mcgarrybowenulls Roseanne Horn on Going With Your Gut

She was employee number 12 when this red-hot agency opened. Now, as
Head of Production, she's running a department that's growing by leaps
and bounds. How does she do it? With a good dose of intuition.

By Anthony Vagnoni

 

Roseanne Horn is leading a production department at mcgarrybowen that's growing by leaps and bounds.

New York-based mcgarrybowen seems to be the Phil Jackson of ad agencies—they just keep winning and winning. Open Ad Age and there’s news of yet another big-name account win—the most recent being Advil’s US ad account, followed days later by 7-Up and Dr Pepper, followed again by the defense contractor Northrop Grumman. The shop was named agency of the year by both Adweek and Ad Age, with the latter pub hailing it as providing a mix of old school client service with a new age take on the power of smart, strategic messaging to help sway brands. 
 
Since opening its doors in 2001, founded by former Y&R alums John McGarry and Gordon Bowen (who hold the titles of CEO and Chief Creative Officer, respectively), the agency has grown almost exponentially, adding new business (Kraft, The Wall Street Journal, Reebok, etc.), new offices (Chicago and London) and heaps of accolades.  If anything, mcgarrybowen is known for its TV work.  Its commercials are steeped in a sense of the traditional, yet are surprisingly effective when it comes to registering with consumers.  That said, the shop isn’t afraid to get edgy, as it did with its launch of the Droid phone for Verizon, which first appeared in a series of TV spots that had all the trappings of a major Hollywood sci-fi feature. 
 
Supervising this torrent of work—and presiding over its burgeoning broadcast department as something of a bantam-sized mother hen—is Head of Production Roseanne Horn.  A Midwestern native who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, Horn spent 21 years at Y&R, which she joined after a stint at the legendary Wells Rich Greene, back in the days when Mary Wells was running the place.  She started at the L.A. office of the agency, stocked back then with stars from New York, people like former DDB and Chiat\Day Creative Director Bob Kuperman and others.  “It was like this little New York boutique,” she recalls, “only in L.A.”—which for her was a problem.  “I figured if I was really going to learn the business, I had to do it in New York,” she recalls. 
 
Horn recently sat with SourceEcreative to talk about the process she went through in building the mcgarrybowen production department, what she brought to the agency from her prior gigs and the agency’s new business secret weapon.
 
How did you get into working in an ad agency?
 
When I was growing up in California, we couldn’t afford for me to go away to school, so I went to a local college.  I don’t think there was an advertising major back then. But I was very involved—I was head of my sorority, a cheerleader for two years, then I formed a dance team. Somehow all the innate skills I have for being a producer—because it is part psychologist, part mother—I developed back then, because I naturally knew how to bring a group of women together to do certain things. And when I did organizational work at school, it all had to come together a certain way, and I was in control of it.  And little did I know where this would take me.

"Expedition," from the futuristic Droid campaign for Verizon, directed by Biscuit's Noam Murro.

After college I worked for Merv Griffin as a page on his show. Before then, while still in school, I played one of the contestants on the pilot of “Wheel of Fortune,” which they used to sell the show to TV stations. I still have it on tape! It’s so funny, you will be crying and laughing at the same time. After a couple years of doing that I was miserable, and quit without having another job.  And my boyfriend at the time was Bob Kuperman’s prodigy at Wells Rich Greene.  They had just been open in L.A. for six months. And I went and interviewed as the secretary for Bob and Pacey Markman, Bob’s partner.  And I said, ‘I can’t be a secretary, I was president of Kappa Kappa Gamma.’ But I did it, and four months into it, bless Pacey’s heart, he said, ‘Do you want to be a producer?’  And I said, ‘Yes, I’ll be a producer.’ And he taught me how to direct talent.  They had at the time a number of producers come in and out, and it got to a point where they made me head of production five years in. 
 
But I felt if I was going to stay in the business, I had to see what it was going to be like in New York.  How I had the wherewithal, how I had the strength, how I had the fortitude to move here at 29 knowing no one, I’ll never know. The first six months I cried, thinking, ‘What the hell did I do?' I was beloved there. Now I’m at this place where they think I’m a bimbo because I wore high heels and red nail polish. They came clean later, saying that at first they didn’t think I was that great of a producer; they had no idea that I knew what I was doing.
 
What was it like when you first came to Y&R from L.A.?
 
I had to learn how to be an entirely different kind of producer. Because at Wells, they wanted me to just “take care of them.”  Did they care about my opinion?  Not really.  But at Y&R, the production department at the time was one of the strongest in the business. In the beginning, I thought, ‘I’m never going to get there, I don’t know how to do it.’  And it was interesting, because as time went by, it was obviously in me somewhere, and I became that producer.  For me, there was no need to go anywhere else. 
 
Of course I’d go and look around occasionally, because you always do, but nothing ever felt right.  I reached a point where I could work on anything there, and it became more a question of whether I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. As I said before, I’d never had any desire to be a head of production.  And I also didn’t want to go to a department that I hadn’t created—I’m a control freak—and have people there who didn’t share my aesthetic, my moral sensibility, my way of doing business or handling suppliers or working with creatives.  I didn’t want to go someplace where I didn’t feel connected to the people, or where they weren’t that good, because I couldn’t fire anyone, and I still can’t.
 
So then I got the call about this new agency, mcgarrybowen. And I walked into their office—it was our old space on 22nd and Broadway—and it was all light and bright and happy.  And I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do this.’  Because when do you have a chance, when you’re 49, to start something new?  What could be the worst that could happen? I figured that I’m a good producer, I can get a job somewhere else.  But to have the fear stop me from doing it, I couldn’t let that happen.
 
Then I had to start building a department, and I really didn’t know how to do that, although I knew one thing: that I wanted to bring Joanne Garber over as my head of broadcast business affairs. Then I started interviewing producers.  At first we used a lot of freelance. When I started hiring staff, I couldn’t decide whether I should hire people who I was told were great but I didn’t connect with emotionally, or just follow my gut. You know, everyone doesn’t have to be just like me.  In the end, I just followed my gut.  I have to say, I think I was able to build a pretty spectacular department. 
 
How many people do you have now?
 

A sampling of Horn's New York production department--when they're not all busy working their tails off.

There are around 30 of us now. When we got Verizon, we had practically no time to ramp up.  There was all this work we’d presented that they loved.  We knew something was happening when we did the Droid launch last fall.  But I wasn’t going to hire producers that quickly without figuring out the scope of the work; even though the client was saying one thing, I could tell the nature of the assignment was already changing and becoming more complex. 
 
I immediately put two of my executive producers on it and brought in four freelance EPs. Then I started to add more people.  And of course I have Joanne, she has six in her broadcast business department. And we have a music department; our Head of Music is Jerry Krenach, and he has five people working for him.
 
Do they all report to you?
 
Yes. We handle both TV and Radio.  What’s happened now is that, since the requirements for online are so different from what the project managers are used to doing, we’ve become more involved and we’re doing work for them as well.  And we have a group called 360, which produces for all the out of home and direct response work.
 

Chase's "Wedding Night," directed by Peter Care of Bob Industries, one of many spots produced for the brand.

There are two sides to it—a blessing and a curse.  The first part of it is, it started because at Y&R we would have an assistant producers department of like ten young people. And when we had to do a rip, everyone would pull from reels. And here, it was a different model.  I had four or five producers on staff, and that took a while to get to that level.  So basically I would do a lot of the rips initially and I was doing them alone.  And the only way I could get enough quality footage in a short amount of time was to go to SourceEcreative.  Because it was very easy to look at a lot of stuff; I’m able to plug in words that are expressions or metaphors, and get the footage. It’s incredible. When you have limited time and limited resources, there was no other way to do it.  Now, interestingly enough, we’re on another new business pitch now, and I don’t have any one producer to give them, but I have four producers pulling from SourceEcreative. It’s been an incredible relationship. 
 
What part does that play in the process?
 
A pretty big one. There have been a number of clients who have so fallen in love with the rip that they demand it as their advertising. And that’s a problem, because they’re looking at ten million dollars’ worth of footage.  There’s no way to give them the rip. 

How do you work around it?
 
In some cases, the work we want to present is basically un-ripable, like what we presented for the Droid launch.  So one way to do it is via the work we develop. Of course, there will be times when we prepare them for client presentations or new business pitches where we want to make a little splash in the room, to show something emotional and moving.  But I call them ‘brand personality’ rips now, to position them differently, so it's not seen as the actual work.
 
How close are you with your new business people? What’s the collaboration like? How does it work?
 
Two ways.  One, it’s mostly the creatives we work with. So if they have an idea they want to rip, we’ll work together on that.  The second way is that many times clients will say, ‘Present work for us and we’ll test it, and if it wins we’ll want to produce it and needs to cost this much, or it’s got to be produce-able in this amount of time.’  So I’m brought in to see all the work before it’s presented, and I can advise them that if they love this, it’s a three month job, or this  is a million dollar job.  So that is usually when I’m brought in.
 
What is it that makes this place different from other agencies?
 

The agency's Chicago office breathes new life into Miracle Whip with this Arni & Kinski spot, via a WHITELABEL product.

I think it has a lot to do with how we got started.  When a new agency begins, for the most part, it can be something like a creative team that takes a client with them, and they build slowly and typically have smaller accounts.  Here, from day one, because of John McGarry’s unbelievable relationships with the clients he cultivated over the years, combined with Gordon’s Svengali -like an ability to charm a room like no other, we attracted huge clients.  After we got Verizon we got J. P. Morgan Chase, then we had a connection with In-Bev and we got Brahma Beer, and then Reebok, which came via a Gordon connection. Then Chevron, and The Wall Street Journal and News Corp. When we got Kraft, we brought on Tim Scott, our President in Chicago, who has an incredible relationship with the client. If you watch what’s going on in our Chicago office, it’s insane. We have a great EP there, Lisa Burke Snyder, and she reports in to me.
 
Often when an agency is in its infancy, it’s dealing with more regional or local clients and maybe one corporate client.  But all of our initial clients were big, and they were all accounts like I dealt with at Y&R. It was like a mini-Y&R here at first, and I was employee number 12, but it started to grow.  And there were times where I would say, ‘This can’t keep happening, we can’t be this lucky.’ But the other side of it is, the people that we hired, creatively, in production and account management, were very special people. We were hand-picking everyone.  It’s a very special group.  For example, in this department, I have a certain philosophy that we don’t really deviate from.
 
And what is that?
 
The work is the most important thing.  We are partners with all our suppliers and we are in it together. You treat everyone with respect and decency.  And the way I find my producers is, I will call editorial companies and find out how they were in the edit.  Because it’s the last part of the job, it’s where they can completely blow up and blame the last person involved, which is usually the editor—and if that’s the case and they’re assholes, I don’t want them.  If they don’t have humility, I don’t want them. And the most important thing is, they must have a sense of humor.  So, we’re very, very close.  I kept us all together here in the office, and we’re constantly screaming at each other—‘I need this, I need that!’—and we all have this particular sense of humor, because without it we would all want to kill ourselves, tomorrow.
 
Gordon had great respect for me creatively, so when he told me to build the department, we built it out of the Y&R mold, which was based on having very strong creative producers. Of course, they had to be organized and understand what was in an AICP form. But when the creatives came in, certain policies were already set up—we’d say, ‘Okay, this is how you’re going to work with your producer.’ We’re called every day to look at work, and there are procedures that we follow—we see all the work before it goes to the client.  Because we’re given budgets; if what they’re presenting is going to be above the budget, that’s fine—I don’t want to stifle the creative process—but I want them to tell the client that.  No account person is allowed to talk about production or put together an estimate without talking to me or one of my executive producers.  

You mention in your agency bio the importance of maintaining exceptional relationships with production and editorial. Is that harder to do now with the budgets being the way they are and with expectations clients have?
 
No.  Actually, in a weird way, it’s made my life easier.  Because these companies that we’ve cultivated, who have become my friends, my trusted partners.  They’ll do more for us because they respect  us, and they know we won't throw them under a bus. We don’t do that here. So they know we'll be fair to them and take care of them and protect them, and in turn they take care of us.

Published October 7, 2010