantics and we sort of got into this whole sort of creative intellectual world where we're hanging out with people who subsequently became fashion designers and so on and so forth. And I think Mary her name was Mary as well and myself. We actually saw ourselves a bit more like, you know, intellectual and I really wanted to do philosophy and politics at uni and she wanted to do Russian and history and we landed back to night school and having and working and in the year we both got our A levels and I got a place at York and she got a place that's something called a School of Eastern European and Sylvonic Studies and I think the thing was because we were able to get a grant, we could do it. You know it was very difficult but we could do it without our parents support. She came from a poor background, so long and short of it was smart kids. You know, nothing was impossible for us because we'd done something that was like everyone told us we couldn't do.

Mary Keane Dawson:

And I went up to the north of England, which I didn't know at all, and I really loved the people and I love the, I love what I was studying and when I left university I really, you know, I was full of positive energy and ambition but, of course, hadn't got a clue what I wanted to do in my degree. So an ex boyfriend of mine and subsequently had landed up going into a job in advertising sales on Fleet Street and I told him, you know, I had these ambitions and he just said, mary, you'd be brilliant at selling ads. And I had no idea what he was talking about whatsoever. But when I saw what they were paying graduate trainees I thought this actually looks like I could do it because, you know, I was independent, I didn't have any parents or sort of support. So I landed up getting a job at the observer and the lady who interviewed me the ultimate interview was a lady called Werner Drummond and she said I'm very impressed with you, I'm going to put you on semi display on the magazine. And I looked at her and I was like great, having not got a clue what she was talking about. And yeah, what was semi display? I mean display is the half pages and the quarter pages that you would see in a magazine, and so it's. And so most of those and the magazine was the observer magazine, which actually at time was quite a big force in advertising and this was in the days when Sunday color supplements really were the powerhouses after posters and TV. And, yeah, so I took up the job, I was trained within an inch of my life and which was very, very good.

Mary Keane Dawson:

And then I went, went to small to medium sized advertising agencies, mainly in the London region, on foot, using the tube, whatever, and sold to their clients and it was everything from like you know, those days it would be like the equivalent of Wren kitchens and, you know, like a jewelry in the Knightsbridge and stuff. So it was a very broad base of clients. But I didn't ever go on the phone, I was always like going to appointments and meeting people and presenting to them, you know one to one, and that was an incredible experience because you know, actually kind of meeting these entrepreneurs, people who ran these organizations. You know it was very important to them when they were advertising, when dollar went or their advertising pound went, because they you know that was an investment they were making and driving customers into their stores or into their environment. So I so that was a really brilliant way of learning the business on the ground but also understanding how to use science, which were things like TGI, the two target group index and other researches of the early days of analytics.

Mary Keane Dawson:

And then one day I was approached by a headhunter who said that there was a company looking for people who had been trained at national press level. But they were starting off something that was very unusual. It was based on a new technology that had emerged called desktop publishing, which is really the foundation of the internet. And I was intrigued because I loved all the new stuff and I didn't really like the old school kind of very, very old school newspapers in those days very sexist, very, very sexist. Not that I was the first and only some I experienced sexism, but anyway I got the job in.

Mary Keane Dawson:

The company was called Redwood. I was their fourth, fifth employee and I suddenly started working on very big circulation publications. First one was expression, which was the American Express Card Members magazine, which had 640,000 circulation in the UK, which was exclusively ABC1 males. They might have had a handful of female card members but and it was a massive jump, it was a huge even though I'd gone on national press and I'd had big circulation I hadn't actually been dealing directly with, like the people who were planning Volvo's advertising campaigns or big, big, big advertisers, and it had an international dimension as well. So I did that for about six, eight months and was very successful, built a team when all of this was learning on job. We were growing at an incredible rate, being trained all the time. I mean I do want to emphasize the training aspect of this was absolutely essential because it gave me all these skills. You know like they would video us and then play about the video and say this is what you're doing when you go in and you present to somebody. So you could actually get conscious of like you know how you behave, how you spoke, you know what landed, what didn't land. So it was a really, really great experience. But I mean the thing you know the end of the day was, I was just good at it and I was working with really great people on absolutely amazing brands.

Mary Keane Dawson:

And I moved from American Express then to the Marks Suspense's magazine, which was at the time it was the biggest female magazine in the UK. It had a circulation of nearly two million and it was card members at Marks Suspense's card members but you had to go into the store to get it. Very glossy, very, very upmarket, smelt, beautiful. I always remember that and I was incredibly proud because by that point I was actually doing the flat plan and the flat plans or anybody who's listening is to you is actually when you plan where your ads go and where the editorial goes. So you work very, very closely with the creative and the editorial people and that was that then became my big passion. But my next step was I realized I needed the experience of working in on newsstand, because that was where all the how do you sell magazines? So I landed up going to work in a publishing company that you know basically it was a newsstand publication and I landed up publishing graphic novels and comics, which is a big what pivot isn't it?

The Trailblazers Experience :

I'm just thinking here, in your journey it sounds to me you were someone who was curious and just wanted to get out there very quick on learning on the job on your feet, very good with people Feels like a lot of working with people as well and you sort of landed even with the American Express and M&S gig. You were already in the cusp of, you know, dealing with cohorts of specific customers with a high spend and you know, when we look at segmentation, now that's sort of what we're doing on a digital space, but actually seeing your customers and understanding that that must have been, that's a whirlwind. You know from, from you.

Mary Keane Dawson:

Yeah it was an absolute whirlwind because I mean I'd left the university, had to find a job, had my son to live, all these other things, and then you know, I got this role and I mean to your point about segmentation and analytics and I'm really kind of getting. You know you had to understand how to compete by hand with the Sunday times, so you know things like indices and coverage and you know the sample sizes. I mean, really, you had to understand the science of it, and so it always makes me laugh now when I speak to you know entrepreneurs and people who come out of big, big advertising media agencies in particular, who can stand there and they tell you about this absolutely remarkable way that they have built out these bespoke cohorts of customers. And so I'm just looking at them going, mate, I was doing this 35 years ago, I mean by hand, you know. I mean it's not, it's. It is very, very important. But it's also really important to understand the actual why it's important rather than being able to say, oh, I can do this.

Mary Keane Dawson:

You know, because being actually, why are you doing it is the real question. Because if it's got, no, if you do not understand what value is to your end, your advertiser or your customer or whoever you're, you know, whoever you're working for, frankly, it's just your ego spouting numbers, and I think we have far too much of that in the industry. We've gone too far. I think, yeah, we've got to get back to what, what, where is the emotional connection with your consumer? Right? Because you know, once we got into so you know I come from, you know to. I mean, there's no doubt denying it and I'm not embarrassed about it at all. In fact, I think it's one of my greatest strengths, because I understood what the meaning of advertising was, why it was important. You know, it's all about giving somebody an opportunity to immerse themselves in some entertainment. And you know, and as an advertiser, you are there, you're in that experience, you're in that moment. If you can sort of ride the wave of their emotional positivity, they're brilliant and that's really been. You know very, very first principle of how advertising works.

Mary Keane Dawson:

Whereas what I think what happened in programmatic in particular, you know still continues today is that we turned it all into impressions and forgot about any kind of connection with the consumer and been an outspoken critic of, you know, some of the practices that have been gone on with that tax, etc. In the land, in the land of Lala digital land, but I do think that you know it's now come back to bite us. You know, and, and I think also there's so many different ad texts that are now required you know everything from your verification, you know from your botware, from your you know like, and now increasingly, you know this is this is the holy grail of targeting and this is the holy grail of identity, identity and I feel it's just completely diluted and it's just become the most irritating experience for a consumer and they're switching off and well, we know this. So, yeah, I mean, I think that I still feel very, very positive about, about innovation and how you know the human human beings creative human beings you know are will drive, you know, like, the consumer experience.

Mary Keane Dawson:

But I feel that we have taken, taken liberties with the consumer and they've and they're just not playing ball with us in the way that we once were. I also think we've, you know, lost, we lost a lot of very kind of like open minded people to you know who were engaging in different debates, because, with journalism through the, you know the rise of what was called at one time. You know the, the, you know the kind of they're now. Yeah, they're basically the people on social media who see themselves as citizen journalists, but in effect, they're often, you know, peddling extreme views and conspiracy theories in the in their pursuit of clicks and likes and so on and so forth, because that's without the actual facts and the research things to back it up sort of what we learned, and you want to argue your point.

The Trailblazers Experience :

What? What are these points that you're arguing and what are you using to justify that? I feel like that's sort of ground out the window and obviously the internet is not regulated in a space. Just circling back to your career journey and hard work, tenacity. At what point do you then say I think, I think I've got something going here in the advertising space, yeah, at what point did you say okay, I think this is something that I can continue. And what inspired you to then sort of to the future aspect.

Mary Keane Dawson:

This is a true story. So I was working for a company called Fleetway Home and Law which was owned by a gentleman who's now very infamous, a guy called Robert Maxwell, and, yes, it was a huge organization At the time. It was, like you know, equivalent to. It was like Murdoch and Maxwell, you know. They owned. They owned publishing and in probably you know, very large parts of certainly the English speaking world, north America and in the European UK, etc. And I had a.

Mary Keane Dawson:

I became, I was publishing these comic books, as I mentioned, and one of the published, one of the comics that I was publishing was called 2000 and AD and the guy who was my boss had, who came from a licensing background, said to me we're going to sell this title the actual IP rights come back to the acronym in a minute and he said I'd love you to get involved. And I was like, well, I don't know anything about that, but it sounds really interesting. And he said, yes, we're going to sell it to people who make films. And within six months, we were in Palm Springs sitting in Sylvester Stallone's home office and he had written us a check to take the film rights for 2008 D and he subsequently made a movie called Judge Dredd, which was about the main character in 2008.

The Trailblazers Experience :

D and I do remember that movie. It actually it didn't do too well, did it Judge?

Mary Keane Dawson:

I mean we did okay out of it. I remember yeah, I remember To cheer you on we came back with a check which was written by him and the guy was working for he had it framed and they put it in the reception of the office for a few weeks, for a few days, so it's so that everyone could see that, you know, sylvester Stallone had bought the rights. But it was quite a PR victory. But what happened was the experience of dealing with very successful, you know, entrepreneurial creatives and I mean at this day I was only about 25 when this was going on Made me realize that you know, there was a huge opportunity. There were other opportunities around, you know, intellectual property, ip, and you know where you could take it and cross platform fertilization. So I was, I kept on getting sort of promoted and getting more responsibility within the organization and then another, in those days, headhunters did bring you up and they did actually ask you did you want to do a different job?

Mary Keane Dawson:

And I mean I wasn't usual. Again, there were women in media and advertising, do not get me wrong, but they mainly. You know they were sort of like on a career trajectory which would mean that they land up, you know, staying in the organization that they were in and they would be hopefully they would get to be, you know a senior manager. Whereas I took a different approach. I decided that I wanted to get as much experience in more different, in different kind of like disciplines around media and advertising, because we knew it was changing, you know, and, as I mentioned, desktop publishing had been the first revolution and then, in the early 90s, something read its head which was called the internet. Now, at the time nobody really knew how to use it. They knew you could write what was an email and that was in and of itself An absolute like revelation, because my sister was living in Mexico and I remember writing my very first email to her because she was a university lecturer, she was teaching at a university and they had access to the internet. So we had one computer in our building that actually you could write an email on, and I was. It used to take weeks between these letters that we used to write each other, or, you know, very expensive phone calls, so that kind of huge, exponential sort of change you know, from letter weeks and weeks waiting for replies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah, to literally send the email and seconds later or an hour later or whatever, I would have a reply was a real like wow, what's gonna happen? You know, because this is like this is real foundational to change that's taking place.

Mary Keane Dawson:

So I got into an organization that was trying to be a WPP and before we knew who WPP were, they were trying to roll up lots of different kind of disciplines and businesses, everything from publishing companies to direct mail to nascent internet, and basically they'd done deals with a lot of inter-dependent companies in the hope that they could then put them on AIM which is what they did, aim being the alternative investment market and part of the London Stock Exchange and then make loads and loads of money. That was the theory and what happened was they had this had happened you know they'd done that before I joined them but they had won a couple of very big contracts and they wanted somebody with a lot of big client experience but also understood the commercial aspects. Come in and I was a headhunter for the job and it was my first real managing directors role and I was 27 and going on 48. And I thought I was the bees knees and I managed to negotiate an alpha or a male spider as my company car and I thought I was it and I refer to this period of my life as my knob head years, because everybody has to have some.

Mary Keane Dawson:

Yeah, you know, and I'm totally and utterly like. I look back on it and I was like, wow, I must have been such a prat. But you know, I was a very outspoken prat and I was a very and I was very senior in the company and I was very young. So I was constantly getting myself in trouble with these old geezers and these young men who would be sending memos around the building saying things like could all the women notice that they should not wear black bras under white shirts? It's very distracting for the men. That is a true story. I have many, many worse tales I could tell about that place, but I'm not gonna go there because I wouldn't want to make your listeners' ears bleed too much.

The Trailblazers Experience :

That's the pressure. There, isn't it? Because it's your first MD role. It's a time where you know you're in an industry which is male dominated. You're having to prove yourself. You were probably very good at your job. But this is added layer of you're a woman. You're young. There's also a lot of pressure now.

Mary Keane Dawson:

Oh my God, it was intense and I think that's why I mean I said about the knob head years, because you kind of have to. There's two. You know a lot of people suffer from, you know emperors' new clothes. You know I'm in impersonation, so somebody's gonna work out I shouldn't be here.

The Trailblazers Experience :

And.

Mary Keane Dawson:

I can actually remember saying to a guy called Zeb Aram, who was a very smart guy and a client of ours. I said I don't know how I got here, and he was a really, really nice man and he said to me Mary, you got here, you're like. This is the thing you have to remember. You are now here, make sure you stay here. You get home, you know, and it was good advice, but you do kind of find ways of coping. So, like you know, I remember I bought a Gucci handbag which I definitely couldn't have afforded, but I did it because I thought this shows a symbol to everybody that I'm in charge.

Mary Keane Dawson:

You know, like this kind of thing and why I'm very like. I'm not critical of myself, I'm just I make the point that you kind of have to be more self-aware about the impressions that you are giving to other people, because they can be misinterpreted. And that, I think, is important, because I think this was a time when women in particular, especially if you weren't, you know, if you weren't senior and you were in an organization where there might have been one or two senior women, they would have seemed really far away from you, very disconnected, because they were encouraged, as in female leaders, were encouraged to behave like men, you know, if you behave. And I actually had my business partner because I subsequently bought part of this company that I'm referencing. He said to me you really need Mary as a wife. And I mean, you know I can remember that was like, oh, you think I need a wife? Oh yeah, that's a good idea, you know. But of course it was just the kind of language of you're a big, you know, you're more of a man than I'll ever be in the boardroom, mary, because I was always very outspoken. What I mean by outspoken was if there was an elephant in the room, ie, we were losing money on a subsidiary, or one of our clients isn't paying us on time, or we've got, you know, a gang of people working on a certain in a certain part of the organization that are just underperforming massively.

Mary Keane Dawson:

I wouldn't just kind of like say, oh, this is, yes, well done. Everybody, you know, it's all good love. I would say, what are we doing to change these things? How are we making ourselves accountable so that we don't, you know, we don't get in trouble? And I think that that was a surprise for men and women, because someone's actually saying we need to change and we need to actually improve what we're doing, because leadership, you know, isn't had a style in those days which was very much about just like you were born to lead and usually you were broke and you had a suit on and you know, you were, you know, but they didn't know what to do to kind of lead. You know, it was all about them and I think it's still set quite a bit of that that goes on in our industry. But I think it is changing.

Mary Keane Dawson:

We certainly anything to do with encouraging diversity, called equity and inclusion, which is something that I have been passionate about my whole entire life, and I really mean that, because I can't bear unfairness out, bigotry, that type of stuff. I was really, like you know, furious about how, you know, women weren't being given opportunities. So I would make it very clear that we had to have diversity around us. And what happened was myself and my sub subject came up as my partner realized that the company that we were in was not doing great. So we saw that the opportunity to cherry pick some of the better businesses within this mini WPB, and one of those was SpaFax, which became the world's largest in-flight entertainment business. There was a nascent internet business in the organization and there was a publishing business. So what we did was we bundled those three together, made an offer to the PLC management board and the biggest investor, which was a company called 3i, and we extracted it out and turned it around within 12 months and sold it to WPB. And that was my first big deal. It was a great team of people working on it and we really knew what we were doing. I mean, it was just like one of those where everybody had watched it out for everybody's back. We were all on the same page. Everyone worked very, very hard. It was a super exciting experience. It brought me into contact with finance. We went going into the city raising money.

Mary Keane Dawson:

I've never done that before and I think that was, you know, and there's lots of never done those before in my story. But the point is, once you've done it, whether you fail or you succeed, you learn right. And that's the most important aspect of this is that you know if you try something, even if it doesn't work, you know that you'll learn why it didn't work. And learning why something doesn't work is actually the most brilliant of lessons, because then it gives you the opportunity to actually say to yourself right, if I could go back and do that again, what would we change? Well, how would we approach it? And if I have the opportunity to do it again, how will I approach it this time? So various, you know, self-awareness is an incredibly important skill to have in terms of, you know, becoming successful in your career. And, of course, the other thing is you know how you measure. Success is really important too, because, again, outspoken, outspokenly, she said I would never be paid less than a man. What are you talking about? You know excuse me.

The Trailblazers Experience :

Excuse me, probably isn't it. Yeah, yeah.

Mary Keane Dawson:

Let me assure you I was not, because I made it possible to know what every man was being paid. So once I got to a scene, you know, once I got to an opportunity where you had trans, fancy, first MDs, job, et cetera, I mean I knew if a woman was getting paid less than a man. I was like what is going on here? We cannot have that because it will cause tension and toxicity. So fast forward to WPP. So we get bought by Martin and it was Martin who bought us. We, you know, went to the Hayes meeting. We sold it to him all nine yards and I had to accept a lower salary than my business partner because he was a man and I was a woman. And that was when it began to go wrong Because, you know, it was not that I thought I was better than him, but I was sure as hell at a completely different skill set. And I got packed off to the United States to basically grow our organization in America, which is what I did. And I mean you know I had, I made all these massive sacrifices personally to ensure that this was a successful acquisition by WPB and it was good for the company, it was good for my colleagues. It was good for them, but actually what landed up happening was people got very threatened because they didn't know what I was doing in New York and they didn't know who I was hanging out with and how come I kept them winning all these airlines when you know, like they were in, they were in London and the Middle East and they weren't getting the size of deal I was getting. And, of course, the culture of very large corporations can become very top.

Mary Keane Dawson:

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, you, you, you, you, you you.