Is the glass ceiling a thing of the past?

By Elaine Wong

The glass ceiling is no longer a problem for most women. Or so a panel of leading female media and marketing executives say. That was the general sentiment at "Beyond The Glass Ceiling," an Advertising Week event devoted to the topic. The high-powered panel featured moderator Lori Senecal, president and CEO of ad agency Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners; Kenetta Bailey, svp of marketing at WE tv; Robin Domeniconi, svp and chief brand officer of Elle; Jodi Kahn, evp at iVillage Network; and Susan Malfa, svp of ad sales at Bravo & Oxygen media networks.
  "The glass ceiling is more of a thing of the past," Senecal said in her opening remarks. "It's not something we are experiencing [as much] as we did a few years ago." In some cases, younger females haven't even heard of the term. Senecal recalled a particular case when someone said to her: "A glass ceiling? You mean, [as in] a skylight?" "It has a whole new meaning for the next generation," Senecal said. "There are a lot of signs that it is time to leave this notion of a glass ceiling in the past."

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Published on September 30, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (28)
Filed under You've Come a Long Way

'Mad Women' talk about industry's evolution

By Elaine Wong

Mad Men, the hit AMC drama, shows advertising during its supposedly golden age of rampant alcohol abuse and sexism. The female panelists at Thursday's "Mad Women" event, part of Advertising Week, endeavored to show how far the industry has come since then.
  Speakers including Wenda Harris Millard (the former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia co-CEO who is now president of consultancy Media Link) and Angela Courtin, svp of marketing at MySpace, discussed some of the trends and dynamics shaping marketing today. The rise of social media, brands' desire to join the conversation without being "disruptive," and clients' unwillingness to pay top dollar for agency work—when many can perform the same duties in-house—are all changing the way agencies and the creative business operate, the panelists said.
  The latter is clearly a risk, because "once you reduce your fees, you can never put them back up again, and once you give something away for free, you can never charge for it again," said former Bartle Bogle Hegarty U.S. chairman Cindy Gallop (shown here), now a marketing consultant.

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Published on September 24, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Filed under You've Come a Long Way